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Do You Ever Cry, Dad?: A Father's Guide to Surviving Family Breakup - Softcover

Schecter, I. J.

 
9781459742673: Do You Ever Cry, Dad?: A Father's Guide to Surviving Family Breakup
Softcover
ISBN 10: 1459742672 ISBN 13: 9781459742673
Verlag: DUNDURN PR LTD, 2019

Inhaltsangabe

The help divorcing dads need to survive marital breakdown while staying close to their kids.

Divorce and separation are overwhelmingly sad, especially when kids are involved. In Do You Ever Cry, Dad? I.J. Schecter shares his experience, stories from other fathers, and insights from family experts to provide practical and emotional support to dads going through the anguish of a split, and to help them maintain a loving and healthy relationship with those who matter most in their lives: their children.

Filled with emotional and practical help, concrete research, and a deep understanding of the pain and processing marital breakup involves, Do You Ever Cry, Dad? aims to help dads get themselves and their kids through one of the hardest changes in their lives. Honest, heartfelt, and compassionate, this book is here to instill in any dad hope in place of the despair and hurt he may be keeping to himself.

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Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

I.J. Schecter has written hundreds of articles on parenting and family topics for publications including Today’s Parent, Men’s Health, and MUM Magazine. His work has also appeared in the National Post and the Globe and Mail. I.J. lives in Toronto.

I.J. Schecter has written hundreds of articles on parenting and family topics for publications including Today’s Parent, Men’s Health, and MUM Magazine. His work has also appeared in the National Post and the Globe and Mail. I.J. lives in Toronto.

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Introduction

In the first year after my split, I encountered two individuals whom I nowthink of as my guardian angels. Both were police officers. I met them eightmonths apart.

The first meeting occurred about three months after my ex and Itold our three kids we were breaking up, which was, needless to say, theworst moment of my life. At that point I was, to put it mildly, a completemess. I’d been attempting to manage the few parts of my life I felt I couldcontrol: the quality of my work, the state of my body, the way I treatedothers. But those were the things on the outside. The part inside, my heart,well, I had only so much control over that, and the pain it was trying tocontain was overwhelming.

I had just spent the evening with Dustin, Cory, and Alisha, thendropped them back “home” with their mom and drove away. It hurts toeven write “drove away.” Those words make me want to cry, as do anywords that describe the action of physically leaving my kids. Typically,after parting ways, I would drive a few blocks, pull over, and cry. Thosetears expressed a lot of complicated emotions, but mostly just unmitigatedpain. Often I would think about when my kids were born: the pure loveand instinctive connection I’d felt. What I was experiencing after thebreakup felt in many ways opposite — the emptiness of saying goodbyeto them, the feeling of detachment instead of connection. The first time Ihad to leave them after the split, I felt like the pain might kill me.

At some point after stopping the car, I would pull myself togetherand drive back “home” (my parents’ apartment). Then I would try to dosomething productive: exercise, write, correspond with people importantto me, read, spend time talking to my mom and dad. On this particularevening, after the cry had exhausted itself and I started driving home,almost immediately I saw flashing lights in my rear-view mirror. I pulledover impassively. The cop, an older guy who looked like he’d been on theforce for a long time — thinning hairline, gray at the temples, bit of apaunch — walked toward me and I lowered the window, getting ready tohand over my licence and registration. He was in cop mode, serious andauthoritative, flipping open his pad and clicking his pen.

When he looked up and saw my face, he paused for a long moment.I was holding out my documents, but he didn’t take them. He seemedfrozen, as though he wasn’t looking at a person, but a ghost. After whatfelt like a long time, he spoke. “Sir,” he said, in a quiet voice, “I don’t knowwhat’s happening in your life right now, but I need you to do something.I need you to promise me you’re going to drive home, and then I needyou to promise me you aren’t going to get behind the wheel again whenyou feel like this. This is a school zone, sir, and you were going fastenough to do something really dangerous. Do you understand what I’msaying to you?” He was speaking very slowly and carefully. “Sir?”

“Um, yes,” I said. “Sorry. Yes. Thank you.”

“Do you want to wait a while, or do you feel you’re okay to drive home?”

“I’m okay,” I said.

“All right,” he said. “Straight home, then.”

I saw my hand go out and grasp his. I heard myself say somethingabout his being a good cop, or maybe a good man. While he walkedback to his cruiser, I tilted down the mirror to look at myself. What Isaw reminded me of a day soon after Dustin was born, when I’d goneinto work feeling exhausted, but thinking I could fool people for oneday. Ten minutes in, someone had walked by, done a double take, andsaid to me, “Wow, you look so tired.” We can fool people sometimes, butnot when the fatigue, or the pain, is blindingly obvious to them (evenif it may not be to us). Now, looking at myself in the rear-view, I wasstunned at how I looked. Maybe the best way to say it is I was there, butbarely looked like I was. I am forever grateful to that cop not only for hishumanity, but also for alerting me to the fact that I was in a far worsestate than I’d recognized.

Eight months later, after having again said good night to my kids,again detesting the moment of walking away, again feeling despair at notseeing them in their pyjamas in the morning, I was driving down the samestreet as before. Again I saw flashing lights and heard a siren. This timeI felt the same righteous indignation most of us feel in such a moment(right before you start to admit you might have actually done somethingwrong). This time as the cop approached my door, I didn’t reach for mylicence and registration, because I remembered what had happened beforeand assumed it would happen again. I even worked to achieve the samekind of look of desolation I’d had the previous time, just to make sure Iwould get out of this ticket too.

The officer, younger and more trim than the one who had pulled meover months before, looked at me and asked for my documents. Nothingin his demeanour changed; he started cop and stayed cop. I told him Iwas going through a split and having a rough day. He said, “I understand.Licence and registration, please.” I hadn’t been going very fast this time —just fast enough to merit a ticket. But if there was ever a positive ticketto get, this was it. Because what this cop saw was a man who was present,aware, and, all other things being equal, normal. What the other cophad seen was a man hardly there, obliviously driving a two-ton weaponthrough a school zone.

Some eleven months after my breakup, I was still in tremendous pain.I was still burdened by a sorrow I’d never known, still just trying to, asTom Hanks’s widower character Sam Baldwin puts it in the movie Sleeplessin Seattle, “get out of bed every morning, breathe in and out all day long.”But that ticket, although aggravating in the way any ticket is, was also thefirst sign that things might get better.

In the months before, during, and after my split, I’d spoken to dozensof friends and others who had gone through divorce, either as the parentsdoing the splitting or as the children of those parents. They’d all had usefuland compassionate things to say. But the advice of one person stood out,and it was those words I thought about as I drove away, ticket in hand.He’d said, “Look, I.J., there’s no way to make it go faster or make it hurtless. But eventually, it changes. It’s bad, it’s bad, it’s bad, and then one day,it’s good.” What I was feeling by then, nearly a year in, couldn’t have beenremotely described as “good,” but the fact that the second cop recognizedme as a person conscious enough to deserve the ticket signalled that I wasstarting to come back into myself, even if only a tiny bit. I still found ita monumental effort to remain functional and positive from one day tothe next, but at least I was starting to reawaken.

Those two men were my guardian angels because they representedtwo essential parts of my journey: the pain that cannot be bypassed orrushed, and the first small moments that indicate things might be okay, ifnot today, then maybe tomorrow. The first angel let me know that I wasin a really dark place and not entirely aware of my actions. The second letme know that I was starting to become whole again.

Before, between, and since these two encounters, my kids have gonethrough a bracing series of ups and downs, each in their own way andaccording to their personality. During their collective and individualpassages, certain moments have made me want to cry, scream, or both.There was the time, just weeks after the split, when I tried to do...

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Verlag
DUNDURN PR LTD
Erscheinungsdatum
2019
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
1459742672
ISBN 13 
9781459742673
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
192
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Verantwortliche Person
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