flurry of angry remarks.
When he entered their lives without preparation or warning, I felt as if we were all thrown into a Gopher Hunt arcade game at those manic kids’ entertainment places like Chuck E. Cheese’s. Plastic gophers pop up from holes on a flat board and the goal is to smack the gopher down with a rubber mallet; that’s how the player earns points. Then another gopher and another pop up, over and over again, in different places each second without pattern or logic, until your time runs out and you put more tokens into the machine or walk away. And then? Nothing. As if the game was unplugged.
Two days later my former husband sent me an e-mail with the header D AD I S IN T OWN . The e-mail came as a surprise, like the phone call. In it he said he hoped the boys would call him on his cell phone. He also asked if he could have a private face-to-face conversation with me that would take fifteen minutes. He said he had an idea that talking to me would be “the first order of business in terms of reconnecting with the boys.” And he signed it, “Love, Matthew.”
His name was not Matthew. He changed it after he moved to Europe. Not legally, I gathered, since legal correspondence concerning him still listed his given name. Debt collectors called the house regularly asking for him by the name I knew.
The boys did not call him back. I would not meet him; I had learned from years of encounters with him that there was the lure, a promise of something, and then I surrendered my resistance, agreed to a meeting, and the trap snapped shut. He sprung on me a new hurt, a new demand, a new denial.
“Any ideas you have for me you can send in writing to me or my attorney,” I told him in an e-mail.
My attorney had been trying to arrange a deposition with him for more than a year, and my former husband delayed the requests each time. He had filed a motion to stop all child support past, present, and future and would not show up for any deposition or court appearances. In the meantime, he paid nothing at all. For years. A deadbeat dad. Like in the movies. Like in the news stories.
Two more days passed and he sent another e-mail. He explained in the first few sentences that he would be busy celebrating the birthdays of his children from his second marriage, his daughter and her son. He did not mention that his son Weldon’s birthday was also that same week.
In this e-mail he proposed that he and I write a book together on the “important message” of forgiveness, and said that he had already gathered his thoughts on the book. He went on to outline three “process premises”: that our lives always reflect what we intend, that no one has ever treated us badly or wronged us, that every decision we make is the perfect decision at the time. He then elaborated with sixteen subpremises. He acknowledged that sometimes other people’s decisions cause us pain, but it does not mean the decisions were not “excellent.”
I was livid. Is genocide self-induced? Where does this put ethnic cleansing, violence, and abuse? A drive-by shooting, drownings? Were they all excellent decisions at the time, with no victim or perpetrator, just a reflection of what we truly want? Is everyone off thehook? Are you? Was being a father a part-time job you just quit? This psychobabble made me furious.
Of course, I would never tell the boys that his decision to have nothing to do with them emotionally, physically, or financially was an excellent decision. Never. No blame, no responsibility. No father should ever say that. No father should ever do what he did. I found the behavior reprehensible and immoral.
“I am busy with my own work, I will not write a book with you,” I told him on the phone.
A few days later I picked up the package he sent to my post office box—a large document envelope with a photocopy of every card and love letter I sent him in our twelve-year relationship. I opened it and read them all. Some of them I distinctly
When he entered their lives without preparation or warning, I felt as if we were all thrown into a Gopher Hunt arcade game at those manic kids’ entertainment places like Chuck E. Cheese’s. Plastic gophers pop up from holes on a flat board and the goal is to smack the gopher down with a rubber mallet; that’s how the player earns points. Then another gopher and another pop up, over and over again, in different places each second without pattern or logic, until your time runs out and you put more tokens into the machine or walk away. And then? Nothing. As if the game was unplugged.
Two days later my former husband sent me an e-mail with the header D AD I S IN T OWN . The e-mail came as a surprise, like the phone call. In it he said he hoped the boys would call him on his cell phone. He also asked if he could have a private face-to-face conversation with me that would take fifteen minutes. He said he had an idea that talking to me would be “the first order of business in terms of reconnecting with the boys.” And he signed it, “Love, Matthew.”
His name was not Matthew. He changed it after he moved to Europe. Not legally, I gathered, since legal correspondence concerning him still listed his given name. Debt collectors called the house regularly asking for him by the name I knew.
The boys did not call him back. I would not meet him; I had learned from years of encounters with him that there was the lure, a promise of something, and then I surrendered my resistance, agreed to a meeting, and the trap snapped shut. He sprung on me a new hurt, a new demand, a new denial.
“Any ideas you have for me you can send in writing to me or my attorney,” I told him in an e-mail.
My attorney had been trying to arrange a deposition with him for more than a year, and my former husband delayed the requests each time. He had filed a motion to stop all child support past, present, and future and would not show up for any deposition or court appearances. In the meantime, he paid nothing at all. For years. A deadbeat dad. Like in the movies. Like in the news stories.
Two more days passed and he sent another e-mail. He explained in the first few sentences that he would be busy celebrating the birthdays of his children from his second marriage, his daughter and her son. He did not mention that his son Weldon’s birthday was also that same week.
In this e-mail he proposed that he and I write a book together on the “important message” of forgiveness, and said that he had already gathered his thoughts on the book. He went on to outline three “process premises”: that our lives always reflect what we intend, that no one has ever treated us badly or wronged us, that every decision we make is the perfect decision at the time. He then elaborated with sixteen subpremises. He acknowledged that sometimes other people’s decisions cause us pain, but it does not mean the decisions were not “excellent.”
I was livid. Is genocide self-induced? Where does this put ethnic cleansing, violence, and abuse? A drive-by shooting, drownings? Were they all excellent decisions at the time, with no victim or perpetrator, just a reflection of what we truly want? Is everyone off thehook? Are you? Was being a father a part-time job you just quit? This psychobabble made me furious.
Of course, I would never tell the boys that his decision to have nothing to do with them emotionally, physically, or financially was an excellent decision. Never. No blame, no responsibility. No father should ever say that. No father should ever do what he did. I found the behavior reprehensible and immoral.
“I am busy with my own work, I will not write a book with you,” I told him on the phone.
A few days later I picked up the package he sent to my post office box—a large document envelope with a photocopy of every card and love letter I sent him in our twelve-year relationship. I opened it and read them all. Some of them I distinctly
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