A Single Mom's Father's Day Reflection

Here’s what I wonder…when is the right time for mothers…especially single mothers…more especially single mothers who escaped abuse by their children’s fathers…to really open up about how the fathers of their children are doing? You know, like a performance review.

Is it now? I vote yes so here we go…

[For the record, I’m perfectly okay with being on the receiving end of this. Though they are grown and I could justify checking out a bit more, I bust my tail for my kids. Financially, mentally, emotionally and with my time, I invest heavily…happily. They are and will always be that important to me.]

My awareness of the number of dads who do none of this is growing week by week. My jaw drops at some of the stories I hear. And then there is, of course, my own. I’ll tell you what I cannot figure out—do these guys know their behavior causes harm to their kids or are they just limp-minded knuckle draggers, mouth-breathing their way through the merest semblance of co-parenting?

And please note that I said harm the kids, not the mother of their kids. We single moms know our comfort and well-being are never part of the equation. For many of us, that’s been true since before we became mothers.

I understand that I am seated at a table with others like me so there is some confirmation bias at play here. But it’s not like I hear nothing from the other side. In dating, I hear men’s accounts of post-divorce parenting struggles. All of the problems do not rest at the feet of men. However, there are specific behavioral dynamics that many men are using which cause disruption and destabilization in the lives of their children and the mothers of those children.

Is that the intended outcome of the behavior? I don’t know. It is not mine to speak to intent. But I am seeing and hearing lots of mirror images of what I have been and continue to go through.

Loudly enough for those in the back, I’m here to say—it needs to be discussed in order to be addressed.

I saw a reel on Instagram the other day that really synthesized many thought fragments I’ve been wrestling with. Before, the thoughts weren’t cohesive enough to bring into focus the lowest common denominator. Then, I heard these chilling words:

“The person who doesn’t care about the kids has a significant tactical advantage in divorce litigation. You have a bigger palette [of behavior] to choose from.”

I heard that and my head dropped toward the ground. Doesn’t care about the kids. As a tactical advantage. WOW. Never have I heard the problem defined so succinctly.

Well, yeah, I’ve been on the receiving end of exactly that. I just never factored the kids into how he could be so successful dealing in lies. Or that I couldn’t fight back in the same way because I had family harmony “clouding” my thinking. Had I not cared about my children or what they thought of my behavior? Sure, I may have reacted entirely differently to all that has happened in these last five years.

I do not regret, though, behaving from a place of earnest desire for things to get better. I do not regret the presence of my conscience. I do not regret doing my best and making yesterday’s best today’s starting point.

I submit to you that this is the source of a mother’s rage against the realities of single motherhood. When we are the only ones left to care, guide and parent, we experience continual heartbreak on behalf of our children. Not only are we overworked as we often were in marriage, we’re now doubly overwhelmed with responsibility. And the ages of the kids doesn’t matter. All hearts break when a family divides. Those hearts need and deserve attention and healing in the wake of divorce. A good parent will never untie the ropes from the cleats and leave their children to drift away to repair in isolation or with others less invested in their well-being.

When you’re the only emotionally-involved parent, the weight is hard to carry.

The dynamics that lead to unhappy, unfulfilled and abusive marriages become magnified in divorce from an abuser. What was power and control becomes an all-encompassing Chinese finger trap with a dark twist—you cannot escape by fighting back but you also cannot escape by relaxing. There is no way to find peace in co-parenting when your children’s other parent wishes you harm and will stop at nothing to inflict it.

Saying you only want the best for your ex and having all your actions line up with that statement are two completely separate things.

As I have written before, I cannot even tell you why there is contention between my ex-husband and I. Other than his remarriage, there is no moment I can point to and say, “ok, that's why.”

The year we were separated was great. It was so peaceful and I believed it to be a template for what our post-divorce life would look like. Things quickly broke down, though, when he revealed his other relationship to our children and moved toward remarriage. Why did that change our ability to co-parent though? I didn’t care one bit that they lived together so he could move out of his mom’s house. I didn’t care anymore how long they’d actually been together. In my mind, that woman came to my curb and took out my trash.

Who would have a problem with that?

I was told she was jealous of me but again, why? She got what she wanted and I got rid of what I didn’t want. Seems like a win-win to me. BUT when he returned all the photos of our kids that I had framed over the years for his office, I did a mental double-take. Why wouldn’t he want them? I wasn’t in any of the photos. Then, when I heard there were NO photos of our kids in their house, I felt the darkness of our future descending.

Only a very weak father would acquiesce to living in a home with no visual representation of his children. I’m as biased as the next mom but let me tell you, my kids are great kids to have come into your life in a bigger way. They’re well-mannered, intelligent, well-spoken, hard-working and truly interesting people. A woman could certainly do a lot worse in the step-children department.

And sure, maybe they wanted only pictures of them with the kids but to have nothing showing their younger years?? Seems like a crap dad move to me. You know what they say about something walking like a duck and quacking like a duck…well, you’ve probably got a duck on your hands.

A rare and reluctant mention of the N word. Also, for the record, I harbor no hate.

The financial behavior of my children’s father has long been problematic. I very wrongly believed this would stabilize after our split. He has a long history of going to his own parents for financial help and receiving it. With this history came strong examples of parents generously and gladly supporting their child. I didn’t see coming that he did not have a similar heart of generosity for his own children. Rather, money would become a primary tool for manipulation and control. This occurs in two ways.

One, when they ask him for help, he will ask for something in return first. There don’t seem to be any quick, cheerful yeses. He needs a budget or a timeline for being paid back. (Yes, I’m not joking…he always needs to be repaid by his children.) Or he needs to have plaintive, humble explanations of why they can’t pay an expense on their own. I can assure you his parents never required such parlor dancing when we needed financial assistance.

And we never repaid them.

On the rare occasion that he is already covering a recurring expense, he will stop paying that until the child has repaid whatever the larger cost is. Of course, this further destabilizes the child financially. It is hard enough for the kids to ask him anyway. (I pay for everything I can despite being the vastly disadvantaged parent both financially and in terms of employment.) To have him utterly lack comprehension of what it means to receive help and well, basic math is mind-boggling to me.

Further, to this day, he routinely turns to his own parents to fund the needs of our children. If he agrees to pay for something, often he receives those monies or some portion thereof from his mom and/or dad. I cannot fathom having no desire to invest your own earnings in your children, their futures and their well-being. This alone slaps a “lousy father” label on him in my mind.

He occasionally offers tickets to events that he has access to through his work and I think we’re all aware that these are calculated photo ops for him to support his “I’m a great dad” persona online. These offers, though, come with no assistance with travel costs to attend them. At times, I myself have helped cover costs for trips for my kids to see him. In my mind, why wouldn’t I invest in their relationship with him? I may not like the guy but having them dislike him is not and will never be a goal of mine. Any energy of that sort would make me a lousy mom.

Two, this “man” will mine anyone for money or free things. I fully believe that he would take a dollar from a homeless person and then tell the story all over the place like it was some brilliant proof of his charm. Our yearly vacation when we were married was going to the beach with his mom. She paid for it all. Despite his assertions to the contrary, this was not a family vacation for our family. I became such the target of rude behavior that I stopped going long before we divorced. The one year (during COVID) that his mom didn’t make the trip, he asked two of our kids to split the cost of the beach house rental with him and his wife…evenly. They were very young adults at the time and made low hourly wages. Just taking time off from work was hard for them. For each of them pay more than $1,000 for the beach house plus pay for all their other expenses? Utterly impossible.

(I can’t even tell you how much I wish I were making that up.)

And then there is the matter of car repairs following two accidents two of the kids had. In both cases, he received and retained the insurance settlement monies intended for the repairs. As I’ve written before, he had the audacity to laughingly tell one of our daughters, “I’m going to make some money on this deal!” And he did. He “made” close to $10k between the two instances. I paid for one repair and with no other option, I too accepted help from my parents.

My children have also greatly suffered emotionally because of his behavior. Much of this, I suppose, was unseen when they were younger but the effects remain as they have become part of our family history.

Nothing was safe in our home from his sexual perversions. Our children’s toys, belongings of people who stayed in our home, online accounts and devices were just some of the means he used to perpetrate his evil on and around us. At first glance, these can seem like petty mentions, even to me. But this is deep and profound betrayal of security which undermines trust in way that’s hard to shake. Living in a home where someone is continually prowling for a cheap, selfish thrill represents an entrenched lack of personal and emotional safety for all who live in the home.

To what degree for each of them, I am not certain but my children were witnesses to violence in my marriage. They saw the holes he punched in the walls at exactly the height of my head. They heard me crying and pleading with him to stop. They saw marks on the back of my bedroom door from my attempts to escape blows. Though the most egregious acts happened late at night, they may have heard his death threats as his used his weight and leverage against me and the sound of my tossed-aside body crashing into my bedroom walls.

Because I concealed evidence and told lies to “protect” them from the truth, they likely did not know that I slept on a bench outside at Disney World after he raped me, uttering words I can never forget as they slept in the next room. They do not know he took me on a trip to announce that his therapist thought I had personality disorder. Or another trip to cruelly confess infidelity in a place where I had no one to come pick me up. And yet other ones where he drugged me to carry out his own evil intentions.

Though I tried with all my might, I could not be unaffected by these things. My children suffered by extension as I swallowed my pride and my rage and carried on.

When the pandemic lockdown began, he asked if he could come over to see the kids. I asked them and they agreed IF he kept his distance. (“Mama, he doesn’t obey rules so I don’t trust him to be close to me.”) I was out back doing yard work when he arrived. As I rounded the house, I saw him in the garage hugging one of the girls as the other started to cry in distress. This was a direct violation of the boundaries they set with him. I ran him out with a tongue-lashing. He left laughing at us and the distress he had caused. I spent the rest of the day helping them calm down and feel assured that we would all be okay.

Several weeks later at our youngest’s high school graduation, he left the stands to watch from the fence surrounding the football field. This was a direct denial of our daughter’s request to have us sit together in the stands. Why? I wasn’t talking to him but my parents were. (And what if they weren’t? Why can’t a grown man sit at a ceremony without being entertained or the entertainer?) Or was it the lack of my attention that made him so uncomfortable?

So much is awkward and embarrassing in our lives now and I can’t find a single valid reason for any of it. For me personally, there is also real danger. Does he really want me dead? I get goosebumps typing that because I know the answer. While I initially internalized the cruel and violent things he did to me so many years ago, I see it differently now. I see it as a continual escalation to where we are now.

He never loved me. He loathed me with a Machiavellian desire to control me with all the hate in his heart.

Whether the associated behavior is intermittent or continual, I can never be quite sure. As mentioned in the reel above, the bank robber always has the tactical advantage and yep, my ex maintains this. I cannot be intuitive enough to anticipate what he might do next. It takes a lot of mental work to maintain equilibrium under circumstances like this.

Frankly, it is this particular reality that is the clearest condemnation of my children’s father. Any man who harms the mother of his children is not fulfilling his role. Such desire is the outflow of an evil heart. He doesn’t need to like me or love me or give two rips about me but to seek to injure me, destabilize me and humiliate me is to bring sure and swift judgement on himself.

What a father commits against the mother of his children he commits against his children. Period.

Through almost every studied culture, fathers have assumed three primary roles: the protector, the provider and the disciplinarian. —J. Neil Tift.

The father of my children fails in all three categories. He is a protector, not of our children, but of his own self-interest. He provides, not for our children, but for himself and seeks ever more provision for himself. He cannot possibly stand as an example of discipline when he has so egregiously failed to model self-control and the introspective, personal growth needed to attain it.

There’s simply no moral or ethical way to justify or mitigate the chronic failure of fathers. (And yes, some mothers chronically fail also.) Fathers have specific roles to play in children’s lives. These are roles that a mother cannot fulfill. I cannot be to my son what he needs to learn from his father and I cannot be to my daughters what they need to see in their father. Try as I might, I will never make up for the lack of him. His low character is something our family has no choice but to work around.

There is no solve for any of this unless my kids’ father decides to change. I hold little hope for this but God is in the details of that.

To have a low-quality father must be an ongoing source of sorrow. To be the mother of children with such a father carries a low-grade distress that I may never be rid of. I want to be one of two on whom my children can always rely. I want them to hold us both in high esteem and not be burdened with the weight of this impasse.

More than anything, I want my children to have two loving and supportive parents. Like many other single moms, I am only half of that equation. My voice rings out with a plea for peace for mothers everywhere. For abuse and control to truly cease. For more respectful, peaceful and safe family dynamics even in the wake of very hard times.

And may men everywhere hold each other radically accountable for their behavior across the lifetimes of their children. Children of all ages are so very deserving of that.

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Should fathers be held more widely accountable for behavior toward their children in post-divorce scenarios? I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments.

—R