Divorced parents, bad guys
Another chapter refers to the other kind of parents, the separated parents, those who leave everything to their partner and still keep their children. These parents imagine, conceive and cradle their young; make them breakfast every day; share the first day of class; and the bedtime story with them. When the marriage is suddenly dissolved, they get to visit the home they built and they soon get to have another male figure as a surrogate parent: the mother's new partner.
The dad feels he helped build a nest and then had to leave forever and nobody cares about his feelings. It is said that men do not cry and perhaps they do because some are so sad that they would form a tsunami if they cried all together. If you do not believe this, take the following aspects into consideration.
Long ago or in the past generations, the children were of the women, who stayed at home and breed them, while the father worked all day and then went to play pool or to the bar with his friends. He gets along very well with his children when they meet.
In the 60s and 70s, people began to learn that if the wife was pregnant, it was like they were both pregnant and he was co-star in this whole process and also after birth, for life. Thus, some men had to bite the bullet and participate to the birth and they were encouraged to cut the umbilical cord and give their babies their first bath. They learned to change diapers, prepare bottles and food and give comfort to the infant at night, if they mourned every three hours. They dared to whisper lullabies to their baby or they would wake them up with that other Pinto song, saying that the rooster fell asleep and did not sing that morning.
In short, they realized that work was a pleasure that had been lost for generations and that the concept of masculinity had a significant page turned and it was time to change for the better.
Of course, the femininity was also changing at the same time. Thus, this new human male was in love with his children and his fatherly role, which was what family was all about and which perhaps healed the wounds from childhood. Then, they experienced a dramatic second lesson: divorcing their partner no longer consists of just breaking the link with a woman, but it exposes them to a much greater pain.
Parents forever?
No film shows the reality better (perhaps no other) than Mrs. Doubtfire (Father Of All Time), this being the drama and feeling of a man having to leave the family home because his wife no longer loved him. He can no longer live with his children he adores.
In the famous film, Robin Williams plays the beleaguered father not to accept the inability to watch his children constantly and since the character is an actor, he ends up posing as a lady of a higher age, Mrs. Doubtfire, who becomes the nanny of his own children.
The same happens in everyday life beyond the details and nuances surrounding the breakage of a marriage. It is very common that the children remain under the custody of the mother, law and culture automatically considering her more popular than the male parent in the absence of evidence to the contrary.
“A parent knows, even before separating, that they need to be times in the life of their children, although they can no longer witness their growth or share activities with them. Then, they eventually notice their physical changes in voice, every week or fortnight or when they can reconnect with them. Their successes and failures will be an anecdote and one feels that they slowly turn into a kind of uncle if they just come and visit and they end up being afraid of the child not missing them anymore,” says Santiago, 53 years old, a teacher in Buenos Aires, who has been separated for ten years and with two children.
The current notes on these issues are usually devoted to describing the delicate situation in which the boys are, who must adapt to a new reality or focus on women's civil rights if their partner does not provides the food required by law.
But this is a more unique story.
Children of divorced parents
“There is no doubt that the link is broken, no matter how good the weekly meeting is since the link is not established everyday”, ensures SÁnchez AndresÉs, a clinical psychologist for 33 years, professor and creator of the Career Counseling ( Psychological Consultant) in the country. He adds:
“In our society, people believe it is the woman or the child who suffers more and forget that the man loses his home, continuity, making them feel sad. My experience as a therapist has put me in front of many men who cry, who are distressed at having to see their children once a week, in a sort of guided tour if he has a proper place to host them and must then return to the mother’s home.”
Moreover, there are men who delay the separation or do not get separated, but live together in appalling conditions in the couple. They stay for 7 or 8 years without any kind of sexual bond with their wife and they sustain a relationship in terms of not losing the interaction with their children.
For her part, Maria Ruth, systemic Gestalt psychologist with 20 years of hospital experience, seems to agree with her colleague and says: “I see them suffer in the office, leave their furniture, home, smells, plants and go away because all that is history and it produces grief. But what do they do when it comes to their sustainable life”.
When the father or uncle feels the distance
Eduardo, accountant of Villa Crespo, 3 children, bank employee: “We had some relationship problems, which were not very serious in my opinion. One night, my wife told me I had to go, she threw me out,” he said when he spoke to his attorney.
“To avoid greater problems, I spend the night at my parents’ house and I went home the next day. When trying to enter, I realized that she had changed the lock, so I attended, she responded insulting me and refused to allow me to be with my children”.
Eduardo is part of another reality, as there are thousands of parents who cannot even see their children regularly. Jose Maria Bouza, founder of Apadeshi in 1988 (PTA away from his children) says: “Separating without the possibility of having contact with the children is a more serious case, because there is an obstruction on the link produced by the partner and the father is marginalized in society, looking for casual work, leaving aside everything and focusing on a court action, because he thinks things will be resolved quickly and this is not so in our country. This is all like a mirage in the mountains: the climber believes to see the top right there, close and later finds out that it is further or that they can never reach it.”
Dad is not an idol for the judges
Jose Maria Bouza, who confesses he only paid about 15,000, thinks that: “a court which raises a question of ownership should assess who is the fittest, not who has the proper gender. They should judge by their psychological conditions, the career development and the time available and especially by their attitude towards their partner about this issue. But the mother is culturally preferred, even ignoring the fact that some mothers have had suicide attempts, psychiatric hospitalizations or even that they do not even want to really take care of the kids.”
For her part, Luis Maria Assaneo, founder of Apradim (group of professionals who lecture on topics such as Enigmas of Manliness, Couples in Crisis, etc.), psychologist and professor at the Centre Two of psychological support and member of the Freudian School in Buenos Aires, agrees with Bouza and says: “laws that automatically give custody of children to mothers are obsolete, the father’s possibility to parent has evolved and it used to be the woman who stayed at home, while now both of them work outside the home.”
Ms. Maria Ruth extends the concept: “the mother has a bow gun in the first four years of life that she must not cut, but then both are capable of exerting the role of mother-father or father-mother and the kids could choose to be with one of them.”
Is there hope, father?
Sanchez says: “There are new psychological trends and it does not matter who does what, when and so on, as long as they can take care of the children. There is no such thing as why, who, when and where anymore, the most frequent question being how. These streams provide the ability to think in a concrete way and the family, the ex, the kids, the family reunions do not make the thing so individualistic.”
Maria advises: “ The tendency to be achieved should be that the family recurs to a break, regains homeostasis, finds a new equilibrium, but all tend to do that and everything is in order after a time of crisis. The Dad has to go, he expect a large internal piece of work to overcome this cut or break and it may be time for a re-learning, as there are parents who discover their parentage skills just when they leave.”
Jose Maria Bouzas suggests that the dads that have no children need to change and prepare the nest, becoming better for when they stick the leap and join the other in this adventure.”
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