94,000 Miles, stuck at the airport

So here we are, well into 2014, five months after the ER visit that set this round of legal action into motion: nothing has changed, and it looks like nothing will change for several more months.  The GAL has not issued his report yet, in spite of assurances that he would complete his work by the end of January.  He has six more days to deliver, but he could ask for an extension if he feels like it. 

I had been hopeful that he would get his report in, I would get my final court hearing this coming week (before my kids' school vacation), and we'd load up the car and go.  I was actually doing pretty well at getting up in the morning, motivating myself to face the day, and being a productive member of society.  Then, with no fanfare, a notice arrived in the mail last week stating that there was a "mediation hearing" scheduled for late March and a "pre-trial/status conference" scheduled another week after that.

That one piece of information knocked me right off course.  The judge had ordered back in December that there would be a mediation hearing within 75 days of the appointment of the GAL; that date would come in mid-February.  At the time, my attorney assured me that we would be able to bypass mediation and get a final hearing scheduled for that same day.  It seemed simple: the GAL will present his report, testify about it, and the judge will make a decision.  But now I'm getting a completely different story.  Apparently the court can just ignore its own order to delay this for no good reason.

I asked my attorney to estimate, based on the new scheduling, when I could expect to actually have a final hearing at which custody could be switched, and she wouldn't say, but she didn't dispute my assertion that it wouldn't happen until May.  Worse, she denied telling me that the whole thing should have been done this month, and when I challenged her on it, she slipped into lawyer-speak: "well, I'm sorry if you got that impression.  I don't recall ever saying anything like that."  She is a good lawyer, but she still has a vested interest in stringing this thing out: after all, each hearing is another $1,000 for her.  She says she will try to schedule a private mediation with my ex's attorney, but even that will only save a couple of weeks.

So now, in a best case scenario, it will be sometime in April before any decisions are made.  In the meantime, another school year has been lost, and my kids are one year deeper into the abyss that is their mother's world.  The isolation, paranoia, narcissism, over-attachment, and tolerance of bad behavior that she displays has had one more year to seep into their souls, making it that much harder to undo the damage.  The separation has gone on for another year, leaving me only tied to them by a phone call each night for weeks on end during the long, dark winter.  I grudgingly made my arrangements for another long weekend over the President's Day holiday that will be spent holed up in a hotel room in Maine. I had convinced myself that there would never be another weekend like that, and signing up for at least one more is a stab to my heart.

I had a reminder yesterday of just how long things have gone on like this.  I was watching the 2014 Winter Olympics, and remembered the 2010 Vancouver Olympics, when I was hunkered down in a sparsely furnished apartment in Maine without TV service.  As a result, I missed the now-legendary U.S.-Canada gold medal hockey game.  Now that the 2014 Olympics are underway, it's been a full four-year cycle spent living like this.  When it started my son was in Kindergarten and my daughter was just barely two years old.  Now he is about to turn 10, and she is well into first grade.  So much time has passed, they have grown so much, and I have experienced so little of it.  Even if they eventually do come to live with me, I will always feel a deep sense of loss for the years of their childhoods that I did not get to share with them.

There is a certain feeling that has been coursing through my body each day since the court scheduling notice arrived last week.  It is a feeling that I have come to know too well, but can't really explain it.  It's a sensation of emptiness and coldness, tightness in the chest, detachment, and confusion.  It is not something that I ever felt before moving away from my children, so it's not just depression.  I have come to realize that is something far deeper, something that can only come from losing something you love.

I love my children more than I ever thought I could love anything.  I know it is still quite likely that they will be living with me soon, but, until that day comes, I am just left with one day after another to feel the cumulative effects of being separated from them for so long.  For now, I don't even know what the GAL will say, when my real day in court will come, or what will be decided.  Until all of those things happen I am just going to continue to feel like I do right now. 

It is a terrible way to be living--stumbling through life in a fog and wishing days away just to get out of this darkness.  I am 40 years old now and have wished away enough days--days that I won't be getting back.  This period of my life has been reduced to simple survival.  I don't know how many days or weeks it will take until anything changes, but I am fully aware that I am going to continue to walk around feeling terrible every day until then.

I don't even want to think about what I will feel if the court does not agree with me and my kids are allowed to stay put.  I am not OK with that and probably never would be.  I know that it's not a likely outcome at this point, and I am trying not to think about it, but the possibility definitely exists.  I have had so few things go my way over the course of my adult life, so I should be used to disappointment.  But if ever the time was right for the karma to even out, this is it.  I have suffered enough.  My kids have been poisoned enough.  The world may not be fair, but I'm not asking for fairness.  Life has already been so unfair to me--I'm just asking for a little less unfairness.

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.

68,000 Miles

My son turned 8 two weeks ago, and I was there in Maine to be with him, but it's taken me two weeks and more upheaval to be able to sit down and write about it. It was a typically complicated weekend by my standards, as it involved both his birthday and my cousin's wedding in New Jersey the next day. Thus, my miles were on the ground this time--I drove up and back. On the way, my wife and stepdaughter flew up from Atlanta to Manchester on Thursday night, where I picked them up, then we drove on to Maine to collect my kids for half of the weekend. We spent two days in Maine, drove to Connecticut, spent the night there, drove to New Jersey for the wedding on Sunday morning, then I dropped them at Newark Airport and drove back to Maryland.

Travel stress aside it was largely a great experience. It was the first time since New Years' that my whole family of choice (me, my kids, wife, stepdaughter) was all together at once, and we had a blast. We went swimming in the hotel pool for the afternoon, and then had dinner at a Japanese hibachi place on Friday night, which was great aside from my 4.5 year old daughter being scared of the flames shooting into the air. On Saturday I did the karate and dance routine for my kids then had a smaller than expected (more on that in a moment) birthday party at Joker's, where the kids got to be kids for a couple of hours. And then it was over, just like that. Poof, and back on the road.

The party was the very definition of bittersweet. Back in January I had asked my son to make a list of everyone he wanted to come to the party and then I talked with his mother and told her that I wanted to have one big party for him and that she was welcome to come. She agreed and even said that she would bring the cake. I then made a critical error: I asked her to handle the invitations, as she lives there and would be much more able to distribute them. I'm not exactly sure what happened over the next few weeks, but the end result was that only one of his friends RSVPed and that, a few days before the event, my ex told me that she wasn't coming. I asked her why and she told me that she was doing her own party the day after mine. I've learned my lesson.

Now it's been two weeks since I've seen my kids and it will be another two weeks until I see them again, and it's probably been the two worst weeks of my life. My father's illness has gotten worse, and I've become certain that he will be dead soon. Meanwhile, my brother came back with my parents from the wedding so he could be around to help take care of my dad so my mom could fly out to Arizona to retrieve my 93-year old grandmother. It was a very, very long few days with my brother in the house, as he basically won't even talk to me, for reasons that I don't understand. And then my mom returned with my grandmother, who is suffering from short-term memory loss and is nearly blind and deaf, and she wants to die too.

By last weekend here was the score: living in a nursing home/hospice, taking care of my invalid father, putting up with my martyr mother, facing a hellacious commute, having no space to myself. My wife did come up for a few days with her daughter and niece for their Spring Break, but it was of little comfort to me. By the time she went back to Atlanta, I had fallen into the deepest depression of my life. I couldn't get out of bed in the morning and only went to work two days last week. I pondered checking myself into a mental hospital but decided against it. I did find a counselor and am again in therapy, and I've resumed taking an antidepressant. But even after all of that the past two days got unbearable. I skipped work on Friday and spent most of the past 48 hours hiding out in the basement watching back episodes of Mad Men on Netflix.

Last night I finally decided that I simply needed to get out of there for good. I found a room for rent in a house that's 10 minutes from my office, and I paid for one month and moved in this morning. It's lonely, quiet, and strange here, but at least I'm away from the madness for a while. I don't yet know how long I'm going to stay here, but I've agreed with my wife to at least try this for two weeks to see if it makes it any easier for me to do my job and try to live a decent life. If it's just too much for me then I'm going to quit the job and go back to Atlanta where I'll probably check into some sort of mental health program. If I'm feeling better then we'll rent a place in Virginia and she'll move up in about 6 weeks.

It's an unpleasant and frankly scary time for me, and I'm having a hard time saying that I'll even make the most of it. I have spent about 36 hours with my kids in the past two months, and it can't be an accident that I'm feeling the way I am. I wish I could isolate those feelings from all of the job, family, and financial stress that I'm under, as then I could possibly deal with it. I know it's a bit selfish of me to run out on my parents when things are so dire over there, but I feel like I've done all I can do to help them, and if I try to do any more, I'll end up in a mental hospital. People may joke about stuff like that, but it's not funny to me.

I have never before seriously contemplated seeking that sort of help, and I'm trying one last, desperate move to avoid it. So here I am in this rented room, a stranger in a strange house, where the smell of death and old age won't haunt me all day, and where I don't have to worry about being stuck in traffic for two hours every afternoon. It's not going to solve my problems, but it has already removed two stresses from my life. I hope it works.