81,000 Miles

I'm back from another long weekend in Maine, one that turned out exactly like I thought it would in my last post when I gave a rough sketch of my next four visits to Maine.  It was February.  It was very cold and windy.  We stayed in the Howard Johnson's in South Portland, which due to its age, one-star rating and the season, cost just $53 per night, including breakfast.  We spent a lot of time in the indoor pool there, and my daughter finally decided that the floaty vest would, in fact, keep her afloat, so she didn't cling to me all the time.  I tried not to spend too much money, but opened up the wallet to go snow tubing one night, to the movies one afternoon, and out to a couple of better-than-fast-food dinners.

In the end, for the cost of about $800 (including airfare, hotel, rental car, all meals and activities), I got to spend three full days of quality time with my kids.  I have had people tell me that I probably spend more quality time with them during my visits to Maine then many parents spend with their kids who live in the same house.

So what did we all get out of this?  I got three days with my kids with no interruptions.  We got to do fun things together, I got to tell them my version of how life, the universe, and everything works.  I had to discipline them a handful of times for being somewhere between annoying and disrespectful.  As for my kids...I'm not sure.  I know they love me, enjoy seeing me, and have fun with me, but I know they'd rather be in their own home, with their toys, books, and games around, and a driveway and backyard to play in, instead of being cooped up in a crappy motel.  Even after more than three years, they still haven't fully come to understand why Mommy and Daddy got divorced.  My son, who is almost nine now, came right out and said, "I wish you could come back and live with me so I could see you and Mommy all the time."

I wonder what goes through the mind of a kid who says something like that.  I understand the eternal wish that Mommy and Daddy would get back together and that all would be as it was before.  I always think of the song "Wonderful" by Everclear, which captures life for a boy with divorced parents so painfully well.  The most wrenching part is this:

"I don't wanna meet your friend

And I don't wanna start over again

I just want my life to be the same

Just like it used to be"

I imagine that my kids have some version of those words in their heads all the time.  "Yes, Mommy and Daddy married other people.  Yes they both seem happier than when they were together. Yes, I've gotten used to living this way.  But I don't like the way things are and just want them to be back together."  And I can't blame them for feeling that way--it is only natural.

I know this because I had the opposite sort of feelings in my childhood.  My parents were miserable and fought all the time, both with each other and with my older brother.  I frequently found myself wishing that they would get divorced so they would stop fighting.  As I grew towards adulthood I found myself hating any time that I had to spend with both of them, as they brought out the worst in each other, but I actually sort of enjoyed getting to spend time with each of them individually.

These feelings grew once I went to college, 1,000 miles away from home.  My dad was on a business trip not far from where I was in school and he came to town one weekend to hang out with me.  He was a different person than usual--happier, more relaxed, and much more fun to be around.  We went out to a jazz club one night and had a tremendous time.  I couldn't picture him having that sort of enjoyment in my mom's presence.  When I moved back to Washington after finishing my education I got a partial season ticket plan for the Capitals and went to a bunch of hockey games with my dad, all of which were fun.  And then in the last year of my dad's life, I spent a lot of time alone with him, as I was the only person who could be around to help him so my mom could go out of the house for more than an hour.  We had a many chances to hang out and just talk to each other without interference.

Looking back on those times now, I have come to realize that the only times I actually liked being around my dad were when my mom wasn't there.  Much the same way, my relationship with my mother has improved greatly in the nine months since my dad's death, as she is no longer preoccupied with taking care of/henpecking him.  I now believe that I would have turned out to be a much happier person and had far better relationships with my parents if they had gotten divorced when I was little.  I am certain that the fiasco with my first wedding would never have happened, as they would not have put up such a unified front against me.

So what does all of this mean for me as a father?  And what does it mean for my kids?  They won't know what it would have been like had I stayed, so they will spend the rest of their childhoods pining for an alternate reality in which Mommy and Daddy never got divorced and everything was "wonderful."  This is no different from how I spent my childhood (and my adulthood as well) wishing that my parents had gotten divorced, so everything would have been wonderful.  Such is human nature: when you don't like what you've got, you yearn for the opposite.

I will never be able to go back in time and to remove the ugly stain of divorce from my childrens' childhoods.  By the same token, I cannot cleanse my own childhood of the stench of a bad marriage that should have ended.  All I can do is to pass on what I've learned from my own experience and hope that my children benefit from my hard-earned knowledge.  If nothing else, I hope they come to realize that they are getting to see a much better version of Daddy than they would have gotten had I stayed with their mother. 

I only got to see a small piece of my own father independent of his unhappy marriage.  Now that he is gone, I am certain that our relationship would have been far better if he and my mom had split up.  I will never know what it would have been like to go over to his apartment for the weekend and have nothing but good times without fighting or tension in the air.  I guess I should be happy that my kids do know what that's like, and that they will have few--if any--memories of their parents fighting with each other.

73,000 Miles*

*This post's title comes with a disclaimer: I've actually traveled a whole lot more than 1,000 miles since my last  post, but I made the executive decision to only count the miles traveled for the express purpose of seeing/retreiving my children from their permanent home in Maine.  I ventured north to pick them up in late June and have had them in my possession for the past four weeks.

Foremost among the many realizations I have had over the past month is that, at long last, I have finally embraced the idea that my children would be every bit as content living with me as I would be having them.  They have been staying in my new home in Northern Virginia for the past months and they have given absolutely no indication that they are unhappy, miserable, or otherwise homesick for the pathetic excuse of a life that their mother has crafted for them back in Maine.

I'm not going to lie and claim that everything has been easy or free of stress--instead of just one relatively normal six year old, we've instead got three rambunctious kids, including one with Asperger's Disorder.  However, what started out as a frightening proposition has, after a month, turned into a semblance of normalcy.  During the week the kids to go day camp and my wife and I each do our jobs.  At night we find enough time to play board games, have picnics, or watch movies in the basement, and weekends have been filled with fun times.  This weekend alone we had a sleepover with my mom, went to a Washington Nationals game, had a movie night, invited over another family for a playdate, went to the American Indian Museum, and had dinner at a great Cuban restaurant.

In brief, our makeshift Brady Bunch has become a family, and a small part of me couldn't be happier.  I have finally managed to turn the dead-end existence that I had in Maine into a rewarding life in a great city, with a decent job, good friends, a loving wife, and hope for a future.  When I still lived with my first wife I had given up on having much of a life for myself, as we were staying in Maine no matter what, and there were few joys in my world apart from time spent with my children.  I have come to realize that, no matter how a great a parent a person is, fulfillment from one's children is not, and indeed should never be, enough.

For the first several years of my kids' lives, I was little more than Daddy to them.  There was so little to my life that I wasn't able to show them any more than the part of me that fed them, changed their diapers, drove them places, and cuddled with them.  By contrast they saw all there was to see of their mother, who is and always has been a homebody, and so they grew close to her, they pined for her, they sent the message that they could never be away from their beloved Mommy. 

Last year when they spent two weeks with me in my then-home in Atlanta, I never got the feeling that they felt at home, and my daughter in particular frequently whined for Mommy.  But not this time.  This time, they are seeing more and more of the person that I was before I met their mother, and I feel them growing nearer to me and I to them with each day they spend in my care.  I see that they are having a fun and fulfilling experience being here, knowing that each day will bring another exciting adventure.  I hear their laughter and feel their hugs and, most importantly, never have to endure them whining for their mother.

And then, 13 days from now, it will all suddenly come crashing down, and they will go back to the life that they don't even seem to miss.

I know it's not so simple for them.  I have heard both of my kids express in their divergent ways that they wish I could come back and live with Mommy and we could be a family again.  Since I didn't live through a divorce as a child I can't possibly understand this, but they apparently can say this without thought of the fact that both of their parents have remarried.  They don't take the next leap of logic to see that they would have to say goodbye to their new stepfamilies. In my case, my daughter would have to part ways with her stepsister, with whom she has grown inseparable.  But to a small child who has had to endure the unspeakable tragedy of having his or her parents split up, the collateral damage of splitting up two other families to put theirs back together is of no consequence.

I don't have it in me to tell them that their dream of having me come back to Maine and move back in with Mommy isn't going to happen.  I have moved on and, seemingly, moved up.  My thoughts of dropping everythng and going back to at least live near them have dissipated; now it's my wife who talks of doing this, as she worries (with good reason) about the effects on her daughter of not living near her beloved stepsister.  She talks of us moving there, making a simple court filing, and Presto...I would have joint custody of my kids, and they'd live with us 50% of the time.  I tell her that it's not so simple, that doing so would involve a nasty, expensive, and possibly even unsuccessful court battle, a battle that I am in no way capable of fighting right now.

So the clock ticks on, and in two weeks I will be sitting here on my computer on another Sunday night, pounding out my despair and emptiness into my next entry, pondering the good times that I had with my kids over the preceding six weeks, but lamenting the emptiness of the 46 weeks that follow.  I know it's coming, and I'm steeling myself for it by staying up late writing this entry while drinking wine and blasting a long-lost favorite record ("Gish" by the Smashing Pumpkins).

I'm preparing to have many more nights like this over the next 12 years, if not longer.  But I am no longer afraid to let myself daydream about the possibility of my kids living under my roof, whether due to their mother's poor judgment, a future tragedy, or even their own choice at an older age.  I love them.  They love me.  They don't need their mother any more than they need me, and now they know it.  If I have to suffer through the rest of their childhoods as the Frequent Father, then I will, but I'm finally ready to embrace the idea of being their primary parent.

69,000-72,000 Miles

I started this post six weeks ago with the odometer at 69,000 miles.

"Mentsch tracht, Gott lacht," said my 93-year old grandmother to me no fewer than five times yesterday.  While her short-term memory loss causes her to forget what she just said moments earlier, her mind is still there, and her Old World wisdom survives.  The saying translates as "Man plans, God laughs," and she kept repeating it as we sat in Room 4D23 of Shady Grove Hospital while my dying father lay sleeping in bed a few feet away.

It is the saddest thing I've ever witnessed to see my own father, lying motionless with an IV plug in his arm, oxygen tubes in his nose, a catheter bag hanging from the bedside, and, as of yesterday, a feeding tube in his stomach.  I studied him, his eyes opening and closing, and wondered what motivates him to keep breathing.  Is he hopeful that all of the tubes will be removed and he will stand up and walk out of the hospital?  I hope not, because that's not going to happen.  The bacterial infection that sent him to the hospital 10 days ago is gone now, but his body was so weakened by its effects that he can't swallow, sit up, move his arms or legs, or even talk.  Even if he does regain his strength, the wasting disease that has already stolen his old age has been advancing and was likely going to kill him off by the end of the year remains, meaning that he'll have to spend many weeks in a rehab center just to re-learn all of the basic motor skills that his body has forgotten.

Last night, after my mom and grandmother left, I spent a couple of hours alone at the hospital with my dad.  He would try to speak, then stop, then close his eyes, then, open them to look at me, then try to speak again, then drift off again, and so forth.  Every time his eyes shut I felt myself hoping that they would not again open, that he would not have to go on suffering as a prisoner in his own body.

That's as far as I got that night.  I was exhausted and had to get to sleep to go to work in the morning.  I'll pick up the story here.

My dad died two weeks later.  The last 14 days of his life passed exactly as I hoped they wouldn't, with him in and out of consciousness, his fever up and down, his breathing uneven, his speech all but nonexistent.  I spent endless hours by his bedside, first at Shady Grove Hospital and then, at the very end, after the community hospital had finally thrown up its hands, in the care of the best doctors available at Georgetown University Hospital.  He was brave through it all, facing his untimely death at 68 years old with grace and without fear.  I won't say any more about it now, as there will have to be a whole post on another day about the complex emotions of saying a long goodbye to a deeply flawed but ultimately decent man with whom I never really developed a true father-son relationship.

The intervening six weeks have been a time of constant motion, transition, and upheaval that have left me on the first steps along a new path, but unsure of where the path will lead and even less sure of how I will find the strength to continue walking.  In that time I have traveled to and from Atlanta twice, once to pack and once to drive the moving truck, and to and from Maine to be present for my daughter's first dance recital.  In just ten more days I will travel back to Maine to retrieve my kids for my six-week summer visitation--their first extended time in my world since I left their home three years ago.

And so I find myself here in a new life, a life I'm just learning how to live.  My wife, stepdaughter and I are living in a rented townhouse in Northern Virginia, 20 miles from where I grew up, but a world apart from it.  I'm commuting to a mostly meaningless job in which I'm running a small nonprofit agency and drawing a respectable paycheck while knowing fully well that this job is just my audition for another job that won't necessarily be in the same city.  I am, as my father pointed out at the end of his life, now the de facto head of the family, since my mother will defer to me and my brother simply doesn't care.  So now at 38 I am the breadwinner, the wise man, the head of the household, and the boss, but my children still live 500 miles away, making all of the above somehow feel empty.

While I am aware that the six weeks I'm about to get with my children will at least temporarily plug the leaks in my psyche, I have no reason to believe that this brief chunk of the year will in any way compensate for all that I have already lost and continue to lose from my decision to live in Maine and have a family with their mother.  I know we will do a lot of great things and create a veritable photo album of lasting memories, but they won't call my house their home and they'll talk about their family and mean their mother and her louse of a husband, and they'll go back to Maine and resume the lives that will be waiting there for them.  Then for the next 10.5 months the cycle will repeat, and I'll fill up more blog posts with tales of sadness, emptiness, loss, regret, anger, frustration and, on rare occasions, poignancy and humor.  Then they'll come back for another six weeks and the whole process will repeat itself for another 12 years and then their childhoods will be over and I will have missed out of them.

Thinking about the crushing weight of the responsibility of being a father under these circumstances has nudged me ever closer to the point of giving up.  I've come to realize that the only times I've been truly happy over the past three years have been when: 1) I'm with my whole family (wife, kids, stepdaughter), or 2) I'm deeply involved in something else so that I don't think about my kids.  Since I'm not going to ever get  Scenario 1 full-time--barring a tragedy and/or a miracle--I have to exist in Scenario 2 as often as possible in order to soldier on.  By that logic, wouldn't my life be better if I just cut ties with my kids and moved on? Sure I'd be upset, but I could treat it like a death, and train myself to live life without them in it.  I have all but convinced myself that burying my children would be easier than continuing to be the Frequent Father.

My wife has told me that she understands why I'm feeling this way but that I love them too much to actually walk away from my children.  I don't know if she is right or not, but I also don't know how I'm going to find the strength to keep on living this way for another 13 years.  I guess I will just dive into the six weeks that I've got them and then do my best to figure out what it all means after they've gone.

65,000 Miles (approximately)

I'm guessing that it's been 6,000 miles since the last entry, but I've been on so many trips that I don't care to calculate it, so I'm estimating. I drove up to the DC area to move for my job. I went to Long Island for a wedding. I flew up to Maine for a weekend with my kids. I went down to Atlanta for a weekend with my wife. I flew up to Maine to retrieve my kids, brought them back to Maryland and spent a great week after Christmas with them, then returned them and came back home. In between my wife came to DC for the weekend so we could go house hunting. I probably missed a trip or two, but that's why I'm estimating.

Meanwhile...

I'm working 5 days a week at a job that is a brutal commuting distance from my parents' house (where I'm staying)--it takes 90 minutes each way unless I leave by 6:15am or return by 3:00pm--and I have to attend frequent nighttime and weekend meetings and events for the job.

My almost 8 year-old son has been diagnosed with Asperger's disorder and is having uncontrollable fits about not being able to stop wetting the bed.

My 4 year-old daughter won't ever talk on the phone to me, although I take some heart in that she won't talk to her mother on the phone when she's with me.

My ex-wife got married to the alcoholic bastard who drove drunk with my child in his car.

I have seen listings for two good jobs in Maine that would pay well and allow me to be near my kids, but I have not applied. On the one hand I was miserable up there and have no desire to go back. On the other hand I have told my kids a million times that the only reason I left was because I needed to find a job. I feel like a liar and a horrible person for not jumping on these jobs, but I just really don't want to go in reverse like that.

My father has been diagnosed with an aggressive terminal illness and probably won't live another year. It's nice to be with my parents, but it's heartbreaking watching him fade away before my eyes. It's also terrible that my mother, who just retired two years ago, is now stuck being the full-time caregiver for him, as he can't dress, shower, go on stairs or even eat without help anymore.

I am so tired and overwhelmed by life that I can't even motivate myself to do simple things like read a book, exercise, or make plans with friends. Most nights I just come home from work, eat too much food (my mom loves to overstuff me), collapse on the couch, and maybe talk to my wife on the phone, and then go to bed and do it all again.

* * *

I try to tell myself that much of this is temporary. My wife and stepdaugher are still on course to move here in May, and we've determined that we can afford a nice three-bedroom townhouse in a good school district that will drop my commute to 20 minutes. My kids will be there with us in our new home for 6 weeks next summer. My dad will probably be gone and my mother will get her life back, and will even be able to watch the kids for us. I'm getting my career back on track--my job is going well, and I am certain that it can lead me to better things. My kids are growing up and I won't feel as horrible about going slightly longer stretches without seeing them. Eventually they'll be able to fly on airplanes without me, which will make it far easier to get them to where I am.

But I still can't get my need to be with my kids out of my system. Every day they were here last week was a joy for me, albeit a joy tempered by being exhausted. It was particularly great when my wife and stepdaughter came up for three days, which was the first time since August that we had all been together. By day two the girls were wearing their matching princess dresses and calling each other "sis." I'm flying up to see my kids in Maine at the end of the month, and will go again for my son's birthday in March. I may even go in February for a long weekend.

The point is, as expensive and difficult as it may be to go there so much, I can't justify not going there. I've got the money now, as I am earning a good salary and saving a lot by living with my parents. I've got the time, as I am mostly bored when I'm here on weekends by myself. And the flights are much shorter and less expensive than they were from Atlanta. I've also gotten over the fear of "what are we going to do?" when I go up there. It's still exhausting being cooped up in a hotel room with them, but they've gotten used to the routine and we always find ways to fill up the time. The best part is that they don't, as they did when I first became The Frequent Father, ask to go back to Mommy's house after a few hours in a hotel. They seem to have gotten used to the idea that this is how things are, and they seem to be OK with it.

* * *

When I started writing this post 25 minutes ago I felt like crap. Now I feel much better. I know that I have to write more often. It's all about the release.