Friday 29 March 2024

In defence of fathers

When I hear about child custody battles, it sometimes seems as if the rights of the father to continue seeing his children regularly are not as protected as they should be.  Although in the eyes of the law (and barring any violence or abuse), both parents have equal rights, in practice it doesn’t always work out that way.

Granted, it is true that in this world you will find that there are men who take off without so much as a backward glance, as if their offspring were mere puppies who don’t require paternal attention. But there are many other men who not only care deeply for their children, but who, when faced with a marital separation, fight tooth and nail to have joint custody and who make it a point to be a presence in their children’s lives.

I have always been irritated by generalisations which make it seem as if the mother is this Santa Maria Goretti-like martyr who sacrifices her life for her kids while the father is a heartless figure who barely looks at the children and is dispensable.  Not all women are good mothers, not all men are bad fathers; these sweeping statements are called that for a reason, because they sweep everyone into the same corner, not making any allowances for the variables in human nature.

A while ago there was a story in which a man demanded a DNA test as proof that he was, in fact, the father, leading to a discussion of whether men would be willing to raise children who are not their own. Sure they would, they often do so – sometimes knowingly, and sometimes without their knowledge when a woman has been deliberately deceitful. The latter scenario, in my opinion, is incredibly selfish and unforgiveable on the part of the mother – and invariably the truth will come out when words are said in anger. In any case, if the man has raised the child as his own for many years, will learning that he is not biologically connected obliterate the love he has for the child?

Over the weekend, there was another story which presented us with yet another all too familiar scenario. A distraught man who is (apparently) being prevented from seeing his children by his former wife, barged into a police station demanding that they accompany him to collect his children. Unfortunately, he made it worse for himself because he went about it the wrong way: filming the police officers with a video camera and than threatening to kill his former wife’s current boyfriend if they did not help him.  Obviously, these threats landed him with a court order not to approach his estranged wife or her boyfriend, and his visitation rights have probably been jeopardised even more.

Despite his bizarre behaviour, on reading the story, I am sure that many men (and even women) sympathised with him.

We all know of cases where women resort to using their own children as pawns as a way of getting back at their former spouse especially when there’s a third party involved.  In cases where it is the woman who has the new relationship, she sometimes attempts to cut the real father out of the picture – for reasons which can only be described as selfish.

The severing of these paternal ties can take many forms: women sometimes insist on only granted the father limited access, they make all sorts of excuses to curtail the time spent with the father, and they find all sorts of ways of making the possibility of contact between the father and children as difficult as possible. Probably one of the worst situations I can imagine is where the father is forced to collect his children from a police station because of the bristling acrimony between the parents.

If these tactics are successful a mother can manage to erode any form of relationship between father and child to the point where the child grows up thinking that his father does not want to have anything to do with him. In some cases, by filling the child’s head with poisoned remarks about what a “bastard” the father is, it can lead to the child refusing to visit the father any more.  While there might be some small kernel of grim satisfaction at this outcome, the ultimate result is that the child grows up with father issues, which he/she will take into their own relationships.

I do realise that the hurt and pain caused by rejection can cause the human being to act irrationally and I am aware how extremely difficult it is for people to play “happy families” when one or the other has been betrayed. However (and it is a big however), marital separation should not mean separation from the children.

In the worst types of martial battles over who was at fault, human nature automatically wants to attribute not only blame, but exact revenge. The thing is that even if a woman manages to prevent the father from seeing his offspring, the ones who are paying the ultimate price are the children. They will grow up confused and hurt, not knowing whom their loyalty should lie with, especially if they see that their mother has been emotionally hurt.

Of course, it does take a lot for a woman not to allow her own personal issues with her former husband to seep into the child’s psyche. In fact, it is so rare that when I read the story of the woman who is helping her former boyfriend (with whom she has a child) to find a kidney, and saw how this woman is on such good terms with her former boyfriend’s new girlfriend (with whom he has another child), it read like something out of a made-for-Hollywood movie.  We also have to be realistic here: I am assuming that they can all be friends because there was no betrayal involved and that the second girlfriend came into the picture much later.

I can perfectly understand how it would take a super human effort for any man or woman to swallow their own antagonism towards their ex, when the cause of the break-up is a new relationship.  When children are involved, the pain is excruciating. The reality is that, in many cases, the happy families scenario is not only almost impossible to achieve, but it is not even desired.

The very least parents can do, however, is leave their children out of the hostility which exists between them. And if they manage to do it that, their children might, one day, just thank them for it.

 

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