Eight Months On

Posted by MilhouseDivided in self improvement, positive thinking, my story, moving on

So into the Blogosphere I go, not something I've ever done before. It feels strange but I have to start doing something with these thoughts, even if it is just talking to myself.

Because it is now over eight months since I moved out and it is not getting any better, or any easier, or feeling anything other than just horribly wrong.

Eight months since I moved out from our house to a flat. The usual story. A Dad Flat. Sad Dad. Dad in a Flat, the world's least funny sitcom, now starring Weekend Dad. Out of the family home, our home, full of noise and kids and dog and gerbils, to this. Listless evenings in front of National Geographic, another seconds to disaster, another megastructure.

I do my best at weekends, with my ever increasing collection of family attraction flyers, a fridge full of chocolate and inflatable beds, but Weekend Dad is just not the same. I don't want to be Entertainer Dad, spending money I haven't got, I just want to be around them in a normal way, with their homework and routines and friends and silly chatter and that's now so difficult.

I don't know how to be natural with the kids, or even what is natural any more. I'm constantly on edge with them, fretting, wondering what to say, what to do, what to eat, desperate for Dad time to be a good time.

I've avoided the golden arches but I know I am McDad, and that those wildlife and conservation parks are really zoos.

And I can barely even bring myself to look at my wife, my ex-wife to be, this sudden stranger. Thirteen years, three wonderful kids and then game over. There's not even any third party involved, which somehow makes it worse.

Well that's a good self-pitying start. Time to blog off.

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Vail said:

October 11, 2007
		MillhouseDivided, You are still thinking of yourself as half a partnership. Now, here's the blunt advice. You can be described as an ex-husband but that is not what you are, you are a FATHER first and a man second. What do father's do apart from carry out the instructions of the mother? They teach, they support, they pay attention to what their children want to talk about, they play games with them, they care and they take care. That's what the children are used to and that's what they'll notice. It won't affect them that much that you're living somewhere else. So see this time as an opportunity to do those things you always wanted to do with your children and look around you with your eyes open to new horizons! Best of luck!