Yeah, so as long as he could plop me down with a video and maybe drive me to the library once in awhile, it was no biggie; but as soon as I started making my own decisions, I needed to be Put In My Place.

Same guy who, when I was 10, told me with regret and concern that if I wanted boys to like me, I was gonna have to stop acting so smart, ’cause guys just aren’t attracted to smart women.

Then he stole my college fund. Given me by his mother, but she was just some lady, and I was just some slut, right. Money belongs in a man’s pocket, close to his penis!

i am now 42. he called two months ago after 26 years of blissful silence. i refused to either forgive him or to see his lying godbag ass, going so far as to arrange an out of state vacation with my two remaining minor kids when i found out my sister invited him down here. she knows what he did…

my ex didn’t fight for custody either, but tells the kids it was all so unfair how things turned out for him. he ignores them if they stay with me, then pays attention to them and actually speaks to them when they are with him(4 visits in 8 years so far. what a real prince). two have chosen to live with him now. talk about a perverted kind of extortion.

Dad, being a Navy man, did the regular workday thing when he was stationed at land-locked Navy bases, and for one stretch he was stationed on a ship (USS Nimitz, an older aircraft carrier). So he had a pretty valid excuse for not being around a lot for something like four years out of my childhood. However, he still pulled the crap of having his wife raise me. I grew up thinking that was the normal order of things. I look back now and I’m kind of horrified, because he had a habit of marrying crazy women. There’s nothing wrong with being mentally ill in and of itself, but there is something wrong with leaving the care of children up to people who can’t cope with reality. At minimum they need another adult there helping them for most of the day.

I remember waking up one Easter and my stepmom not being home. She’d gone out to run the road with her friends and left us alone. That was in Missouri, and when we moved there I was eleven and when we left again I was thirteen. That age range. Not appropriate to be left alone an entire day with a four-years-younger brother and no note, no nothing. We called the cops, fearful of what had happened to her. She gave us grief about it when she got home.

My mom didn’t pay child support as far as I know and she was married at least once after she lost me. She had visitation rights but while Dad was on the ship they were pretty much ignored. The general feeling was that if she knew where we were she would make life hell for my stepmom. I resented being expected to route all my letters to her through Dad’s ship and so we lost contact for those four years.

I grew up thinking it normal for stepmoms to be treated like legal moms as far as the law was concerned. I have no idea now what the actual legal reality was. But I was deprived of my extended family my entire childhood because of those shenanigans. My maternal grandfather, my favorite grandparent, died this last November and it hit me hard that of all the grandkids, I’d known him the least. Even if my mom wasn’t a fit mother–and I don’t believe she was–I had other family around me who did give a shit until Dad took me.

I’ve been divorced too. The breakup left me broke and desperate and I sent my almost-three-year-old son to live with his paternal grandparents with the understanding that the arrangements were temporary. They turned around and sued for custody. History repeats itself. Only what they thought was neglect turned out to be a learning disability (central auditory processing deficit–he was a VERY late talker). They didn’t find that out til three years later–they were so busy trashing me they didn’t bother getting a speech evaluation. I’m still so angry about that, you just don’t know. They adopted him about a year and a half after they got him, the excuse being that if the divorce went through and they had custody, both my ex and I would owe support and neither of us could afford it. I learned later that judges have a lot of leeway in these matters and probably could have worked with us. Of course.

Guess who’s raising him? Not my ex. They all live in another state and I was so focused on trying not to drown in my own situation that I didn’t keep up with my son very much. This went on for years. Now he’s decided I’m not his mother anymore and I don’t think it has anything to do with how often I write. His dad and dad’s girlfriend recently broke up after she contacted me and I told her why Mike and I had split, and Mike and his family suspected I’d had a hand in the situation, and *I* suspect they told my son it was my fault the breakup happened. So. Stealing a child, breaking trust, trashing me as a bad mom up one side and down the other, and now actively turning him against me. I’m not Mother of the Year but jeebus.

I now have a daughter who is almost four. Her dad ran around on me while I was pregnant with her, then kicked me out for making too much of a fuss. We were in a poly situation and he later blamed his wife and the girlfriend for “making” him boot me. Convenient, since neither was around to give their side of the story. (They probably *did* try to influence him, though. By the time this happened we had a nice friendly little state of animosity between the three of us, although the wife liked the girlfriend.) In Ohio a never-married mom has more rights than a divorced mom. I have sole physical and legal custody. That comes from a lawyer he consulted who was on his payroll. Even if I die my daughter will go to someone of my choosing–Matt will still have no rights.

I am utterly dependent on him for support at this point. I would rather have my own income but I don’t like the idea of putting my daughter in daycare. If nothing else she’d probably be indoctrinated with all sorts of patriarchal bullshit, and at least if she’s around me I know what’s going on with her. At the same time I resent that I depend on him to live. I feel like he knows he’s got me under his thumb even though we get along OK and my daughter spends a lot of time with him. Just the fact he feels OK kissing me without asking or uses my kitchen to store food he likes speaks volumes. So… I dunno. I’m trying to figure out working at home so that at least I could feel safer calling more of the shots.

I totally do not feel like dating at this point, either. And thanks to some of the other commenters here for helping me articulate some reasons that I don’t want to be involved with a man who already has kids.

One more data point: my aforementioned brother is also divorced. His ex-wife comes from a well-to-do family. Her lawyer sat down with my brother and arranged a set child support payment that does not change with income. My brother has never had what you’d call a stable work history. You can guess what happened. A few years ago I found out he was $40k in arrears. It is one of those situations where if I won the lottery I’d catch them up and I don’t care what she does with the money, just so he could see his kids, but I have a feeling he doesn’t give much of a damn. Guess who got to babysit my nephew while my brother and I were both staying with my dad. Two grown men in the house, both of whom knew Isaac better than I did and I got to be a babysitter.

the two or three times we visited with him and his new partner over the twelve years between my ma kicking his psycho, cheating, wife-beating ass (oh, excuse me, “never hit her with a closed fist”) to the curb and when i hit 18 and refused to so much as speak to his grimy ass, he was very attentive, but spent a great deal of time attempting to turn us against our mother. which backfired pretty spectacularly, considering she refused to say a single bad word about him within our hearing, because of her steadfast belief that a crazy, shitty husband doesn’t necessarily make a crazy, shitty father. he’d ring every week for a few months at a time, talk to each of us for ten minutes and then attempt to find an excuse to talk to our ma.

so to answer the question: he didn’t leave us sitting on the rug watching wrestling, but it became increasingly obvious over the years that the only reason he bothered with us was to get back at our mother. and really, six weeks over twelve years is pretty fucking piss-weak, all things considered.

my stepdad gave a shit, though, even after their divorce. about all of us, not just my baby sister, who’s he’s biologically related to, so that’s something.

he didn’t fight for custody, because he was self aware enough to realise that he wasn’t the best full time parenting choice for us, now three, girls. then again, the fact that my ma was giving him a much better deal than family court would have in terms of access -and pointed that out -probably helped. though he’s only required to pay $70 child support and is slipping my ma at least another $50 in cash every week towards it, so maybe not. actually, if memory serves, most of the reason their marriage broke down was because he couldn’t deal with the fact that he wasn’t supporting us as well as he thought he should and got stoned 3 times a day to cope with his depression. WHICH, UH, ISN’T THE BEST SOLUTION, TURNS OUT. WHO KNEW? that man’s so constricted by his own patriarchal shackles i’m surprised he can fucking breathe some days. he’s gotten better about the whole ‘EXCURSIONS AND JUNK FOOD, OH JOY!’ shit in the last few years with my baby sister though, since ma sat him down and told him exactly why that was fucked. in his defence, i think it was more his having no fucking clue how to deal with a small child than any ploy to be the favourite parent, cos he didn’t pull that shit with us older two.

SORRY ABOUT THE ESSAY, UH. I TALK A LOT. And have no sense of personal privacy about this shit.

Absolutely; this produces what we in California call the Disneyland Daddy. Mom is do-your-homework, clean-your-room, eat-your-veggies, time-you-were-in-bed; Dad is Party Time, junk food, and staying up late to watch TV or videos. And he gets a support discount for the time he spends on this, whether it’s used for activities that cost him actual money (like Disneyland tickets) or things that cost nothing (like handing the kids over to the current Fungible Woman to take care of while he spuds out in front of ESPN.) Under the California “H [for Hostage] Factor” rule, the only number that matters is percentage of time he non-custodial parent spends with the kids; if it’s 20%, he gets 20% off, regardless of the fact that he doesn’t buy 20% of the clothes and shoes, do 20% of the driving to school or soccer practice or wherever, doesn’t, in short, do anything like 20% of the actual “parenting” (one of those irritatingly gender-neutral words that conceal women’s real work.) The explicit legislative intent of the H Factor is to encourage, and I quote, “frequent and continuing contact” with the non-custodial parent; the net effect is to offer a discount for sheer hours spent, regardless of how they’re spent, which then also becomes a way of pressuring moms to take less than the support the statute guarantees in order to hold off his calculating demands for maximum visitation time.

Dads aren’t paying to see their kids less. The child support they are paying is reimbursement to the mother for the expenses that she is already paying in order feed, clothe, and put a roof over her kid’s head. Since mothers usually have their kids most of the time, the bulk of the cost of childrearing is on her shoulders as well as the majority of the actual childcare. No matter how much child support a father may pay, this doesn’t cover a fraction of the cost of raising a child. Most fathers choose to let their ex-wives have physical custody of the children, and those who fight for custody are usually abusive types who never did any kind of childcare when they were living with their kid’s mothers. When dad gets more physical custody time, he dumps the kids on another woman to raise like his mother, girlfriend, second wife. Your father may have been a caring father, but for the majority of the posters here, that’s not the case.

:(

i’m 18 and i live in washington..