The best place to start any story if probably the begining. My problem is that the begining often seems a moving target. Was it the birth of my oldest daughter or the day my x-wife left, was it the day I found out my youngest was blind in one eye or the day I went to court to get custody of my kids? I would love to think it was a happy day, that cold Feburary afternoon I rushed my X (I’ll call her Billie) to Harbor Hospital and a few hours later was left holding a tiny person; so dependent, so innocent, and so liberating, teaching duty, peace and true love in an instant. But in reality this story begins a few years later, on a hot July afternoon..

When you are a partner in parenting it is a different dynamic for both people. I worked outside the home, she stayed home and worked taking care of the kids. After a rough first few years we settled in to a routine and got comfortable, maybe minus the passion of our early days together but, nonetheless a good place (well, at least I did). I was happy and ready to dedicate my life to the two children I had had with my beautiful wife. Other partrnerships work out differently, sometimes both parents work, sometimes just the mom does, but in most, from what I can discern, people settle in and live their lives resigned to the world they have built together. Regardless of the form, both parents have a roll that is defined by them and for their children. Sometimes it just happens, others it is planned out; with us it just happened and was pretty traditional. I would come home from work, play with the kids, make dinner, she would bathe and put them to bed while I settled in to watch some TV. Most times it is an up and down life with moments of pure joy and dark days of doubt in our choices, but regardless, when it works it is because both partners feel they chose what they are doing and what they are doing is right for them.

It wasn’t the case with me and Billie, Billie was not happy, she didn’t like being ‘stuck’ as a stay at home mom and wife. Perhaps it goes back to the day she came down stairs and said “I’m pregnant” and I said “I guess we have to get married”. Not a ringing endorsement of any of it on my part. In those days our relationship was on its last legs, I was bored and ready to move on, and she felt, from what I can gather, that I wasn’t the person she needed. I have never been one to stand and talk to my girlfriend while she did the dishes or felt I had to wake up next to her every morning, and I never expected those things from her. I like sleeping on the couch, I like the space and not having someone trying to hold or cuddle me. That’s my inner Aquarius and she knew that is what she was getting. I knew too what I was getting, a flowing tide of Piscean emotion and needs that would only grow exponentially when a pregnancy was added. In that moment we chose to accept each other as we were because together we had created a life, or so I thought.

We married, went the whole nine yards, full on wedding at a church, open bar reception, honeymoon in Nashville. But things wern’t all rosey, I had decided nothing had changed in my life; sleeping all day, working at night in a bar and generally being abscent from Billie and our daughter’s life. A newborn is hard for a dad, they feed, sleep, and poop for the first few months and I was relegated to diaper duty because our daughter refused a bottle, and was strictly breast fed. This left me feeling left out. I took them to the doctor and held them when asked too, but I was not completely involved so I would slip out when they napped and come home drunk and useless to Billie in the child care deaprtment.

Billie was not happy with me and left. After a few months I convinced her I could change my ways and she believed me, came back, and we had another daughter. I quit my job, got a new one in a hardware store with more ‘normal’ hours and we moved far from the city to try and reset our life and start over, but it didn’t change how she felt or the memory of my mispent first years of marriage. I wasn’t good at being a husband, but I tried, reading books, talking to those I knew who made it work and trying to do the things she wanted of me, the things she thought a husband should be. I had given up on bars and such but I was still aloof at best and detachted at worst when it came to me and Billie.

This is not to say I didn’t love Billie, it just wasn’t in that Romeo Julliet kind of way. The problem was it was a kind of ‘duty’ love, I wanted to take care of her and the kids and I resigned myself to this. I was 34 at this point and had lived my life to it’s fullest and was ready to enter a new phase, a quiet family life. Billie was 26 and, I think, saw this great opportunity and challenge as the thing that took her youth away. When coupled with her inablity to change me into the man who would sit and talk while she did dishes, it left us in a bad place and ultimately left our children scared from the termination of their parents marriage.

Not long after we moved she admitted to me she had slept with a friend of hers when we had split up. It took some time but I forgave her, problem was I couldn’t forget and had a tinge of doubt always floating around. Turns out it was rightly so because she began an affair with this person and he did the old Don Juanius and convinced her she would be better off with him. You know the routine, ‘I’m your friend and such a good listener’, then on to ‘trash the husband with the ammunition for being a good friend’, finally ‘hey I can do everything for you he doesn’t’. So one day in July of 2008 she said she was in love with someone else and after giving her what I am sure was the strangest look ever said “”What should I do?”, my answer “Go be with him”.

Who knows what she thought would happen, or even if she had thought about it at all, but that is where my story really begins. In a matter of minutes I was alone as a parent with a two and four year old and had a lot to learn real quick. I may have been a bad husband (I would like to think flawed because my devotion and fidelity to her never waivered) but I was always a good father, abeit one part of a larger partnership, and it was this moment that put all my skills to the test.