I hope you and your daughter are able to go to the mall together very soon.
I just sent her a birthday card for her #12, and expect as usual that her mother will recognize my handwriting and never even tell her I sent it. Just like no one answers the house phone there any more, which I happen to know has the old style of caller ID on it. Just like she stopped calling me as often as weekly a couple of years ago, a few weeks after her mother had blustered into my home when she was back in town, shouting and swearing and accusing at me and her and her playmate who was visiting, as the two kids stopped in mid-grand-old-time and mid-sandwich and were both in tears within seconds over the awful things she was shouting at all of us, over less than nothing.
I also have a son, with a different mother, and I went through the same godawful nightmare with him from when he was four months old and she just took off with him one day and never came back. It took two years of legal hoop-jumping before we were ever even allowed three hours in a park, with the police spying on us and them lying to my face about it when I confronted them over what authority they might have had to do so.
With the both of them, in one sense that Magic Number Eighteen seems like a ray of hope, after which their paranoid and drama-queen mothers will have no lawful say-so over what decisions they make about the other half of their family. But my son turned nineteen, months ago now, and is still too much under his mother’s and grandmother’s (the social worker who started her degree course just after the OJ Simpson trial and the passage of VAWA in 1994) influence, to pick up his own phone and call his own father.
Best I can tell, I as a man committed two unpardonable sins in each of these women’s eyes: that I fully embraced fatherhood from the start, and that I simply expected to be treated as an equal in the undertaking. OMG: what a man is supposed to do, apparently, is take the radical feminist ObGyn staffers who do parenting and pre-natal courses at their word, that what I “did to” their mothers amounts to a crime that I will spend the rest of my life kowtowing and fetching for them as retribution for it.
Both these mothers reckoned this was a pretty good setup for them, that they could monopolize parental authority and treat these kids like their personal property for having allowed them to live at all, and in the bargain have a domestic servant stand by awaiting orders while they wallowed in social approval over how hard it is to be a mom.
Well, they damn sure make it look hard anyway. That I didn’t make being a daddy look like their doing enough to suit them, each of them in their own way has found the way, by taking an innocent child hostage and cutting them off from half their family and heritage, to punish me in perpetuity. For regarding myself as their equal and expecting only to be treated as such.
I have done quite a bit of study on parental alienation. There is no good news. There is no known cure. It isn’t even about what the mothers have done after it sets into the children’s world views over a lifetime. It is about what they themselves are willing to do, to take back the autonomy as human beings their mothers stole from them to use them as pawns in a permanent game of power-grabbing. And the children, even when they grow up, simply no longer see that they have any reason to do that, to turn around and defy the half of their family which is all they know, in order to regain their part in the other half whom they have been denied access to all along.
So I do hope. Of course I do. But being a big fan of getting on with my life, and a bigger fan of breathing, I don’t hold my breath. I also stopped paying any attention to all the urges within myself, and the messages aimed at fathers in my situation, that I am supposed to wallow in guilt and regret and anger forever, and never stop enriching the fortunes of the legal operatives who profit from all this without ever delivering any results.
That is all behind me now. So if either of them ever does decide to rejoin my life and take back their rightful place in it, we’ll be starting from scratch after much damage already done. That is the only view I can take of it that won’t just drive me insane, as in trying the same actions and feelings again and again and simply expecting the results to change.
They don’t. They won’t. It’s all up to two young people, who haven’t even been allowed to know each other as siblings, nor me as father to them both.
