The story starts with my Mother. Her marriage to my father only lasted until I was five years old and before my brothers were three. My Mom is a very strong and determined woman for whom I had only respect and admiration. That has not changed over these 40 years that have passed. Being that I was five at the time of their separation and divorce, and because of the way Mom chose to handle it, I did not see my father after that and didn’t know what kind of person he was.
Our little family of four moved across the country and my mother never spoke of my father. My brothers and I never asked about him or talked about him amongst ourselves. In retrospect, it seemed that we never missed having that father. I have very pleasant memories of the years my Mom was single, babysitters and all. We were living in the same city as my grandparents during that period, so they were extended family, very nearby, who had not been present before. After about three years, Mom married my stepfather. When they married it was very exciting because we moved to the city where my stepfather was living and to a new house that he and my mother decided to rent on a farm. This move would take us about 400 miles away from the city my grandparents lived, but that did not seem to worry me. The first time that my new stepfather had to discipline myself or my brothers through words, was when I had my first worry about this new marriage idea. All of a sudden it was clear that there would be TWO people in charge of telling me what I could and could not do, and how could that be better than just having one?! I was just fine with only my Mom telling me what to do. How could I have not seen that this stepfather was going to be a negative addition? I sat my little brothers down to inform them for the first time that the stepfather wasn’t our real father, and they should not have to listen to him! My Mother overheard this conversation behind closed door (built in 1803). When we were at the dinner table that night, the parents told us kids that they needed to have a talk with us after dinner. When we were all seated in the living room, my Mom asked each of us what we thought a REAL father was. That was when I knew she had heard what I said, and I was embarrassed and afraid. My stepfather proceeded to tell us what he perceived a REAL father to be, and I could not disagree with his logic. Even though I knew they were right, I spent the next five years trying to hate him. Through five years of REAL fathering, my resolve to hate melted, and one day I started calling him Dad instead of by his first name. He was an extraordinary father to us all until the day he died, and because of that, I never consciously missed my biological father. I married at 19 years of age and that husband and I had a daughter. He is a very loving, if not responsible father to her. After about 10 years our marriage broke up because I grew up, and away from him, and wanted a different life. At 30, I met that very different life in the form of a second husband. This man had been married before, had other children, and conned me into thinking he was a person who had different morals and ethics than he actually did. He was adamant that my daughter be withheld from her father until I got a separation agreement for money and child support signed. I did not agree with his methods, but was too weak spirited to stand up to him. Although he wasn’t physically abusive towards myself or my daughter, he was extremely emotionally abusive. Even after the child support agreement was signed, he did everything he could to discourage my daughter from spending any time with her father. My second husband and I had a daughter way too soon, and my husband had only previously had three sons. Needless to say, this new daughter was the princess of the house and my older daughter was treated like Cinderella by him. I divorced the second husband after 10 years, and by that time my daughters and I were living in a different country than their fathers. As soon as I made the break with that dysfunctional marriage I started noticing changes for the better in my older daughter. At first she was very worried about how I was going to support our family of three because I am disabled. The way I learned how upset she was by this was an incident that is impressed indelibly on my memory. It was late fall and my daughter was forced to rake piles and piles of leaves out to the roadside for the city to pick up. When I looked out the window to observe her progress, I saw that she was crying as she was raking. Of course, I thought she was crying because she had to rake! I walked out to the section of yard to confront her, and it was then that she told me about her fear for our family’s financial safety without her stepfather’s support. When she learned that would not effect her life adversely, she started blossoming into the happy girl that I knew she would have been if not subjected to the bad stepfather. My older daughter is the type of girl who tries to be perfect in every way. She got straight A’s from kindergarten through college. She never told me how she felt about being away from her father in words, but I should have been able to read that in her actions. At a young age she was always looking for positive affirmation through boyfriends. I worry about her choices in men because of that. Although she is extremely confident and capable in all areas of her young adult life, I feel that her choices in men are dictated or twisted because of the fatherless time in her life. I now believe that my own choices regarding men were made badly for that reason. My stepfather was great, but I didn’t have that feeling of unconditional love from a man in my life since birth. Perhaps it was even worse for my daughter, who had it, but it was ripped away and withheld from her. My youngest daughter is in a divorced situation with her father living in another country. Although he spoils her when he is with her, he has rarely come to visit her. His money is very important to him, so he barely stops working long enough to spend time with her on court ordered visits that she spends with him in our old house. She looks forward to these visits very much and would never give them up, but he rarely lives up to her expectations of putting HER first. Even though both of my daughters can see the mistakes I have made, I wonder if they will make better choices when it comes to marriage? I never realized how being fatherless effected my choices in men until I had been through two marriages, and watched two daughters trying to live through it. Apparently, we will have to wait until much later in their lives to see how all of this plays out. The one conclusion or moral we can all get from this story is how detrimental it is for daughters to be fatherless.