She Still Needs Her Dad...

My daughter was sick last night.

She woke me at 2 A.M. needing her dad. She has been trying a new medication and it made her terribly nauseated. She’s nineteen. She knows how to take care of herself when something like this happens. But she still needed her dad to get her downstairs to the couch, get her some water, and feel her forehead with the back of his hand. She needed to be reminded that she isn’t alone.

In truth…I needed this too.

We’ve been here in Lynchburg for three and a half years now. That’s the longest uninterrupted period of living in the same house that we’ve had since she was born. Her mom left when Daisy was only eighteen months old. From that point on, it was once a week and every other weekend and two months in the summer. Even the two months were broken up with her mom having my visitation schedule.

I never fully felt like a dad. I felt like my entire fatherhood was broken into bits and pieces, like Morse code. Dot, dot, dot…dash, dash, dash…dot, dot, dot. The thirteen years between our divorce and her moving here with me felt like I was lost at sea, trying desperately to swim against the tide, struggling beneath the waves and only catching a gasping breath whenever she was with me and I could breathe. As soon as I’d take her back to her mom’s, I’d disappear under the turbulent waters again. Drowning. Sinking.

I came across a picture on Facebook yesterday. It popped up on that “Your memories From ____ Years Ago” thing. It was my daughter back home at St. Anthony’s Italian Festival. She was nine years old, smiling brightly, clutching a stuffed penguin she’d won at some midway game and waiting to get on the Ferris Wheel with me.

Smiling.

My daughter doesn’t smile much now. She stopped smiling and being a bubbly, outgoing, happy kid when her mom’s second husband took off his mask of decency and showed the monster he really is. From age twelve, until we escaped Nashville and moved here to Lynchburg when she was sixteen, she endured mental and physical abuse enough to drive that bubbly, smiling girl into hiding. He wore her down with every kind of cruelty. He killed her pet. He destroyed her property, including things I gave her on birthdays and holidays. Things shared between a daddy and his little girl. Notes I would include in birthday cards. He would “edit” them and mark them up. He intruded on my fatherhood every chance he got. He stopped short of sexual assault –or he’d be a missing person on the back of a milk carton right now—but everything else was on the table in his sick mind.

Her mom did nothing to stop this. She was too concerned with her own life. She often sided with her husband, against our daughter, in order to keep the peace. She essentially sacrificed Daisy’s well-being, for her own.

It finally got bad enough and I took a job in Virginia and she left with me. She escaped the remnants of her childhood.

This was not the life I wanted for my child. Or for me. I wanted a happy home and a house and peace. I wanted my daughter to be healthy and happy and to reach her potential. I wanted to be the best dad anyone ever had, and to experience fatherhood from the adult side and hopefully make up for how fatherhood looked from the child’s view that I had when I was her age. Instead I got sawdust fatherhood. The fragments that remain after the whole has been cut into pieces, again and again until nothing remains but the shavings and dust that stand as evidence that there really was something there once.

All of which brings me to last night. There are a lot of men who would be upset over losing a half night’s sleep with a sick nineteen-year-old child. “I have to work in the morning.” “I get up at 4:45 am!” “You’re an adult, you can take care of yourself.”

And she can.

But there were so many times over those thirteen years, when she was sick, and hurting, and often in real danger, and I couldn’t help her. My fragmented time with her leaves me aching for those days when she was that smiling little nine-year-old girl in the photo. Times when I would have loved nothing more than to have carried her downstairs to the couch, felt her forehead with the back of my hand, and stroked her hair until she fell asleep.

But I had to settle for phone calls and five days a month.

So, I don’t mind when she needs me now. I don’t rue the lost sleep or the groggy feeling when the alarm went off this morning at 4:45 and I was seriously thinking of taking a sick day. This would have been my life a dozen years ago, and instead it’s my life now. I’m okay with that. It’s what dads do. Good ones anyway.

I nurse her back to health daily as it is. Back to emotional health. I’ve laid the back of my hand to her forehead and felt the cold, clammy feeling of a broken spirit. I’ve comforted the tears and frustration that she’s cried over the neglect and indifference that her mom has shown, both while she was being so abused in her mom’s home, and especially since we’ve moved here. They don’t talk much. Her mom has been here once in almost four years, and that was a brief, overnight visit. Nineteen-year-old women process that as abandonment. That’s because it is abandonment. I’ve held her hand as she’s been nauseated in her soul over the childhood she lost. Over the time we missed together. I’m doing my best to nurse her back to health.

So, no…I don’t mind losing half a night of sleep to take care of my adult daughter. Because in truth, nursing her back to health is also nursing me back. Every chance I get to act like the dad I am inside, goes a long way toward healing the loss I’ve felt over the years after the divorce. And maybe, to heal the loss I felt long before that, in the deep hole that existed in my own heart, because of my own father and his abandonment.

I’ve never felt his hand on my fevered forehead. Never heard his voice speak in the soft tones that dads use when their child is sick. Never felt his fingers brush my hair aside or his lips kiss my forehead as I drifted off to sleep, comforted in my illness by the presence of a loving, caring father.

I know what it means to my daughter, because I needed it too.

I could have quit. During those hard years after our divorce when my heart broke daily because I missed my daughter so much, and those five brief days each month were not even remotely enough to assuage my pain.

I could have packed it in when I lost my career in 2008 and had to live in my car because there was no work. I could have left to find a job somewhere else and just dutifully sent money and called once a week.

But I stayed. I stayed, and kept her trust, even though I was so limited in my ability to act on that trust. I stayed. And when the time came that she could take no more and had to get away…I was still there, ready to take her out of that hell and move her to safety.

You dads who are reading this, (it’s posted on both my personal website and my divorced dads blog) I encourage you not to quit. I encourage you to look squarely at the hell you must endure, stiffen your shoulders, brush aside your tears, and stand your ground.

Take whatever your ex, her husband, and the courts throw at you and stand your ground. The day will come. The day will come when the only knight left in the kingdom who can slay the dragon that pursues your child…is you. If you aren’t there –even with battered armor and a rusty sword—the dragon wins.

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Never, never let that happen.

A Letter To My Divorce Judge...Eighteen Years Later

*NOTE: The judge who heard my case, in December 1999 has long since retired. She was a multiple divorcee who really, in honesty, never should have been eligible to sit on divorce proceedings. How could she? How could someone with so glaring and obvious relational issues with men, possibly be objective? Her reputation as a man-hater was legendary. And she typically lived up to it. For years now, I've wondered what I would say to her if I ever met up with her, especially now that I am no longer under her jurisdiction and my daughter is an adult. I know a lot of men wonder the same thing. So I wrote this and I'm posting it here for other men to read, and maybe...to vicariously send to their judge. Men who read this...this woman was awful. I had an uphill battle every step of the way, but I never let her run me off. You must be bigger than the judge and the system.  Bigger than the pain in your heart. In then end...you'll win.

Your Honor,

     I’ve debated writing this letter. I have alternately felt that it would be useless, and then that it would do much good for others. I have no delusions that you’ll ever read it. But that doesn’t mean I shouldn’t write it. It would be therapeutic for me at the very least, and perhaps, for other men as well.

     Eighteen years ago, I walked out of your courtroom a divorced man. You certainly lived up to your reputation as a man-hater. Your despise for me –a man you’ve never met and who was the broken heart in this case- was evident. I neither cheated, nor abused. I worked hard. I was, and am, a great dad. It was my wife who decided to take a better offer, and it was my wife who walked out on me and our eighteen-month-old daughter. Yet, as you were always given to, during your thirty-five years on the bench…you awarded her primary custody. I got to see my little girl once a week and every other weekend, and for that privilege I got to pay $1000 a month.

     You graciously gave me two months in the summer where you reversed custody and gave me primary visitation. I’m sure your plan was that I would grow weary of being a full-time dad in those two months and come back, begging for you to reverse the order.

But I didn’t.

     I cherished those summers. I wept every night after I would take her back to her mom’s. I paced my empty home like a caged animal. I was lost. Aimless. People who saw me in those first years after my divorce said I looked like a dead man. On Monday’s, my friends could immediately tell if it had been a visitation weekend, because it took me most of the day to shake the gloom of my daughter not being there after a weekend of feeling normal.

     You doled out visitation as if she were your child, not mine. You commended my little girl to a horror she didn’t deserve and a brutal, violent life she never should have witnessed.

     My ex-wife remarried after about four years and the man she married was an animal. My daughter suffered so much emotional trauma under his hand that she has PTSD symptoms now. Together, they dragged me into your court every few months to put me through the ringer of additional child support. I was a straight commissioned employee and if I had one good year, you demanded that I pay an exorbitant amount whether the next year was as productive or not.

     When I would speak in my defense, you literally called me a liar without any facts to contradict me. When I explained that I was 100% commission, you said I was lying and you “simply could not believe I got no base salary,” even though I supported it with countless documentation. You refused to hear my petitions for additional visitation because of my concerns for my daughter’s safety.

     My daughter was forced to live with a man who drank, abused drugs, was physically violent and psychologically cruel. This man even went so far as to kill my daughter’s pet once. He damaged so many of her personal belongings that she started storing everything she owned in my shed. He would find birthday cards I sent her and deface them. He interfered with my visitation constantly and yet, when this was brought up in court, you gave her mother a verbal slap on the wrist and let it continue.

     She witnessed this man beating her mother numerous times. She lived with the fear that she’d be next, and sometimes she was. When every fiber in my being screamed out to just handle him myself, my common sense told me not to, because then my daughter would have no defender. So, I would rescue her from that hell, only to have to return her to it. Time and again you did nothing.

     It finally reached it’s zenith when she was 16, and we moved here to Virginia. She has been in counseling for a long time and will be for years to come. She still lives in fear. She still gets panicked whenever there is loud yelling, or she witnesses physical violence. Anything that reminds her of her mother’s home, causes her to almost shut down.

Her mother’s home.

The home you decided was the better alternative.

The hell you condemned her to.

     I want you to know what it’s like to be a dad who loves his daughter and see the damage done because of your rulings. To watch her literally shake in fear because she saw two people fighting like her mom and second husband used to fight.

I want you to know how my heart is ripped in two when I ask her if she’s heard from her mom and she says “No” with resignation because it’s been over a month. I want you to know how my heart aches when I look at my precious daughter, my only child, and see so much potential and so much talent, and such a loving, tender, heart and know how damaged she is already, at nineteen.

     I wish I could transfer all my grief and sorrow and pain onto you. I wish that, somehow, you could feel my hurt instead of me. I don’t deserve this…you do. You blithely rendered thousands of rulings like mine over your career and glibly destroyed thousands of dad’s lives and the lives of their children, because of your arrogance and your hatred for men. NO multiple-divorcee should ever sit on the bench in a divorce court. Not ever.

     You are long since retired. You’ve walked away from the battlefield you created and settled into the family business, and you’re living the life of ease and comfort while men like me are left to clean up the disaster zone you left behind.

     I hope someday your conscience awakens from it’s slumber and you begin to feel the effects of the career you had on the bench. I hope that someday you start losing sleep as I did for so many years. I hope your soul is vexed and your spirit broken until you repent somehow for what you’ve wrought on good men who merely wanted to be dads.

     A lesser man would hate you. I don’t hate you…I don’t think enough of you to hate you. But I don’t pity you either, although I should. I should pity a woman whose life was so consumed by her personal grudges against men that she used her position of power to extract her personal vengeance from every man she came across. You can’t possibly be happy. You can’t possibly be satisfied. You can’t possibly look back and think of any good that you did.

     My Faith got me through the long, grueling years under your jurisdiction. It’s my faith that commends me to civility in this letter. I refuse to give in to bitterness, because that would only extend every ruling you made in my life while you could.

     My daughter wound up with me. She survived your jurisdiction, as I did. You didn’t break me or run me off to abandon my daughter out of shear frustration. I won. I endured and resisted the urge to leave and escape the pain your rulings caused me. I stayed. I was there when my daughter needed me and in the end…she chose the better parent. You lost. You didn’t break me. I remained and became living proof that your sad, pathetic view of men is twisted and skewed.

     I met lots of dads in the years I lived in N____ who had been victims of your court. They all told the same story. Many of them were consumed with hatred toward you. They wished you evil and harm and talked openly of what they might do if they only could. I know they were only talking…only speaking from pain. I never became that man. I never vented my spleen with bile about your jurisdiction. I refused. I knew that I would only make my own pain worse, meanwhile you would carry on with life as merrily as before, unaware and unconcerned about the harm you’d been doing.

     So, I waited until this morning. I’ve thought about what I would say to you if I had a conversation and you had no power or authority to extract revenge after I spoke. I thought about what I wanted to say and what I needed to say and what I should say.

Then I realized that it wouldn’t make any difference. Your heart is too hard and your soul entirely without compassion to even flinch if I were to have said all this to your face.

It never bothered you then, what you were doing to families, so why would it bother you now?

     So, I wrote this article for me…not for you. For me, and for all the men like me who’s dream of fatherhood was broken and reshaped into something twisted and clownish. Men whose hearts never quite recovered during those long years of unequal visitation and prejudicial treatment. Those dads who had less, because so much of their money was going toward child support while so little of time was granted for their fatherhood. Men like me…condemned to weep every other Sunday night after the long ride home from our ex-wife’s house, looking over at an empty car-seat. Men like me who pulled up in the driveway of our own houses and sat in our cars for long stretches, not wanting to go inside and hear the deafening silence of a house without the sound of our child’s voice. A sound that had been filled those halls only hours before. This is for them. This is for me.

This is as vivid a description as I could give, to the life you condemned me to when you made that ruling in December, 1999.

     I survived you. My daughter survived you. In my mind…I won. You spent your entire professional career dissolving families. You profited –you and the despicable attorneys who picked at the carcasses of families for every possible penny- from marriages ending.

I don’t know how much my legal fees contributed to your lifestyle, but I hope you enjoy it. I hope you got my money’s worth.

     My daughter is 19, she lives with me, she’s getting better, and I survived you. I won.

     This case is finally closed.

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Staying Even When You Want To Leave

It's 6:30 AM on July 19, 2017.

I'm sitting in my kitchen, getting ready to go to work. 

I've been contemplating this return to writing here on my blog. I haven't written nearly as much as I used to and almost nothing in recent years. So much has happened. I considered, at one point, deleting this blog. I thought maybe it had run it's course. But every day I get hits. 20, 30, 50...

Every day, a large number of dads stumble across this page in their sorrow and sadness and find some measure of peace. 

There is a pattern. I get the heaviest traffic on Sunday nights and Mondays. I know exactly why. That's the day most of us take our kids back to their mother's and we are alone again. Mondays are the first day we wake up without them after a weekend visit. The pain is crushing. 

I lived that way for 15 years. My daughter was only 18 months old when we divorced and I spent her entire childhood, rebounding from the pain of every-other-weekend fatherhood. 

I watched as her life disintegrated because of her mother's second marriage. I rescued her many times from the clutches of the animal her mom was married to. 

In 2008 I lost my career and then my home when the economy collapsed. Because her life was in such turmoil, I could not leave to find work. I had to stay in Nashville. So I stayed. That meat living in my car. I was homeless for 6 years, until 2014 when I was hired by my alma mater and my daughter moved here with me.

A lot of damage was done. She went from age ten to age 16 without her dad having a place to live. We lost our weekends together. I saw her during the week, and I'd pick her up on a Saturday to spend a few hours, but it wasn't the same. It hurt like nothing I can describe. But I stayed.

I stayed and I endured that horror because she needed me. 

I know there are a lot of guys reading this who are in the same boat. I know there are others who could not handle the disappointment and chose to leave. I know there are some reading this article this morning who are on the brink...you are facing divorce and you think the best thing is to just walk away. There are others who are like I was...so broken and crushed that you wonder how you're going to make it through another day. The pain from missing your kids is so great and your life feels so empty without them, that you consider not living at all. 

To those men I say, "Hold on." Even through tears, even through disappointment and mistreatment by your ex and by the courts and sometimes by your kids. Hold on. My daughter wasn't always aware of my sacrifices when I was making them, but she is now. Hold on.

There is hope. You can make it. There is a God in heaven who loves you. He sees your tears and feels the pain you feel. I have no secrets to how I endured six years of homelessness for the sake of my daughter except this...only my faith in Jesus Christ got me through. There were nights I considered just letting myself freeze to death. Or buying a bottle and drinking myself blind and letting myself die. But my faith sustained me. It wasn't pretty. I cried all the same tears. I suffered the same broken heart. But I did not suffer alone. Jesus walked each painful step.

Dads...do not give up. Do. Not. Give. Up. Find yourself in the faith I speak of here. Lean on the God who adores you and wants to help you through this. He loves you. He loves your children. 

Trust Him to give you the strength to stay till the end.

You are loved. 

You are still the daddy.

Craig

Updates...

Hi fellas,
It's been awhile since I've written anything, and even longer since I've been consistent i posting here.
I apologize. For those of you who don't know, I spent six years -from 2008 until 2014- homeless. I lost my job in the economic crash and then I lost my home. I stayed in Nashville, where we lived at the time, because I refused to give up my fatherhood. That required me to sleep in my car.
There is a lot to that story, but I won't recap all 6 years here in one post.
Suffice to say, it was hard to be regular here on this blog. I've been settled here in Virginia for three years now. Life is slowly returning to normal. My daughter is here and she's recovering from the crap her mother's second ex husband put her through. I have a good job and I'm rebuilding.
It was hard to survive all that, so you can imagine that it was hard to write very much content for this blog. But with things at least a little more "normal" now, I am determined to resume this blog and get back to helping the guys out there who have been wounded in this war.
I recently released a new book, chronicling the six years I spent homeless. It's entitled: "Nowhere to lay my Head: The True Story of a Homeless Dad." You can buy it HERE  It's a very emotional read, but it encourages you not to quit.
I may resume the radio show in the future, if things shake out. In the meantime, I plan on expanding this site to include more resources for dads like us.
Never quit, men...never, ever, quit.
Craig

A Divorced Dad At Christmas: "It Wasn't Supposed to be This Way.."

Hey fellas,
It's been over a year since I've posted anything new. I apologize for that.
I am going to try to be better about posting here more often. I know a lot of men come here for some guidance and friendship in what is the most miserably damning thing that can happen to a dad...the separation from our kids.
The holidays are especially hard on us and even after seventeen years, I am not yet immune to their wounding. I wrote this on Sunday, thought I'd post it today.

It’s been a long weekend and I’m tired but my mind is whirling.

It was great to get home and see family. It was great to have my daughter for Thanksgiving and see her light up at the Christmas display at Longwood Gardens. She’s had a tough year and I worried that Christmas wouldn’t hold it’s usual magic for her.

But this trip home, while always good be home with family, was hard for me as well.

Maybe it’s because I’m currently writing this new book about being homeless and it’s all right there just beneath my skin. Or maybe it’s just that so many years have gone by now that I am finally feeling some things that I should have felt years ago.

Or maybe it’s that I’m not homeless anymore and that means I’ve finally stopped living on adrenaline, and I’m feeling where I used to be numb. I don’t know.

But whatever the reason or reasons, I am in turmoil tonight. I have been all weekend.

This Thursday will be December 1. This is the 17th anniversary of my divorce.

On Thursday December 1, 1999, at about 2pm, I walked out of Fourth Circuit court in Nashville, TN into a bright, brilliant blue Winter afternoon. And I wasn’t married anymore.

I left the courthouse feeling like I didn’t even know which direction to point my car. I was utterly lost. Three years of my life had been spent being a husband and two of them as a father. It was all I wanted. I was just hitting my stride in my new career, I was learning the ropes and finally making a few dollars. Just as I was feeling like a real husband, it was over.

Seventeen years.

I spent the first three years grieving my wife. I missed her terribly. I wept almost daily. I was hollow. My eyes were empty. But eventually I moved on. I let go of her as the ideal of a wife. (Looking back, it’s amazing I grieved a second. They say the opposite of love isn’t hate, it’s ambivalence and I am more ambivalent toward her than any human on earth) But I grieved my marriage for four more years. I loved being married. I loved wearing a ring and having someone to come home to at night or to call with an explanation if I was going to be late. I loved having a reason to pursue success and to dream big. I loved that my daughter had a home with both parents. I loved talking about the future (on the good days) and planning for better things.

I grieved this for years after I was over my wife. I wore my wedding ring for two years after the divorce, not in some outlandish hopes she would come back, but because I liked the way it felt to wear a wedding ring.

I got past that in 2004 when I bought my second house. It was really me and it gave me something to hold to and to put my heart into and it went a long way toward helping me move on.

Then came 2008. Then came collapse, and homelessness and the rest.

During those years, the thoughts of a wife and a home were as far removed as could be from the reality I was living. I wasn’t looking, I never frequented places where I might have met someone, and even if I did, what was I going to say; “Hi, I’m homeless, but I promise I’m still a catch?” I retreated into the relative safety of the four walls of my own heart. It was lonely there but safe. I didn’t realize how lonely it was until I tried to emerge from it two and a half years ago. When I moved to Virginia and got a job and re-entered the workforce and found myself interacting with other humans on a daily basis…it took some getting used to. I had grown used to isolation. My rough edges had gotten rougher in the void of homelessness, with no one to wear them down. I was a bit out of square. It took a few months for me to regain trust in humanity and a comfort level with new faces.

Still, in all this I didn’t think about this emptiness in my heart. I think it’s because I truly didn’t feel it. If I did, I blocked it so perfectly that until this week I never suspected it at all. But I was empty. I am empty. This weekend it was in full view.

I went home again for Thanksgiving. Home. I keep using that word here but it doesn’t feel right. It is my home in the sense that I was born there and grew up there and most of the best memories of my life were created there. As a physical location it is my home and always will be. It remains dear to me, even though I doubt I could return and live there, for the sad reason that the neighborhoods have declined so badly that I could never feel safe.

But it’s not my home in the emotional sense of the word. I saw and felt that this weekend. Once again, I was part of someone else‘s holiday. Someone else's Thanksgiving table. Someone let me tag along on their traditions. I am grateful. I am thankful that I have people who love me and, even though I am not “blood,” they consider me family. And I am thankful for actual family who always holds their door open for me when I am in town.

But it wasn’t always going to be this way.

It was going to be different by now. I was going to be celebrating in my home, with my children, and my wife. We would feel the stress as we cleaned and prepared the house for guests. As Christmas music played while we cooked for an army of visitors. As we joked about each other’s parents, and while we acted like it was a huge pain, we secretly would not have it any other way, and we both knew that. Our kids would be getting excited. The tree would go up. The lights would be lit. The Christmas spirit would sweep down on us like a Nor’easter, and we’d savor every breeze.

There’d be secret shopping trips where I found just the right gifts for the woman I planned on spending every moment with until we were all out of moments. Perfect gifts that, regardless of price, told her that I had thought a lot about these items, that I really knew her, and that I’d picked just exactly these things because I knew without question that she would love them. And when she opened them, and when she saw the thought and care that went into their selection…I would be proven right. She would love them. And she would smile at me, and I would know what that smile meant… “You really do know me. You see me. You’ve been paying attention. You love me.” I would open gifts as well and they’d mean that someone really cared at Christmas. My kids, my wife, they all wanted to find something that I would really love, because they wanted to show me that what I love matters to them. That’s really why we give presents anyway.

Family would come to see us. Instead of being a vagabond at every holiday like I have been for most of my life (long before marriage and divorce) our home would be the fixed point on the compass. The place where friends and family just had to be, if only for a little while, during the Holidays. Ours was the “Christmas House” and our friends and neighbors knew it. It would be a tradition, and eventually, for those we loved, they would come to feel that “It just wouldn’t be Christmas if we didn’t stop to see the Daliessio’s.”

As our kids grew there would be new faces joining us. Boyfriends and girlfriends who became fiancés, then sons and daughter’s in law. The circle would grow larger and remain unbroken.

But that’s not how it turned out. This hasn’t happened for me and I doubt now that it will. I let 17 years slip by before I knew it. I don’t know why. I don’t know if she’s out there, yet to be met, or if I met her and didn’t realize it. Or is she got away, or if I’m simply not going to meet her. But I wish I had.

I am old fashioned. I am a romantic. I longed to sit in my living room with my wife, looking at the tree and all the presents in the late night quiet of Christmas Eve after the guests had left and the kids were trying hard to sleep and we had just a few minutes together alone. I wanted to surprise her with a gift that she’d wanted but thought I’d forgotten. I wanted to make memories. I wanted to be someone’s hero. I wanted to see her as we watched the kids opening presents on Christmas morning and watch her take it all in and catch her eye as she glances at me with a smile that says; “I’m so glad to be here with you. I’m glad were in this together.”

That’s what I married for. That’s what I lost seventeen years ago, this Thursday. That’s what I kept seeing this weekend as we went home.

Now here I am wondering if these scenes will ever play out anywhere but in my heart. Wondering if I will simply walk to the end of my road without anyone watching to see how I did it, to remind me if I did it well, and to be there for the reckoning.

I wanted a home full of happiness and joy and festivity. I might well have missed it. That makes me sad, because there aren’t a lot of hearts like mine left in the world. I don’t say that to boast, I just know how the world is. My romantic, old fashioned, knight-in-shining-armor belief system is antiquated. I’m a relic. But I don’t want to be. I want to matter to someone. To some one. I want to fight for her dreams, cheer for her goals, encourage her in her hardships, and lend her my strength when she feels her’s running out. I want her to look back at life and say “I could have done this without you…but I’m so thankful I didn’t have to.”

I want to go home for Christmas. 

Missing your kids. Missing time. The prison of Divorce.

                                                   

As a rule, I dislike music videos, unless they are live concert footage. Doubtless because I am a writer and I treasure words. I prefer to form a mental image in my soul from the words I read or hear, as opposed to having a meaning provided for me.

There have been exceptions, of course, but for the most part I have simply never found music videos to be as impacting, or evocative as the songs they characterized.

Sometimes, though, a director can create a video that encapsulates the lyrics without confining the impact. When that happens the result can be breathtaking.

Such is the case with U2’s Song For Someone.

Woody Harrelson portrays a prisoner, on his release day. He plays the role so well that I wondered if Woody had ever done time. The hesitancy. The fear. The doubt. The arrival of something so longed for, and anticipated, and yet so simultaneously frightening, was played with so much emotion that I wept throughout. There are few spoken words in this video –which is likely why it works so well- and this silence draws an enormous exclamation point on the character’s pain.

This is metaphor at its best. And for me…it was a metaphor for the pain that has come from divorce.

I have been divorced for almost sixteen years. My daughter was eighteen months old when her mom dissolved our marriage. I was thirty-four when she was born and had just turned thirty-six when I was forced into the world of divorced parenting.

For me it was prison.

I remember the first week without her, calling her one night, about three days after her mom had moved them into a house she shared with a co-worker. As soon as she got on the phone and I heard her voice, I collapsed in tears in my hallway. I tried to hide the sound of my sobs. I could only tell her I loved her, over and over. I couldn’t get anything else out.

There are men’s magazines that will prepare you for a fight over custody, and child support, and the distribution of assets, but they can’t prepare you for tucking your child in by telephone. Or how sleepless you’ll be, or the empty, aching hole in your heart.

I watched Woody Harrelson pace his cell, wash his hands, and take mementos off the wall. I did those things too. I took down every picture my wife had put up, but I couldn’t take my ring off for almost three years after the divorce.

I was still a prisoner.

I watched Harrelson flipping through a worn book of poetry, and then read a letter sent to him by his daughter –apparently many years before, when she was young- and I remembered the file folders and notebooks I still have. Every drawing, every note still filed away in a box in my bedroom. Scraps and pieces of the time with her, and the larger portion of time without her.

Divorce is a prison for a dad. For a dad that cares at least. I know there are those who abandon and disappear. I can’t speak for them. But it’s not most of us. Not by a long shot, regardless what the media and the feminists would have you believe. Divorce is a prison. I was its prisoner for 16 years.

The video progresses to Harrelson shaving nervously, trying to look presentable for his release. His jailer comes. He changed from his prison blues to his civilian clothes. The long walk begins. He pauses as he passes an incoming prisoner…maybe seeing himself all those years before.

I’ve done that. I’ve comforted my friends who’ve walked this path and through my divorced dad blog I’ve offered comfort to thousands of broken, hurting dads.

And seen my younger self in every one.

He pauses again as the exit gate approaches. He breaks down in sobs. Freedom is frightening when you’ve been imprisoned for so long.

The final minutes of the video are the most painful. Woody’s daughter picks him up outside the prison and he offers an awkward hug. She shrinks back from his touch and offers a handshake instead. Harrelson understands her hesitance and hides his disappointment. After enough time, you simply accept the things that come with prison…or divorce. After enough time you learn to mask your pain and disappointment from your kids.

They drive off, exchanging small talk and pleasantries and trying to hide the obvious and enormous uncomfortable air they are both breathing. I cried again.

My daughter is seventeen now. She was so young when we divorced that she only knows single parenthood. She had two Christmases with both her parents. She had three birthdays where we were celebrating with her. Once her mom remarried, I was the odd man out. I saw her once a week and every other weekend…but I didn’t tuck her in every night. I didn’t cook her dinner or help with her homework or take the training wheels off her bike. Her mom made sure those things never happened on my weekends or my Wednesday.

Now she is an adult and she lives with me. She starts college in August, and while having her full-time is better, and some wounds are healing, there are some that have simply become callouses.

In 2008 when the world collapsed and I lost my career and then my home, she lost too. She no longer had a home to go to with her daddy. I had to give our dogs away. We had no weekend visits. I stayed when leaving would have been easier, at least financially. I slept in the back of a 1996 Yukon and did odd jobs. I worked at rebuilding my life and mainly, I stayed in hers.

I could have moved back home and worked for my cousins or moved to North Dakota and made a ton of money in the oil fields. But I know human nature. You start making money and rebuilding your life and eventually that is your life. Then you become a telephone father, calling every few weeks to check in, dutifully sending a check and seeing your kid for two weeks every summer.

It’s prison all over again.

I knew this, so I stayed in Nashville, where we lived for seventeen years. I stayed. I shivered on a lot of winter nights and sweltered on a lot of summer nights. I walked. I went hungry. I studied in my car and got my bachelor’s degree. I wrote. I started a business. But I couldn’t do that one thing that would turn the corner for me and get me out of the truck and into a home.

In May of last year, my daughter and I moved here to Lynchburg, Virginia. In August I was hired by my alma mater and we started rebuilding yet again. In many ways, my daughter is the same as the daughter in the video. She loves me, and she knows I love her. But she missed so many important years after the divorce and even more after I became homeless. We’re not nearly as estranged as the father and daughter in the video but it feels that way sometimes, regardless.

I love my daughter. In my heart, I still see her as the ringlet-curled, little blonde girl she was when her mom and I divorced. Or when she was seven and life was great and I bought her a pony for her birthday and we had a nice home and a garden and two Springer Spaniels.

But she is not that little girl anymore.

She is a college freshman, and I will be fifty-two this fall. And in many ways, I’m still that prisoner, hesitantly facing release and wondering what is out there for me. I never remarried. Never really got close. I focused on my daughter, and being her dad. Maybe a few of those prison walls were my own creation because of those choices. I don’t know. But I know that most divorced dads feel this way. Most divorced dads feel like prisoners. Heck they even call it “visitation” when see have our kids.

Just like prison.

Most dads are nervous and insecure as their kids get older and they start staring into the vacuum left by the time they’ve missed. Most dads have some keepsakes and some mementos stashed away to remind them of a time when they felt like real dads.

Not like prisoners.

Woody, Bono, Edge, Larry, Adam…

I doubt you’ll ever read this blog or know of its existence. I don’t know if this is what you had in mind when you wrote the song and created this video. But this is how it hit me. And I think this is how a lot of dads are seeing this as well.

Thanks for that.

Christmas Letter to my Daughter

Your first Christmas, you were only six months old.

Being a dad for the first time was the only present I needed.

You had no idea what was going on, but your mom and I did.

Every smile. Every laugh. Every single second was a Christmas present from God to me.

By your second Christmas, we weren’t a family anymore. You were still too young to realize what was going on in your world, but I knew. I knew you’d never have a Christmas again the way it was on your first one. Never again with both your mom and me together with you. I swore I’d never introduce the word “divorce” into your world. I can’t remember being more sad at Christmas than I was that year.

But I had you… and that made it Christmas.

The years flew by. On the Christmases you were with me it was joyous. We went home every year. Remember the first time I took you to Wannamaker’s in Philly and showed you the lights? The very same lights I went to see when I was just a little boy. We have always been great connoisseurs of Christmas lights, you and I, and with technology being what it is; you weren’t as impressed with the Wannamaker light display as I was as a child. But you smiled and we took pictures and made a day of it. I wished the monorail was still there. And the big toy department.  You were always so happy. Always so caught up in Christmas, like I was when I was that age. To be honest, you helped me survive those Christmases.

All I ever wanted for my whole life was to create the family I didn’t have. The home I never knew. I wanted you to wake up every single day of your life, knowing…almost taking for granted…that your daddy loved you, that your parents loved each other and that home was a safe haven. Not the place you wished you could get away from. I couldn’t give you that. That wasn’t my choice but I had to live with it just like you did.

You made it possible. You and Christmas.

You got older. Finding the perfect gifts got a little harder each year. You weren’t satisfied with just “Dollies and Dishes.” You loved music. Loved it. I don’t remember a time when you weren’t singing. Making up little songs in a voice that had no business coming from a four-year old. You were born with that gift. It showed up almost as soon as you could talk. Christmas gifts always included something musical. You still believed in Santa, and I still climbed up on the roof on Christmas Eve and shook sleigh bells and stomped around and “Ho Ho Ho’d” and called out to invisible reindeer as you shut your eyes tight and listened as Santa delivered his packages. I lived for those Christmas Eve, rooftop adventures. I loved being your daddy.

Just as you were turning ten, my world collapsed again. I was just getting back to normal. Just feeling like a whole man again after years of heartbreak from being divorced and missing you so much when we weren’t together. Then my world spun the wrong direction again and everything was gone. No job. No success. And not long after…no home. Our beautiful little ranch house in the country was gone. And with it, our garden, our dogs and our cat and your beloved pony “Silly Willy.” Gone. You were ten. I’d spent ten years very carefully trying to never fail you or let you down. But I couldn’t stop it this time. It was out of my control, and when you’re a dad, you are supposed to be able to fix everything. I always could. I used to make little repairs around the house and you would be so amazed at what your daddy could do with his hands and some tools. But this time, I had no answers. This time I was helpless.

That was the Christmas that you stopped believing in Santa. Your cousins had told you about him, and you told me late that fall. We stopped doing the Advent Calendars too. And there was no longer any need for the sleigh bells, or the ladder to the roof.

But it was still Christmas. We still had Uncle Franny and Cousin Toni and Sissy and Nick and Feast of Seven Fishes. And I still had you.

This year will be the first Christmas in about five years that we won’t spend together. You’re with your mom…and I understand that. I love having you living with me now, and life is beginning to rebuild. But I miss Christmas.

I miss you being little, and I miss being your hero and your favorite person. I miss making you laugh with my Winnie the Pooh impersonations. We won’t be watching Christmas movies this year. Or listening to our traditional Christmas music. Or decorating our house.

Our house.

I miss our house. I miss Christmas. I miss my little girl.

Next Christmas will be the last one before you go off to college. It will be like all the others you have ever known, except that first one. It will once again be spent away from one of your parents. I’m still sorry about that. It still hurts. I would have endured for your sake. I would have chosen to give you your family, if the choice had been mine.

I don’t know what future Christmases will look like, or where you’ll be. One day, some young man will come and win your heart. And you’ll begin your own Christmas traditions. I hope you’ll have better success at it than I did. I think I’ve been a pretty good dad. I think I did Christmas pretty well, given the circumstances. I wish I could have a few more of them with you. Like when you were little. Like the time we drove to the beach on Christmas Eve day and saw deer feeding by the side of the woods, and you turned to me and said; “Look Daddy! It’s Santa’s reindeer getting ready for tonight!” And you were pretty sure you saw Rudolph’s nose blinking. And for a minute I felt like the best dad in the world.

I miss you at Christmas. I love you more than ever, even as you’ve become a wonderful, beautiful young woman. But I remember that first Christmas. And how much promise it held. You are still the greatest gift I ever got. And you always will be.

Merry Christmas, Morgan. My beautiful Daisy. You have always meant Christmas to me.

I love you.

Daddy