Two Letters

When my step-daughter was in college, she was in an auto accident (not her fault) which totaled her little tin can of a used car.  She hadn’t had very good luck with used cars so far and, when she was trying to decide what to do about new wheels, I suggested what I thought was a perfectly good solution.

“You’re going to get a few thousand dollars when you turn 21 from the settlement on your accident,” I offered.  “What about if we take the insurance payoff from this car, use it as a down payment on a new car and your dad and I each make half the monthly payments until you’re 21?   Then you can take over the payments.”

She thought it was a good idea until she brought the subject up to her dad.  “He says he doesn’t trust you guys to make your half of the payments,” she related.

Well.  Hello?  I was paying for the bulk of her college education.  Her dad agreed to buy her books – but even then wouldn’t give her money in advance.  She had to turn in her receipts from the campus bookstore and ask for reimbursement from him.  Being perpetually short of money (partly from trying to keep up with her rich roommates), she would buy anything she could at the bookstore and tell him the receipt was all for books and school supplies.

*

To be fair, he had more than a couple of reasons not to be happy with his ex-wife and her new husband.

For instance, the kid and her friends took a cruise to Santa Barbara one weekend and she got a traffic ticket on the way home.  We just shrugged our shoulders and said, “Oh, well.  I guess you’d better figure out a way to pay the fine, hadn’t you?”

But then the Notice to Appear arrived in the mail and we discovered she had been going 93 miles per hour in a 65 mph zone – in a car that was probably barely safe at 65.  So we took the car keys away for a while.

“But I’m too old to be grounded!” she wailed.  “Honey, you’re not grounded.  You just don’t have a car for a while.  Don’t you remember that contract we all signed?  You agreed to this ahead of time.”  “Well, I might as well be grounded,” she screamed and ran off to the comfort of Daddy Dearest’s arms.

DD put on his deepest and most caring voice and explained that this was but another reason why the most perfect daughter in the world should have been living with him all those years, instead of with “those strange people.”

Mom was livid when she found out that, once again, the man who had no responsibility for raising a child (and who had refused every overture to share such responsibilities) was undermining those who did. So she notified him that if he found it acceptable to drive 93 miles per hour in a motorized tin can, then he could provide her auto insurance.  We would take her off our policy in 30 days.

*

The (Hayward, California) Daily Review used to have a columnist named Tom Goff, who was almost the only saving grace of that suburban newspaper.  Goff ran a series of columns called “The Deadbeat Forum,” about the state’s new (1992) child support laws and their effects on children and parents.

The new law, Goff wrote, “seeks to restore some sanity to a system blighted by shamefully low support levels and non-compliant fathers. Before the law, California ranked among the nation’s lowest states for child-support levels. It now ranks in the top 10.

“There is no arguing with the need for this law. Even the fairest payments sometimes cannot cover the care and education of children.

“But there’s another side of the coin,” he wrote:  the story of middle-class, non-deadbeat dads who are “bitter over what they see as an unintentional boon to ex-spouses who don’t, they say, need bigger award checks to support their children.” ¹

And that’s where the kid’s DD came in.  After reading Goff’s series, he contacted the columnist to explain the law’s impact on those non-custodial fathers who were not deadbeats.

Bob is by no means a deadbeat. In the eight years since his divorce, he’s never missed a payment and has kept his end of the joint custody agreement. ²

But immediately after the new law went into effect, Bob’s ex-wife, since re-married and the majority custodian of their 12-year-old daughter, filed for a 70 percent payment increase ³ — even though, Bob says, her standard of living is about the same as his. ⁴

“It’s a well-intentioned law,” Bob acknowledges. “But at no time did I think this was going to be an attack on the middle-income folk….” ⁵

“We were planning a family, but the immediate bottom line is that we’re just going to have to put that on hold if they get the increase.” ⁶

________________________

Notes:

¹ Don’t need?  Don’t need? In other words, if the kid isn’t going hungry and has a roof over his head, that’s all he needs? And Daddy Dearest, no matter what his standard of living, shouldn’t have to shell out anything more than half of the kid’s basic needs?  The law doesn’t see it that way and neither do I.

² This much is true.

³ Not at all true, although it makes a good story.  Either parent can file a motion to ask the judge to take another look at child support, but neither can suggest any specific amount that they believe to be correct.

⁴ Her standard of living was largely based on my income. As I later wrote to Goff, I had no problem with supporting Daddy Dearest’s child in a better manner than her mother could if she were single.  I just didn’t want to be expected to do so.  (DD’s attorney told the court that if 1 were any kind of man I would wholly support the child and quit picking on her poor father.)

⁵ Oh, so asking a father to help support his child is an “attack?”

⁶ My friend Don was furious when he read this part of DD’s statement.  “He wants to have another child when he’s not willing to support the one he already has?” he asked indignantly.

_______________________

Good job of crying in your beer, Daddy Dearest.  But never one to pass up a challenge, I wrote my own letter to Goff, most of which he printed.  Excerpts follow:

Dear Mr. Goff:

I’m told you like a good controversy, so I would like to offer a personal and factual response to your column of August 11, 1992, regarding child support.

I am the step-father of “Bob D.’s” 12-year-old daughter.  Mr. D. is pulling your leg a bit with respect to the facts of his case, which emphasizes a larger problem of child support:  Even fathers who pay their support on time tend to resent paying anything at all.

What Mr. D. didn’t tell you is that…until recently, he was paying only $245 per month in child support.  That is less than 7 percent of his income…to help support a pre-teen daughter.

Meanwhile, Mr. D.’s ex-wife was injured in an automobile accident last year and has not been able to work since September. Yet she did not ask for any increase in child support for more than eight months….It was only after losing her job in mid-May (and thus having to pay more than $800 per month for family medical insurance out of her $1,400 disability award) that she went back to her attorney….

Her new award was $413 per month—only 11 percent of Mr. D’s income…and much less than the 18 percent of income that AFDC says is the minimum necessary for a family to spend to support one child.

Yet Mr. D. is livid.  He has subpoenaed his ex-wife’s employment records, medical records, bank accounts and tax returns for the next court hearing.  He has scheduled her deposition with his attorney….[H]is attorney’s fees, alone, could pay for two or three years of the increased support award.

I pity the poor Mr. D.’s of the world.  I hear their complaints all the time:  “Sure, I believe in helping to support my kids, but what about me?  I can’t take that vacation; I can’t buy that new boat; I can’t have another family if I have to pay child support.  Let her mother support her.”

Sorry, but the law doesn’t work that way.  The kids come first. And you can’t raise a 12-year-old today in a middle-class environment on even two times $245 per month.  Mr. D’s child costs nearly $700 per month in documentable expenses, which do not include food, lodging and medical care (she has serious medical problems).

It was not just single mothers on welfare who suffered under the old support schedule.  It was all mothers.  Mom gets to worry about where to find the money to buy the band or soccer or cheerleading uniform the child needs.  Dad gets to buy a new house and spend his weekends with the kids impressing them with what a hell of a nice guy he is.  Why, he even sends TWO HUNDRED WHOLE DOLLARS to Mom every month to help support them.  (You can just picture a child’s eyes at this statement.)

There’s something wrong with this picture.  And it is small comfort that a father pays his pittance of child support on time each month.

Children are not cheap.  If all the Mr. D.’s actually had to raise their own children, they would long for the days when all they had to do was send a check for two or three hundred dollars once a month.  How does it become the mother’s fault that children cost money?  Why is it wrong for the legislature to say that fathers ought to pay their fair share?

Who is supporting Mr. D.’s daughter?  I am.  Even with the higher support award, I will still be paying more to raise her than her father will.  Who will pay to send her to college?  I will.  He’s made that perfectly clear.  He has even complained because the new support order asks him to pay a portion of her medical care.

I don’t begrudge her a penny of it.  I don’t whine to her mother to quit picking my pocket to help support “her” child.  I don’t moan that I can’t take a vacation or have a baby of my own because I’m supporting someone else’s child.  I wish I could afford to do more.  Still, it would be nice if Mr. D. didn’t expect it of me.

The child is half his.  It would be nice if he voluntarily paid even half the cost of raising her.

Very truly yours,

Steven C. Dimick

The kid loved playing soccer.  The only thing she liked better than socializing with her friends at school was the once-weekly afternoon practice and the game every Saturday.

Still, there were times when she asked to be able to do something else on Saturday mornings such as a visit to the shopping mall or an amusement park with a friend or to have a gaggle of giggly girls sleep over on Friday night.

“Nope.  Sorry kid,” her mother would say.  “You made a commitment.  People are counting on you.  When you make a commitment, you don’t back out just because a better offer comes along.”

So imagine Mom’s surprise when she showed up for a Saturday morning game – on one of Dad’s weekends – to find the kid not there.

Parents asked where she was.  Teammates asked where she was.  Coach and assistant coach asked where she was.  All Mom could do was mutter a lame excuse.  She left before half time when it became obvious that the kid was not just late, but wasn’t coming.

On Sunday evening, when the little one was delivered back home, Mom let her get settled in before commenting, “Hey.  Everybody missed you at the game yesterday,” at which the kid teared up immediately.

She had been primed.

“Dad says if you have a problem you should call him,” she sobbed, already knowing that she was going to be in trouble…in trouble…in trouble.

It turned out it was a “surprise” visit to an amusement park and it served its intended purpose.  It made the poor kid miserable.  And the cause of her misery was — naturally — her mother.

I can’t believe I forgot the best part of the story.

She had remained fairly close with his parents and his sister; as I said, sleeping on a hand-me-down waterbed and watching a hand-me-down television belonging to his sister. But a two weeks later, when bringing the daughter back from her bi-weekly weekend, he informed her that “My family thinks what you are doing to me is really terrible. They want me to tell you that they never want to see you or have anything to do with you again.”

(It would be some years later before she heard the flip side: he told his family that “She wants me to tell you that she hates all of you and never wants to see you or have anything to do with you again.”

(The story came out when the sister rang her doorbell one evening out of the blue and asked to come in to apologize “for believing all those lies.” It turned into a very interesting conversation.)

About a week after that, she received a note from his sister: “I want all my stuff back. My bed, my television and my chair. We’ll pick them up on Saturday.”

When Saturday came, she had everything ready. The waterbed had been drained and its frame carefully disassembled. The television was waiting on the front porch. The chair was on the front lawn. Understandably, she had taken time to puncture the waterbed in several places and was ready to pour Coca-Cola onto the circuit board of the television before her new boyfriend talked her out of it.

He had a new girlfriend also, to whom he would later be briefly married, and when, many years later, his daughter asked him about the furniture incident and others, he had a ready answer: “It was _________’s fault. She made me do all those things. You know I would never want to do anything to hurt you. You were already unhappy enough at home. Unhappy… unhappy… unhappy.”

And she bought into it every step of the way.

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.