WHEN MEN ASK FOR CUSTODY: WHO DO THEY THINK THEY ARE KIDDING?

Thank God I ended up with the residential custody of the children.  However, sometimes in my wildest dreams I imagine what might have happened if my ex had ended up with custody of the children. 

 

His scenario, from what I've gathered from the custody evaluation, was that he would continue to work and that he would have a nanny taking care of the children while I saw them once a month for a short visit. 

 

This would have been quite interesting to see, had it actually happened, because after knowing my ex for 25 years, I am aware that he is a workaholic and that even once he came home at night, he was very likely to have continued on working with the children running around the house unsupervised.  

 

Still, my attorney told me that I was within a hair's breadth of losing custody of my children and that I should be very grateful for his hard work. 

 

Of course, from my perspective I am looking at a custody evaluator and a GAL who actually entertained the idea that having three children in the care of a total workaholic would be a good idea.  Of course, I am not sure they even asked him how many hours he worked.  I think they spent their time looking at all the pictures he snapped during his parenting time. 

 

(I am not going to call it visitation, because there is something inherently wrong about referring the time fathers and mothers have with their children as time that they are visiting!) 

 

My bottom line question is, why do we have these custody disputes costing multiple thousands of dollars?  Shouldn't it be obvious that custody ought to go with the mothers who are the primary caregiver? 

 

Now before you start yelling at me all at once, don't start thinking that I am gender biased.  My own father was a very non-traditional man who never allowed himself to be limited by expectations of what men should or should not do. 

 

He was, in fact, a marvelous mother. 

 

He loved babies--he loved to rock them and hold them.  My mother used to tell me that he always thought they were "cheaper by the dozen." And as a young faculty member, he used to take my older sister to his class where students fussed over the baby while he delivered his lecture. 

 

My earliest memory of my father is of sitting next to him while he darned socks, in the days when people actually darned them.  And this was no easy feat.  My father was well over six feet and extremely large.  His hands were enormous, yet he would take this tiny little needle and repair a whole bundle of socks.  

 

He was also good, by the way, at making buttonholes, hemming seams, and doing all kinds of major clothing repairs on the Singer sewing machine we had stored in the closet.  I could go on about his excellent cooking, about how he collected buckets full of crabapples and turned them into delicious jelly in the summer, but I can only make this blog so long! 

 

My parents had a modern marriage in the 60s and 70s way before it actually existed.  My Mom had a full time job and worked when no other mothers I knew worked.  She would march to work every morning with her hair cut severely short wearing a polyester pants suit.  When her granddaughter asked her on a visit, "Why don't you bake brownies the way my other Grandma does?" my Mom responded, "I am not your brownie baking Grandma!"  My Mom took college classes, attended plays and operas, wrote poetry and published short stories throughout her old age.

 

With parents like this, how could I possibly advocate for the assignment of custody based on traditional gender roles?

 

The first reason is that these children came out of my body.  I risked my life and my wellbeing in order to have these children. 

 

In particular, after my first child I had damage to my reproductive organs that was extensive, consisting of both severe internal and external tearing and bleeding.  Sorry to gross you out, if that's what I've done.  I'm also squeamish talking about these things, but still facts are facts.  I had to wait three hours for the surgeon on call to make it to the hospital to care for me.  Afterwards, it took a considerable amount of time to recover. 

 

Subsequently, when I had the two additional children, things did not get better for me.  This means that I have physical damage to my body that is irreparable.  I did have surgery three years ago, but this could only repair so much, and the expectation is that it will require follow up work later on and that I will never fully heal. 

 

So every day that I get up I have physical problems that have resulted from my pregnancies which a man will never have to face in order to have children. 

 

Now, I am not saying I regret these children in any way.  In fact, every day I wake up I thank God for the wonderful children that I have.  I am only saying, that before any custody evaluator or GAL thinks about taking them from me, they should consider the price I've paid for them. 

 

And, of course, it doesn't just end there. 

 

What about the years of breastfeeding that I devoted myself to so that the children would be physically and emotionally healthy.  That adds up to at least four years of breastfeeding.  That's like a decade in my life during which time I was either pregnant or breastfeeding. 

 

Over and above that, can any of you ladies reading this blog recall when your body became your own again, when the kids stopped spontaneously jumping on your lap when they needed reassurance, when they stopped banging on the door nonstop when you tried to take a shower, when they stopped reaching out for you and hugging you at will, when they stopped jumping up and down asking you to pick them up--about years, I would say, and we have the ratty clothing and miserable hair cuts to show for it. 

 

This is a feat of giving in order to create a family that a man never has to consider providing. 

 

What shocks me, then, under these circumstances is that any court, any GAL, any custody evaluator could ever have only observed a hair's breadth difference between my ex and me when it came to the decision on custody. 

 

So why did it end up this way? 

 

Because I don't think anyone involved in the custody recommendation thought that this kind of information was important.  Our world is still very much a man's world, and so who even thinks to ask questions like that.  Yet these are very basic and fundamental questions that should be considered. 

 

For example, during the entire time that the kids were young, I never once saw my ex change a diaper. 

 

In the fourteen years that we were going to the pediatrician, my ex maybe saw the doctor two or three times. 

 

So since when did it turn out that he should be the one to get custody?  Because he takes good pictures?  

 

I have days when I think that men should have no involvement in custody issues whatsoever because they are simply clueless.  They have no idea what is going on with their own children, I can assure you, and then they go out making judgments on mothers in custody battles when they have no idea what being a mother is all about. 

 

My Dad was a lot different in so many ways, as I have said.  But he had a demanding job and he often had very late hours.  It was still my Mom who took the job that made her more available and that continues to happen nowadays for most people. 

 

So my Dad was not there to hear about my day when I came home from school; he did not instruct me on how to tie my shoe laces; he did not come to my room and check my temperature when I was sick and had to stay home from school; he did not walk me up the street to join the Scouting group at our neighborhood school, or sell girl scout cookies; he did not put my hair up in individual curlers when I was upset and then tell me how beautiful I looked once my hair was all done. 

 

Kids need their Moms, and anyone who thinks otherwise is nuts!