Glenn's E-Newsletter/Week in Review, August 26, 2008

Divorced Mother's Column Says It Better Than I Ever Could...

Sometimes fatherlessness is the result of dad's decisions, but sometimes it's the result of mom's decisions. I've made this point countless times in the media but never have I done it as effectively as columnist S. Renee Mitchell does in her recent column Mom might be the reason dad's absent (The Oregonian, 8/20/08).

Mitchell has lived it, and instead of giving us the "You go girl!/Single motherhood is great for kids" nonsense, she's big enough to tell the truth--kids need their dads, and sometimes it is moms who make kids fatherless.

Mitchell writes:

What I will miss most is my sons' laughter. Next best: hugs and kisses just before bedtime.

This afternoon, my 12-year-old twins fly back to Detroit, Mich., to resume living with their father and stepmother. Our one-year co-parenting experiment turned into a pledge to keep them through high school.

I never thought mothering would be this complicated. Or that I'd have to deliver my homemade nurturing through a postal carrier.

But this is my way of making amends for contributing to the epidemic of children being raised by single parents. I've come to realize: Fatherlessness can sometimes be a result of the mother's choices.

When I made the decision to divorce my children's father and move to Portland when our twins were age 2, I thought I was the only parent my sons, Alex and Zavier, would ever need. I was mistaken.

No matter how much love I poured into my children's hearts, my sons were starving with "father hunger" for the man named Lee, who named them and held them when they were just a few seconds old.

So, about a year ago, I had an epiphany. I decided to let go of what went wrong in the marriage and I shipped my boys off to Detroit, where they were born, to experience puberty through their father's eyes...

I share this journey with readers because I know men aren't always the only ones to blame when Daddy isn't a part of his children's lives. Women have a larger role in that than we'd like to admit...women of divorce need to lose the anger so our children don't become unintentional pawns in a game to prove how much we don't need a spouse to survive...Sometimes, though, women just need to get out of the way.