It’s taken me a long time to trust people because there’s always this nagging doubt
Posted in General on 11. Aug, 2010
It’s taken me a long time to trust people, because there’s always this nagging doubt. I think, at the end of the day, love will be stronger than anything they throw at me. The strange thing is that even though my ex is hell-bent on destruction, I reckon right will come out in the end Ultimately, I believe that what you give out, you get back. I don’t give up easily, even though I know there are many years of battle ahead.”She kept my sons from meJason, a 58-year-old civil engineer from Carlisle, broke up with his first wife in 1967 They had two sons.
He married again three years later and had two more children, a boy and a girl. Both are now in their early twenties”PEOPLE always sympathise when they hear about a mother who can’t see her kids, but they don’t seem to understand that men can feel just as much pain. In the end, I’ve come through it all by concentrating on the present and not getting caught up in the past. I try always to be extremely logical – perhaps that’s why my first wife called me a cold fish.”I had extreme problems in my first marriage and by the time the eldest boy was five, the relationship had totally broken down I couldn’t understand what had gone wrong. I’d sunk all my assets into the house and the family and now she was clearing me out for everything I had. It made no sense – I hadn’t gone off with other women, I hadn’t been cruel or unreasonable. Eventually, I was granted a divorce on the grounds of her conduct.”I’d always played an equal role in bringing up the children, so when the divorce came through I fought for care and control of my sons in the High Court, but lost the case and was given 24 hours to get out of the house.
My wife had always threatened that I wouldn’t see the children and she kept to her word. For the next five or six years, I saw them on a very irregular and unsatisfactory basis.”During that time I went back to the court on many occasions, to get contact access, and over my reluctance to pay maintenance. I know from a moral point of view and from the children’s point of view, it is necessary to pay maintenance, but if you aren’t allowed to see your child, you can’t help thinking, why on earth should I pay.”About six years after the divorce when the children were 9 and 10, I got a letter from my ex-wife’s solicitor saying I was in maintenance arrears and that on no account should I phone, see or write to the boys. I immediately sought to have this changed in the court, but the court did nothing about it.”It was then that I came to the view that if I continued to try and see them it would only cause them more distress.
They lived very near and I knew that if they needed me they would come and find me But they never did. I thought about them a lot over the years and worried about them, but for 16 years I had no contact, other than very occasionally bumping into them in the street, where we would chat briefly and then go our separate ways. The courts say that first children should be adequately provided for and that the next family should get whatever’s left over, but I don’t agree with that, especially since, in my case, I know there was enough money to go around for my two sons because they went to public school.”On the positive side, my new family eased the pain and taught me a huge amount about the delights, pleasures and frustrations of fatherhood. Strangely, my first two children were model children and as a result I always thought I was a model dad, but my second two children taught me I wasn’t such a bloody good dad after all.”A few years ago, my mother died and all my children came to the funeral.
In a way, that started a kind of healing process, although I doubt whether the rift can ever totally be healed. My eldest son is still vitriolic towards me, blaming me for what happened. He says if he was a father he’d have moved heaven and earth to try and see his children and can’t understand why I let them go. If I try and explain what happened he only blames me for saying nasty things about his mother My younger son is not so bitter.