It’s true. For those fathers of us who are divorced, sometimes it seems it would be easier to just not see our children any more. To cut all ties. To say goodbye for good. I know why some fathers do that, step out of their children’s lives forever. The continual goodbyes are painful.
Three weekends ago it was my children’s spring break, so my two school-age children and I took a train from Salt Lake City to Denver, leaving early Thursday morning (early meaning the train was to leave the station, yes, at 3:30 am), and returning the next Tuesday. (I’d not been on a train since I was their ages, 12 and 14 when Dad brought us on vacation to Utah from the Bay Area.) Our excuse for our trip to Denver was temple hopping. My youngest just turned 12 and got his temple recommend, so we decided to do baptisms at the Denver and the new Fort Collins temples. The details are for another post, but … we had a great time. A phenomenal time. I love being with them, even for a short while. It is the highlight of my life to be with them. We stayed at a bed and breakfast with wonderful family of five children (a miracle story of its own), rode rented bikes 25 miles on one day all through Denver, did some hiking, went to church, and shut out the world. It was just us three hiding together among several million strangers. Just us, together for six days. But then I had to say goodbye.
It was spring break for them. As it turned out, I got them during spring break this year, but my ex got them for Easter weekend. You know, to be fair. (Nothing’s fair for the father of divorce, believe me. All we’re doing is sharing our time with our ex, which means that the state ignores the time the mother has with the children each month, takes the father’s time, 72 hours of 720 hours in a month, and to be “fair,” when a father gets an extra weekend, such as spring break, to be “fair” they give the mother the next weekend, Easter, so the father doesn’t get more than his fair share of 72 hour a month.) So I say goodbye to them on Wednesday evening knowing that I would not have them again for 17 days. 17 days!! That’s half a month! I drove the 20 minutes “home” late that night after dropping them off, in grief. I could hardly bear the sorrow. Could God remove me from existence? And I don’t just mean this life. I didn’t want to exist in any form any more.
Yes, in those 17 days I get to see them for three hours one night a week where we throw together a dinner, do homework, laugh a lot (but in my heart I’m crying, knowing that three hours is slipping too fast), and I take them home to say goodbye again on their mother’s driveway, heartbroken again. Yes, I’ll see them tomorrow, Friday, at the start of “my” weekend. But as luck would have it, my older daughter just got her mission call today, and tomorrow she’s opening her call … at her mother’s house. So instead of me seeing the kids after school as I leave work early and go to my apartment, I won’t see them until 5:30. No big deal, right? It’s only a couple hours less.
But there’s something special, totally special, about coming home from work and stepping into my apartment with my two youngest children there. It’s a bit of heaven. Not something I can describe, but you single fathers know what I mean. It’s the one little view into what life used to be, coming home from work and having our children greet us. But instead of this happy greeting 20 work days a months, now it just happens four. So to remove one of those may not seem like a big deal to a “real” father. But to us it’s painful to lose one of the four a month, to fall into each others’ arms for just a few minutes, forgetting that in three hours there will be another goodbye.
Carl