Ron Collins
Jul 27, 2017 · 3 min read

Like many others I will never give up

I think, friend, that you are still in an earlier phase of this life one comes to live after having one’s children turned against you, than I am. You say your odyssey has been going on a year or two, mine has been going on since 1998.

And I can tell you, this “never give up” mindset you express so eloquently, can drive you over the edge. I would never question your sense of duty nor doubt the veracity of your grief. But I do know from long, long experience, that these things can come to overwhelm everything else about who you are and how you live your life, and gradually transform themselves into an all-consuming obsession and you into someone who views yourself primarily as a permanent crusader.

It is with all compassion and sympathy and common cause that I say these things. Being in the right, and being sane and whole, are not the same thing.

I see you headed inexorably down into an abyss of despair and aggrievement and self-pity with which I am all too familiar. What you may not have learned yet, but you will, is that the very extreme transformation of your interpersonal capabilities that you find down in that abyss, will effectively alienate you from your children even further, and make you into your ex’s own most effective enabler. Children have little tolerance for an aggrieved crusader; and how that trait will manifest itself despite all your best efforts to disguise it from them, will in their eyes vindicate everything they have been told about you. They aren’t interested in the details of your adult conflicts, but what they will see, is that an obsessive persona is mostly in their eyes a scary one, and all you have to be to become that enabler, is scary.

You become, in short, so much someone resembling the very things you are accused of, that you make the kids’ taking up the banner denouncing you in their own behalf, that much easier for them.

The one thing you can offer your kids, is YOU. Not this cause, not this fight, not this crusade for justice, they couldn’t care less about any of that. Kids rarely do. But to remain who you are, and enjoy yourself at it, and be ferociously proud of it, for as long as the wait takes for them to return to your life and their place in your family (which all the indicators show, is less likely ever to occur than you, or I, want to believe), is the one thing that will serve them as their parent.

You are probably going to fail at this.

I don’t say that to discourage or disparage you, but to invite you to take care of yourself. And I know you’ll have to slide deeper down into that abyss, before it begins to dawn on you that this is just no way to live. Or you won’t. And just keep sliding down into it until there is no way back any more.

I know none of this is what you want to hear. None of it is what the fathers’ rights crowd wants to have said by fathers who have lived through it ourselves. It doesn’t make for very good campaign tactics.

But I’m not talking about any cause, other than the cause of one man, and only you can see to that one. If you don’t, all the rest is its own self-made moot point. They may not have ever been right about you in denouncing you, but you can easily make yourself close enough to the denunciations as to enable them all by yourself. Please don’t go there.

“I will never give up” starts out as the only moral position a man in our shoes can live with. Then it becomes an all-consuming obsession, then a toxic addiction, then the whole of your mortal universe, and in too many cases, the means to the end, of you. And your own enabling of that outcome, just satisfies everyone that they had been right about you all along.

    Ron Collins

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    Recognizing that women have no need of any special status granted them by men is as respectful of women’s abilities as it is protective of men’s