2,200 Miles

I'm back from a weekend with my kids at my pseudo-apartment in Maine. It was, as expected, simultaneously fun and exhausting, rewarding and depressing, fulfilling and gut-wrenching, et cetera, et cetera. How to even recount the events?

Flight cancelled due to snowstorm in NYC (flying through Newark). Rerouted to Boston, so had to take bus from Boston to Portland, then taxi to get my car, then drive to get the kids just in time for a party on Friday night. Take the kids to get photographed to be "weather kids" in the local newspaper Saturday, then dinner at a friend's house. Sunday school and a cancelled playdate, so many hours spent in the apartment on a cold winter day trying to keep smiles on their faces.

Then came Monday.

My flight was at 2pm, so I thought about trying to get my daughter for a few hours, but decided instead to drop in at the ex's house to ask her once more what, if anything, I could do to convince her to move to Atlanta. Big mistake. The discussion itself, while unpleasant, wasn't awful. Then I found a court document on the counter regarding her lowlife fiance's domestic assault case against his ex-wife from 2006. I asked her what it was about, and she made excuses for it, just as she had when he assaulted her. Then she insisted that she was 100% happy in her life in Maine (in spite of having virtually no support network) and told me to leave. So I kissed my daughter goodbye and headed for the airport, which should have been the end of the story.

But nothing's ever easy for the Frequent Father.

Two hours later, while waiting for my delayed flight (high winds + Dash 8 prop plane = delays), my cellphone rang, with my ex's home number coming up. I didn't answer--something told me that it was her fiance, not her, placing the call. I let the message come up, then listened to it. Yes, it was the fiance. He said that he came home to find her crying (why would that be the case if she were so happy?) and that I should never again upset her. He went on for three minutes, ordering me to never talk to her "like that" again, and that "you don't know who you're dealing with."

The phone rang again, and I let it go to voicemail. It was psycho fiance again, repeating his threats, this time adding, "you don't know what I'm capable of." Then it rang again. This time I picked up, said calmly, "I'm not talking to you," and hung up. Well now I've got his two messages recorded on my computer for safekeeping.

Upon returning to Atlanta, just for curiosity, I googled his name to see if I could find anything about his criminal past...and I found something far juicier. It seems that, not even two weeks ago, he was nabbed for Operating Under the Influence and possession of illegal drugs.

This is all good and well, but now what? My kids are living in a household with an emotionally unstable mother and a a drunk-driving, wife-beating, ex-husband-threatening, nutcase, while I, the responsible, law-abiding parent, lives 1,100 miles away. However, since nothing bad has actually happened to them yet, I doubt the court will do a damned thing about it.

And so it goes for us stupid fathers who go to work every day to provide for our kids while their mothers stay home to care for them. It's all good and well when it works but, as soon as the stay-at-home mother gets bored of the hard-working dad, she just snaps her fingers, and the court says that the kids need continuity, so she gets the kids and the dad can go fuck himself. If I still lived near them, this whole thing would feel like a knife in my heart. Being so far away just serves to make the knife feel just a bit sharper.