Father Apart

Being a separated father means facing up to difficult emotions as well as responsibilities and changed circumstances. Paul Wolf-Light offers a personal perspective.

"Daddy, why don't you live with me and mummy anymore?" I remember my daughter Circe asking me this question for the first time in late 1979 not long after her mother Ann and I separated. She was three and a half at this time, and at regular intervals over the next four years or so she would repeat the question. Often she would ask with a sense of sadness, occasionally with anger and sometimes out of what seemed a simple curiosity to understand why we separated. From Circe's perspective Ann and I were inextricably connected as her mum and dad and therefore we belonged together. Separation couldn't change that and she had a need both to make sense of how and why it happened as well as to question why it should continue to be so.

I had always considered it important for Circe to be able to talk about our separation whenever she wanted, so that her feelings and opinions about it could be acknowledged and accepted. Yet I did not find it easy to listen to her because her feelings triggered so many of my own. On the one hand I felt guilt and loss which I found painful and hard to bear, whilst on the other I felt anger and a wish to blame someone else, usually Ann. Aggressive and angry feelings have usually been easier for me to acknowledge and express, but here they felt inappropriate and destructive, certainly not in the best interests of Circe. And accusations and blame could only put her in the invidious position of feeling split loyalties, in addition to creating a false and painful image of one 'good' and one 'bad' parent.

Whatever my feelings I was clear that I did not want Circe to feel that she had to take sides. Ann and I were the most important people in her life and it was hard enough for her that her family had broken up without feeling she was being asked to defend or support one parent against another. Yet to really support her in this meant not only my letting go of my wish to find fault with and blame Ann, nor just my being honest and open about my own shortcomings. Necessary though both of these were, they did not go far enough.

To really support Circe required me to remain in touch with the love I had felt for Ann, to see her as loveable and loving. After five years of being together in what had been a loving relationship, that basic love was still there deep down. However, in the short term at least it would have been easier and more comfortable to hide it beneath an attitude of 'because it hasn't worked out there couldn't have been much there anyway', enabling it to be dismissed as I focused upon a new relationship.

But Circe experienced both Ann and myself as loveable and I needed to support that, particularly in what must have been a very insecure time for her. To do so touched more deeply the guilt and loss inside myself. In order to accept Circe's feelings I had to accept my own, including those I felt uncomfortable with. I could not just cut off and walk away from them. I had to maintain a loving connection to Ann within myself, and moreover put this into practice in my external relationship with her as a co-parent.

This would appear to me as the greatest difficulty and challenge for parents who separate. If we recognise our children's need and love for both parents we have to accept our separated partner as loveable and of value. Yet whether the one who left or the one who has been left, accepting our ex-partner as loveable, particularly in the early days of separation, is inevitably going to bring us more in touch with our feelings of loss and guilt at the failure of the relationship.

Furthermore, we have to do this in the context of maintaining some level of external contact with each other as parents on a regular basis. This in turn is likely to reinforce and intensify such feelings as well as giving relatively frequent opportunities for conflict and recriminations. Unsurprising perhaps that so many separations result in ongoing acrimony or complete severance of contact.

However, when we as parents avoid our own feelings of loss and guilt, either by denial or blaming, it is our children who most suffer the consequences. Not only is their own loss made greater by our devaluing, whether through denial or defamation, the love that had originally brought them into the world and nurtured them. In addition their response is often to burden themselves with the guilt that we have refused to accept and work through.

For us men in particular, feelings of loss and guilt as well as those of inadequacy and failure are often hard to tolerate. It is easier to be angry and blaming, for to feel vulnerable and inadequate goes against many of our cultural beliefs about what it means to be a man. Which, as these vulnerable feelings are painful and challenging in themselves, gives us a ready excuse and justification for avoiding and denying them. Guilt then gets turned into resentment, loss and acknowledged failure become self pity and blame, grief is overwhelmed by anger, and love and responsibility get replaced by a focus upon power and control, status and rights.

Seen in this light it is perhaps unsurprising that much of the focus of men's pressure groups around children and childcare seem to be upon issues of access and maintenance after separation. The emphasis of these groups seems to be one of parental rights rather than parental responsibility and the tone is often angry and resentful rather than sad and remorseful. Turning the issue of parental care into one of a battleground of rights in which the mother becomes an enemy who needs defeating and punishing is one way of keeping our own feelings of guilt and loss at bay.

Yet for our children's sakes as well as our own, we need to have the courage to accept these uncomfortable feelings alongside the acknowledgement that our ex-partner is still loveable and loving. Separation is a painful process and at one level is always an acknowledgement of failure. Whatever the circumstances, the result is that our children have to experience loss and heartbreak, for to them both their parents belong together. If we can acknowledge this loss and turn our guilt into remorse rather than resentment and self pity, we not only give value to the relationship between mother and father (a relationship that is still important to the children), but we also mirror our children's feelings of loss and take the burden of guilt off of their shoulders and back onto our own where it belongs.

It is not only our children who can benefit from this. Maintaining a connection with the loveable nature of our separated partner whilst acknowledging our own feelings helps create a more solid and intimate foundation for mutual support. And as parents we need to support each other if we are to genuinely support our children. Although the circumstances of who left whom and how will likely affect each partner differently in terms of the intensity and emphasis of feeling, both are likely to experience the same range of emotions around separation.

The ability to empathise with each other and recognise mutual struggles, however painful initially, in the long term can lead to a relationship that is supportive, respectful and healing. Separation itself, whilst clearly hurtful and difficult, is often made more damaging by the subsequent behaviour of the parents towards each other. Taking responsibility for limiting this secondary damage is essential, for our relationships as parents will continue for as long as our children remain children.

Ann and I were fortunate in that we both shared the view that Circe should not be used as a battleground for settling our own differences and conflicts. Plus we had always been able to communicate with each other. So as living together became harder and our differences greater, we could talk about our struggles, not always constructively but with a degree of honesty. In some respects it was probably easier when we first separated for me to maintain feelings of love for Ann, albeit at times they could get buried beneath resentment and selfishness, because I was the one who left and initially found another relationship. I did not have to experience the same degree of rejection that she did. But by the same token, because I had been the one who left, it would have been easier to cut off and deny any real love because then there would be less sense of failure and guilt. Facing separation honestly is not easy for either partner.

However, I still found myself having to face my own vulnerability to rejection. Not rejection from Ann but from Circe, an expression of her outrage at my leaving. There was a particular pivotal moment when this occurred which in hindsight I think defined the nature of our future relationship. It took place not long after Ann and I had separated, when I went to visit Circe one evening, before I had a place where she could stay with me at weekends. I cannot remember what triggered her reaction but I can still vividly see her completely enraged and shouting that she never wanted to see me and wanted me to go.

My response to any clear rejection from anyone in the past had always been to simply turn around and leave, with the underlying attitude of "if you don't want me I don't need you". Every impulse in me at that moment wanted to do just that. Yet despite this intense urge to leave, I knew that I had to stand there and accept her rage, not get angry back or reject her but listen and quietly make it clear that whatever she said I was not going to leave. In the face of the intensity of her rejection that was one of the hardest things I ever had to do. It all lasted no more than a few minutes and then she simply began sobbing and cried in my arms.

Reflecting on it afterwards, I realised that what intensified the experience for me was that it triggered memories of myself and my own mother. I recognised for the first time that she and I must have been through a similar process but with a different result. I had been brought up by my grandmother during the first fifteen months of my life, which I have no memories of (I only found out when I was twenty). But I was aware throughout my childhood that there was no closeness between me and my mother, there was always a distance and distrust between us even though temperamentally we are very similar. I grew up rejecting and feeling rejected without ever understanding why.

This moment of intense rejection by Circe helped make sense of how this could have come about. At some point, presumably not long after I had returned from my grandmother, it seems likely that I would have rejected my mother with a similar degree of rage that Circe was directing at me. However the reaction of my parents throughout my childhood to any anger directed towards them by any of their children was immediate anger and punishment, often physical. It therefore seems unlikely that my mother would have been willing to tolerate any raging rejection from me and would likely have both punished and rejected me in turn. Although I would have been too young to deal with this in any conscious way, I can see that throughout my childhood I remained rejecting and detached.

Having to deal with this somewhat similar scenario I also felt for the first time I could both understand and feel compassion for my mother. She had also experienced rejection as a child. Her father had left when she was six and she never saw him again throughout the rest of her childhood. In addition to this emotional and physical rejection she had the economic hardship of growing up without a father in the East End of London in the thirties, followed by the war. Plus she constantly had to deal with the fact that her twin brother was always the favourite and was more privileged simply because he was a boy. Her experiences of being rejected had been far greater than mine and I knew how hard it had been for me not to retaliate to Circe's rage by rejecting and punishing her. In addition I had considerably more support during this process than my mother would have had during my early childhood.

But knowing my mother's history was not enough in itself to heal the rejection I had felt. I had known this for years. It was experiencing for myself the intensity of Circe's rejection and my own struggle not to reject her at that moment that made that knowledge meaningful and softened my view of my mother.

The result of this particular experience was that a healing process was initiated affecting not only my relationship to Circe but to my mother. Not that everything became easy or was suddenly transformed. But a subtle shift had taken place, a softening in my heart alongside a hardening of my commitment as a parent. I have always remembered this experience and drawn strength from it on occasions when I have felt most lost or hopeless. Although hard at the time it feels like a blessing now, one which I was to need some years later.

It was six years after my separation from Ann, when I found myself going through the process again. Despite my previous experience, the circumstances of this second separation were more difficult and I found it altogether more painful and challenging. Anita and I had been together less than two months when Iskander was conceived. Within six months it became clear to Anita that I was not the man she wanted to share her life with. So this time I was the one being rejected, and in a relationship that was still too new to have developed a strong and solid foundation of love. To complicate matters further, Anita soon wanted to return to her own country, Germany, now that our relationship was over and she was a mother. It was easier for her to find work there than in London plus she had a larger network of support and friends in Berlin.

With no child we could simply have parted which would have been easier for both of us. But we did have a child which meant we needed to find a new relationship as parents that took account of what Iskander needed, not only what our own wishes might be. In the short term we agreed that Anita and Iskander would live under the same roof as me until he was one year old and that I would be responsible for supporting them financially during this time. After this she would return with Iskander to Berlin.

I wanted to live with Iskander during his first year so as to form a strong relationship with him before he left. But living in the same house as Anita was very hard. It was not only that I had a constant reminder of my rejection but also I had no space to process and heal it. My time was spent predominantly working. This in itself was a situation I was unused to, having worked part time almost all of my adult life : yet at a time I most needed it I could not find part time work that paid enough to support us all and pay maintenance for Circe. With most of the rest of my time taken up with my taking care of Iskander (and Circe too at the weekends), the only time I ever seemed to be alone or resting was when I slept. Because Iskander spent the night with Anita but woke up constantly, she got little sleep and was as exhausted and stressed as I was. For both of us it felt like a struggle to survive and neither of us felt really supported or nourished in the situation.

The consequence for me of the stress and exhaustion was that the time I spent with Iskander during that year often felt fractured and incomplete. Our relationship felt a struggle that demanded an effort of will on my part just to stay present. Whereas he and Anita seemed constantly in tune and connected, I felt like an inadequate substitute intruding on their symbiotic world. So although we did develop a bond, I often felt more of an accessory than an essential part of his life, which was a very different experience to that I had had with Circe. So when Iskander was ten months old and Anita went back to Berlin with him, I felt as much relief as I did sadness.

Anita and I had agreed before they left that I would come to Berlin for five days each month to look after Iskander. I was fortunate that having worked ten months full time I was now able to negotiate a more flexible working arrangement in which I became self employed and earned more. But nonetheless I felt very insecure.

I was afraid that my working circumstances could change at some point which would make it far more difficult for me to see him regularly. And financially, my monthly flights on top of maintenance for both Iskander and Circe meant I was stretched to the limit. Added to this was the fact that when I saw him it would no longer be in my own home where at least I could sleep in my own space. Instead I would be sleeping on the floor of his room in Anita's flat in a foreign country whose language I didn't speak.

Yet hard though it was, in many ways it was better than it had been in London. I had five solid days without working, with no other demands than taking care of him. So although the three week gaps between my visits added to the fractured sense of our relationship, having so many continuous days with no distractions more than compensated. He would still reject me at times which I found difficult and painful to tolerate, but having three weeks space between visits actually made it easier for me to manage this. There were still occasions when I felt resentful towards both him and Anita and in my mind could become blaming towards them for putting me in the situation, but overall I felt grateful that it was still possible to maintain a relationship with Iskander despite all the difficulties. Beneath it all I felt a deep love for him which I was not willing to cast away.

What felt most difficult for me in all this was not so much the rejection but the additional feeling of being irrelevant. There were times when I really wondered why I was making such an effort because I did not seem to be important to Iskander at all. I can imagine that this feeling of being irrelevant is one that many men feel when they become separated, which must make it all the   harder to maintain contact. When the circumstances dictate that most of the caretaking is being done by the mother, the feeling of not really belonging and being an intrusion is likely to be felt not only by the father but by the child towards the father, especially when the child is very young. For in those circumstances the father's presence is an intrusion, an interruption of the routine of home life. It becomes an effort then to develop and maintain an intimate relationship with the child, with heartache and struggle on both sides.

Again the ability to tolerate vulnerability and insecurity is essential to being able to sustain a relationship in such circumstances. Over time the relationship is likely to change but this requires not only commitment but also trust. Trust that it is worthwhile, that it will ultimately be beneficial for the child, and that a closer and more intimate relationship can and will develop.

I think such trust is harder to feel for us as men. Not only are we not prepared for such relationships with our children, which leaves us lacking in the areas of communication skills and emotional breadth and depth (apart from anger which is not what our children need at this time). But the world outside also has little or no trust in us as fathers who can nurture and care for our children. We are still seen predominantly as providers and protectors and all our social institutions, in the commercial, political, educational, health and other spheres, mitigate against us as men playing a more active and intimate part in our children's lives.

However, it needs to be recognised that it is men that hold the vast majority of positions of power in these social institutions. So that it is not women but men who are predominantly responsible for creating and maintaining this situation. How many employers are there that value, let alone support, a man who puts his children first before ambition and career, that will allow him to work fewer hours so he can care for the children after school, that will offer paid paternity leave and encourage him to be with his children when they are babies? Where in the education system are boys taught about parenting, and where are they taught that being a parent is at least as important as having a job and at least as demanding? Where are the politicians lobbying for such changes, where are the fathers lobbying the politicians on these issues, which support a man to be a responsible and caring parent? Where are the fathers and other men lobbying for not only equal pay for women but genuine equality of opportunity for women in the job market, which is a necessity if child care is to be equally shared?

It should be obvious that it is not feminism or women who are primarily responsible for depriving us as men from being fully involved in our children's lives, but the social and corporate institutions that we as men put in place and still control. Until enough of us as men are willing to stand up and challenge these institutions, which in large measure is going to mean challenging other men and in particular other powerful men, such changes as take place are likely to be piecemeal and often down to individuals making their own choices rather than effecting social and political change.

Collectively we as men have rendered ourselves to a large degree irrelevant to everyday childcare, creating a conventional image of men as non-nurturing parents on the periphery of children's lives. This makes the struggle of each individual man to find a close and meaningful relationship with his children all the harder. Separation brings this intensely into focus and how we deal with this is I suspect a major determinant of whether we become more or less involved with our children, and whether we see them as possessions to fight over (our rights rather than their well-being taking precedence) or vulnerable individuals who need love and care from both their parents.  

For myself I think I was luckier than most, being able to negotiate terms of employment that enabled me to spend five days in Berlin each month and being paid enough to make it financially possible. In addition both Ann and Circe, who was eleven by the time Iskander went to Berlin, were supportive. We negotiated a new arrangement that Circe would stay an additional day with me three weeks of the month to compensate my being away in Berlin on the fourth week.

Alongside these practical issues, my previous experience with Circe helped considerably. Because I had always felt involved and included during her earliest years and knew I was important to her, I was better able to trust the importance of what I was doing with Iskander and that my relationship with him would develop over time. It also gave me both greater understanding and some of the strength and emotional depth I needed during those first years of his life.

My relationship with Anita changed during this time as well. During the first couple of years of Iskander's life it had shifted from a resentful acceptance of our situation to a more tolerant and appreciative acknowledgement of each other. But there remained a degree of distance and underlying distrust between us which in times of conflict made communication difficult. We were both hypersensitive to criticism which quickly brought all the old resentments and bitterness to the surface. So communication remained essentially superficial and focused around practical issues most of the time.

But whilst in the short term this was probably helpful and necessary, there came a point when it had to change. For as Iskander got a little older I became concerned about certain aspects of his upbringing. I felt that I had to at least voice these concerns for his sake. Being so far away so much of the time my influence was limited and I felt relatively powerless. The only way I could effect change was through Anita. However difficult it felt, I had to talk with her in such a way that she could at least hear what my concerns were.

Yet this did not feel so easy. Anita was understandably not very receptive to anything she perceived as being critical of her. She felt a degree of guilt about taking Iskander so far away from me as well as some resentment and bitterness towards me for not being 'the right man'. For although she had the advantage of being able to have Iskander living with her, she had the disadvantage of being primarily on her own in terms of daily responsibility for his childcare. She too needed to balance work and childcare and felt alone and unsupported in her daily life.

From my own experience of leaving Ann I could understand her resentment and guilt, yet at the same time I simply felt hurt and angry because I was the one who had been rejected. This could very easily turn into a wish to blame and punish her, which if I allowed it to would affect how I made my concerns known and result in a defensive and hostile response.

The only way through this was for me to ask myself each time whether what I wanted to say was really for his benefit or reflected my wish to blame Anita. I also had to accept that there was only so much I could do. To try to take him away from Anita would have been far more traumatic and damaging to him and ourselves than the difficult situation we were struggling with.

In all these experiences the most difficult part of accepting my powerlessness was that I felt demeaned as a man. Despite having always considered my relationships with women to be ones of equality and mutuality, I felt for the first time a sense of shame about the inequality of power in respect to Iskander. This seemed in part due to my sense of being irrelevant and in part due to Anita as a woman holding what felt like such a degree of power in relation to me as a parent.

This experience of shame triggered in me feelings of rage and despair and I often experienced the urge to destroy or leave rather than to maintain a relationship. Containing, understanding and ultimately healing this rather than acting it out destructively was a considerable task, which without both my previous experience with Ann and my experience of therapy would have been hard to manage.

Some of what I felt I could trace back to my childhood relationship with my mother and the feelings of humiliation and powerlessness I endured there. Yet I was also aware that the fear of ridicule and dismissal by other men played a large part. I experienced this not so much as a fear of individual men's reactions but as a fear of men collectively, the contemptuous judgement of men as a group.

This judgement seemed based on the idea that as a man I should not be less powerful than a woman. Although intellectually this has never been a conscious premise of mine, even as an adolescent, emotionally I suddenly found myself affected in a way I would not have imagined. In addition for the first time in my adult life I actually felt my identity as a man challenged. However it was clear that it was not Anita who was doing this. It was not even other men in reality, but rather my own fantasy of how other men collectively would judge me. And this functioned at an emotional level, not an intellectual one.

Based on my own experience of other men, I suspect that such feelings of shame are common when a man experiences himself as significantly less powerful than a woman, particularly in the context of a close relationship, whether as parents or lovers. This fear of being shamed by men in such circumstances seems to me to be an internal reflection of the fact that historically and in the present men hold considerably more positions of power in the world than women.

Until relatively recently there was a prevailing belief that a man held legitimate authority over a woman in any intimate relationship, such a view being underlined by various laws. Although this belief no longer holds the same degree of legitimacy in the UK today it still carries a great deal of weight. This is reflected overtly in many areas of society, such as in certain interpretations of religious doctrines, and covertly in subtle and not so subtle cultural messages via the media and social institutions, particularly schools.

These social and cultural experiences become internalised on an emotional level as an expectation that as adult men we ought not to have less power than the women in our lives. It becomes part of our collective sense of being men, resulting in our very identities feeling threatened when, on a personal level, this political and institutional inequality is felt to be reversed. Furthermore, this does not have to be consciously believed to be emotionally experienced, as I discovered.

What sustained me in tolerating these feelings was the determination to maintain a meaningful relationship with Iskander that acknowledged my responsibility for him alongside my own needs. Offering him my love and presence as a man in a difficult and insecure situation was more real and therefore ultimately more satisfying than attempting to create and sustain an image of powerful independence and effective absence. In doing so I was redefining my emotional identity as a man, an identity based on love and personal integrity rather than personal power and collective judgement.

In time my feelings of powerlessness decreased as the relationship between Anita and myself became more supportive and understanding. Yet there is a real difference in our relative power regarding our son's upbringing and I have needed to accept this, not as good or bad but simply a consequence of how things are at this time.

All that I have described took place many years ago now. Circe stayed with me every weekend until she was fifteen. Then she decided to live with me permanently and stay with Ann on alternate weekends. She moved into her own flat shortly before she was nineteen and has worked and lived independently ever since. We still have a good relationship and speak on the phone or meet up every few weeks. She is intelligent, warm, beautiful and fiercely independent. Yet she can also be either very aggressive or very resigned, and I sometimes sense a deep insecurity within her that I am sure has its roots in the break up of my relationship with Ann.

With Iskander I managed to travel to Berlin every month for five and a half years, during which time my relationship with him became easier and stronger. This ended when he became old enough to travel to England during his school holidays, staying for two to three weeks at a time. I subsequently traveled to Berlin only once or twice a year. He is bright, caring and has a quiet solidity about him, yet he also can be aggressive or sullen at times. Although he enjoys being in England, particularly since I moved out of London, during the early years of his visits he would feel homesick on occasions and often said he would prefer it if I lived in Berlin.

There have been times that I have sensed a very deep sadness within him that I see as being rooted in the separateness of his parents and the exacerbation of this by our living in two different countries. On those occasions I prefer to acknowledge and feel that with him rather than pretend that everything is alright. This honest acknowledgement of the imperfection and sadness of separation seems a fundamental part of what being a separated parent means.

This is a longer version of the article Father Apart that originally appeared in Achilles Heel issue 17 on Men and Families.

Copyright © Achilles Heel Collective

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