She was a single mother trying to raise a young daughter on dead-end-job wages. Although he never quite got his degree, he taught a class or two and had a skilled technician’s job at a community college.
She had to use her parents for after-school care and many an evening meal consisted of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, which she turned into fun so her daughter wouldn’t know how close to the financial edge they were. He vacationed regularly with his family in Hawaii.
He paid his modest child support regularly and on time. She was the one who had to take off work for several days to be with her daughter at the Lucille Packard Children’s Hospital at Stanford University, where the girl was diagnosed with Type I diabetes.
He got the bed, the television and all of the living room furniture except a battered sofa. Her bed, television and the only comfortable living room chair were on loan from his sister.
She knew that he received regular raises and that a new contract had just been negotiated with the community college district. Since it had been more than a year since child support had been calculated, she sent him a formal Request for Production of Income and Expense Statement, which parents are allowed to send each other once a year so they will know if it is worth while to ask a court to re-evaluate child support. He exploded.
When he brought the seven-year-old daughter back to her mother on Sunday evening, she was in tears. “Dad says you’re just after his money because he has a girlfriend,” she sobbed. “He says he pays you four hundred dollars a month to raise me.”
FOUR HUNDRED DOLLARS A MONTH!! To a child who measured all money in terms of gummi bears at ten cents each, this was a fortune. Of course Dad was a martyr and Mom a golddigger.
This was probably not the first time that Dad had deliberately hurt his child in order to make himself look like a hero. It was merely the first time I was aware of it.
And it wouldn’t be the last time, by far. Throughout her highschool and even into her college years, he constantly set her up, put her in the middle and deliberately made her unhappy just to prove how wonderful things would be if she only lived with him.
“I know how difficult things are and how unhappy you are at home,” he would remind her constantly, both verbally and in writing, and it became almost an hypnotic mantra: “unhappy… unhappy…unhappy… But you know you always have me. I’ll always be here for you.”
Like most fathers, the poor fool never did catch on to what it really costs to raise a child, never understood that the non-custodial parent (be it father or mother) generally gets the better part of the economic bargain, and never admitted to himself the damage he was doing to his own child.
But his plan worked for him and she bought into it every step of the way.