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Bob Geldof on the importance of fathers (my title)
London Times | December 5, 2003 | Bob Geldof

Posted on 12/05/2003 3:38:59 AM PST by ejdrapes

'You sit outside and wait and sob'

The pain and fear and panic when you are no longer allowed to live with your children because of divorce or separation are simply unbearable — and the law must be changed

EVERYTHING can be tolerable until the children are taken from you. I cannot begin to describe the awful, eviscerating pain of being handed a note, sanctioned by your (still) wife with whom you made these little things and felt them grow and kick and tumble and turn. You felt intense manly pride and profound love for them before they were even born. You changed them, taught them to talk, read and add, wrestled and played with them, walked them to school, made tea with them, bathed and dressed them, put them to bed, cuddled and lay with them in your arms and sang them to sleep, felt them and smelt them around you at all times, alert even in sleep to the slightest shift in their breathing. A note that will allow you access to these things who are the best of you. Allow, mark you, reasonable!! access?!?!! to those whom two weeks ago you couldn’t wait to walk in the door at home. What have you done? Why are you being punished (for that’s how it appears)? How can she be allowed to dictate what I can or can’t do with regard to my children? When did she assume control? Why do I have no authority any more? What’s going on? She wants to leave. OK, there’s nothing I can do about that. But what’s that got to do with the kids and me? Were I to issue her a similar note, what would happen? Why are men treated as criminals? Why is the person who has taken the children, or been left with them, suddenly given vast emotional, legal and financial power over the other party? (And I’m being restrained, because it is nearly always the woman, but we’re not meant to say that for fear of being labelled misogynist.) Yes, yes; I know in theory that until certain procedural moves have occurred, one has equal dibs, but in practice you don’t because they’ve gone.

The children have immediately become the weapon and the shield. The weapon: “Do as I say or you won’t see the children.” The shield: “Don’t do that to me or you won’t see the children. Behave well, or I’ll report it.

“Don’t telephone, it’s harassment. I don’t care you that you want to say goodnight. I don’t want you to and neither do the children. Stop now or I’ll call the police.

“Don’t write to them. It upsets them. They think it’s weird. You look a mess. It’s not my fault you’re not sleeping. Obviously you’re incapable of looking after them.

“No, you can’t take them. I know we agreed, but I’m not having them see you like this. Stop pleading, it’s pathetic. Go, or I’ll call the police.”

And so you turn from your own door. Dismissed peremptorily, like a penitent tramp. Inside, inches away, is your family, the key to the door is still in your pocket. It still fits. Your key, your house, your family.

That night you must see them. You must touch and smell them. You drive, fear rising to hysterical levels, near the house. Not too near; she’ll see or hear. You walk to the door. Utter panic rising. Fear of this girl you loved beyond reason. Everything’s weird. Disconnected. Unreal beyond imagination.

There’s the door. In front of it you pause. You raise your hand. You feel like a madman, but you only want to say goodnight to your babies. You lift the knocker and listen hard. Inside, inches away, you hear them laughing. Your family. That you made. You worked for everything they’re sitting on, sleeping in, eating. They’re telling some story or joke that you can’t hear. A joke that two weeks ago you’d have been laughing at too. They’re inside. You’re outside — why? Too scared, you gently lower the knocker and retreat to the car. You park near the house and turn off the lights and the engine.You sit and wait till all the bedroom lights go out. As each one goes you whisper “Goodnight” like a madman. After the last light has gone out you sit and sob, hoping that no one sees you, waiting till you’re able to drive again.

Why is that allowed to happen? This disgusting law that imposes that fear and panic on people must be destroyed. In your loss and grief, how is it supportable? Why should it be so? Who imposes this law and how dare they? Some readers will know better than I the incidence of serious illness in men arising from divorce. It is far higher than in women. Why is this? Everyone knows the effect of divorce in terms of employment and homelessness. Again, far greater for men than for women. Why? Everyone knows the relationship between alcoholism and divorce, again greater for men. Why? Don’t you think this is serious enough to insist on change? Count the economic and social cost if that means more to you than the human, but when you achieve a negative sum, ask “Why?” What more is required to make men the same in the eyes of the law as they are in the eyes of their children? To avoid all the foregoing is relatively simple. Men must be accorded equal status under the law. Currently they are not, and they must be. No bromides or platitudes should be acceptable from now on.

The first way to achieve this is to give men the same status as parent upon separation. There must be an immediate presumption, as there has been in Denmark since January 2002, that the children, where possible, will live with the father 50 per cent of the time; if this is impossible, a mutually acceptable arrangement must be arrived at by both parties. Isn’t that civilised? There is a cultural and, thus, legal bias that men shouldn’t raise their children if they’re toddlers. Why not? Who looked after them when Mum was at work or otherwise out? Who changed their nappies or did the bottles? What period of time do some people live in? And if a man doesn’t know how to do it initially, as it is for most first-time mothers, it is easily learnt.

So what does contact really mean? The implication of any order determining the father’s allotted time with his children is that he was always of secondary importance within the household. Indeed, this would appear to be the unspoken assumption underpinning the whole farrago. The weasel words “gender neutral” and the oft-stated pieties of equality occur so often that you could be forgiven for thinking that, if we say them often enough, we could convince ourselves we are administering a fair system. But these words, like all the other alibi utterances such as reasonable contact, will never disguise the underlying reality of painful discriminatory practice.

Reasonable contact is an oxymoron. The fact that as a father you are forbidden from seeing your children except (like a visit to the dentist) at state-appointed moments is by definition unreasonable. The fact that you must visit your family as opposed to live with them is unreasonable. I suppose contact as an idea works. One does become like a visitor from Mars, infrequent and odd, making contact with strangers in an alien landscape with all the concomitant emotions of excitement, fear, anticipation, suspicion and dislocation. But these are hardly the ideal emotions involved in being with your children, or they with you. In the end there is emptiness, loneliness and an overwhelming sense of failure and loss. This isn’t a dad with his kids; this is an awkward visiting uncle in false, fleeting situations of amity.

A man (like a woman) must be allowed to live with his children where possible, to raise them as he should, and as he desires, in co-operation with his ex-partner. Once what the court deems appropriate orders have been made, a man enters the emotional marathon that is trying to retain your sense of family and fatherhood with your children. It may well be that he was the type of person who read his Sunday paper all morning, apparently oblivious to anything but what was in front of him (“He was never a very good father”). The children would come in playing some game or other, scrambling over him. He continued impassively reading. The children climbed over him and then buggered off. This was the dad they knew and loved.

Now the Sunday morning papers and games are gone. For ever. There is no house. There’s an embarrassing bedsit or small flat. “Well they can’t stay there, can they? It’s not suitable. Don’t be stupid, there’s no space.”

The children are embarrassed for their dad. They don’t want to see him down on his luck. They feel somehow guilty, as if they’re partly to blame. Dad should be in a big house again. Then they’d like to come over. Come over. Like a visit to another person but not a dad. Dad looks sad in this place; they don’t want to see that. He looks like Dad, a little tired, a little crushed; still he looks like him, but he doesn’t feel like him.

There’s nothing to do here. It’s boring. It’s weird, Dad playing Monopoly and stuff . . . .and drawing and . . . What’s going on? In Battersea Park on Sunday. Watch the single men with the children drag themselves through the false hours in a frantic panic of activity. The build-up. The excitement of being with them. The all-week anticipation. The fear of the pick-up. The coldness. The stranger’s voice. The peremptory instructions. The “Have them back at . . .”

It’s Sunday. You remember the quiet papers and the tumbling bodies about you. The serenity. But they’re here and the other thing has gone. Not now the excitement, and not now the couple of hours together, now it’s only the two hours and 58, 57, 56 minutes left.

Time dripping too fast, decaying. Every second measured and weighed in the balance of loss, losing, going away and fading. Everything must be crammed into this space. Life in an hour. Love in a measured fragment of statepermitted time.

Now, oh boy, yeah you’re Action Dad! Yessiree, kick that ball, push that swing higher than those other dads. You’re much better than them, aren’t you? Feed them ducks . . . again. Go to that movie . . . in the afternoon? Madame Tussaud’s, the London Dungeon, the Eye, the circus . . . Hey, Johnny, every day with Dad is Treat Day. Birthday-party time. They’ve finally forced you into being . . . Hurrah for the State . . . New Model Dad!!!! And maybe if you keep it up, they’ll let you stay just one night . . . Just one night. But don’t tell them we’ll share the bed like we used to before . . . They think it’s different now, they won’t like it.

Weird minds. “It’s the best thing that’s happened to him. He’s a much better father now. He used to do nothing before. Nothing.”

McDad in McDonald’s. Sunday lunchtime. Where else do you go? The silences must be filled. So much to say. Your heart bursts with things to say. But shut up. It’s too much. Too grown-up. Too heavy. Everything to say, no way or nowhere to say it. Those easy silences, that casual to-and-fro talking of the past is gone.

None of this is working. It is not the best we can do. The law itself is to blame for these consequences of divorce. It is not right.

Some pressure groups advocate a “shared parenting” presumption at separation and cosy up to the family law establishment by saying that this in no way implies an equal-time situation, far less a split-residence one. I insist on the latter. There is no harm in being radical when the status quo breeds injustice. I have suggested that should proceedings move to divorce, a presumption of equal parenting, implying shared responsibility and equal residency, would be assumed. Even if it’s not acted on, other formulas that suit the particular couples could emerge, save those arrangements so flagrantly ridiculous that it would not be in the best interest of the child.

My proposition has already begun to be assimilated into the mainstream. I myself fought for it in this country. I had always worked from home. I had money. I took care of the children. I lived beside the school; had ample accommodation; a stable relationship with a woman they knew and liked. My ex-wife worked etc. Why couldn’t they be with me 50 per cent of the time? I understand that my circumstances were exceptional, but I could not, and still don’t, understand why there was so much opposition to this perfectly reasonable request. This is not being naive or disingenuous. Eventually I succeeded, but I had nearly to bankrupt myself simply to be able to live with my children. How is that in their interests? Finally I was granted full custody. But I never wanted or asked for that. My ex-wife was not a criminal, so why this punitive measure of taking our children from her? If I disagree with it happening to men, equally so with women. I was given full custody because the professionals involved would not agree that split residence was acceptable, despite the urging of the judge in the case who had sat on international benches, making those judgments daily. Once he asked: “

If it works in (other) countries, why not here?” No answer.

What is it with these people? I was granted my children, but this humane man told us that should we wish to arrive at something more conducive to us both, he would welcome that. Fifty-fifty worked fairly well for us. The only problems in our case were the personal, and finally tragic, circumstances. In a normal household I cannot see why, after perhaps some initial dislocation, this would not work.

The children are fine now, I’m fine. But the things they put us through almost destroyed us. My children will remember the unwarranted intrusions and heavy-handedness, save for a few gentle souls we encountered along the way who were kind and sympathetic. But Lord, how I hated them, and what they did to us.

Allow men their dignity. Let them be with their children. The sting is drawn that way. The financial issue is laid aside. Co-operation, if not amity, would be the norm. Issues of power and control and their attendant responses of impotence and hopelessness, which fuel the anger and rage, are redundant.

Of course it will work for some and not for others. But that’s now. When it becomes the social norm, and it will, children will meet their peers, who will have the same experience. Just as divorce was shaming for children in the schoolyard once and is now commonplace, albeit still painful. Allow men to reclaim their fatherhood and their children.

The law-makers must stop ignoring this central critical issue. Stop tinkering with the already redundant. We have all changed. Think anew. Right now the agenda around fatherhood is a modest “add-on” to initiatives. It is at best a sideshow. But the truth is that only changes in men’s lives can generate genuine equality. Fatherhood is now the key to feminism.

As I entered court on my first day someone who felt he was doing me a favour said: “Whatever you do, never say you love your children.”

Bewildered, I replied: “Why not?” The answer was as shocking as it was illustrative: “The court thinks you’re being unhealthily extreme if, being a man, you express your love for a child.”

For two years I shut up while I heard the presumptions in favour of a mother’s love. Finally I began articulating the real love that dare not speak its name — that of a father for his child.

No law should stand that serves to stifle this.


TOPICS: Culture/Society; News/Current Events
KEYWORDS: fatherhood

1 posted on 12/05/2003 3:38:59 AM PST by ejdrapes
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To: ejdrapes; netmilsdad
We have demonized men. We ditch them when they are boring yet will not let them go with buddies to the bar after a 40 to 60 hour work week. We scream that we don't have money and b!tch when they work overtime. We complain when they come home and want to buzz out but expect they go to bed when we do. When we get rid of them, they are instantly the enemy and "Friend of the Court" makes more money than we do.
Kids need Dads. Boys are more likely to get into legal trouble without them and girls look for any male attention they can get. People condemned our mothers for not divorcing "For the kids" and I am not saying that there is never a time when a divorce is warranted, but we have made it too easy. Boring is not a reason for divorce.
I have never been divorced nor ever will. Dad will have to kill me.
2 posted on 12/05/2003 5:30:03 AM PST by netmilsmom (He who angers you, controls you!)
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To: ejdrapes
Is this Bob Geldof, the musician? Wow, I'm very touched by his heartfelt essay. I have a divorced friend, who with two children, share a very interesting--but equally divided--schedule with his ex-wife as far as custody is concerned.

My wife and I have always privately agreed that we couldn't bare not seeing our child every day, but Mr. Geldof's depiction of how fathers are treated in the UK is far worse. I could only hope that we never get this far in the U.S.

3 posted on 12/05/2003 6:47:33 AM PST by Lou L
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