A few evenings ago and several hundred miles away I said goodbye to a little boy. He hugged me along time as I knelt there before the doorway to the place where he would have to stay. “I love you Daddy. I love you” he said over and over again. I told him that I loved him too and that I would call him soon. And then, as I stepped back, still whispering words of encouragement and love, he stood facing me in the doorway, his baseball cap on his head and tears in his eyes. “Goodbye Daddy. Goodbye, goodbye…”
The next day having returned home to a quiet house filled with his toys, books, games, his Bruins mug on the table next to mine, I glanced at the front page of a newspaper. “Gaining a Scholar, Losing a Child,” said the headline in pleasantly amused and sentimental fashion. It told of the pangs and confusion of parents whose teen-aged children decamp to college. It prominently quoted one mother, a professor no less, who stated quite seriously that she had been dreading this day of leave taking since her child was five years old. How privileged to be able to afford and expend such grief on a small and natural passage.
But give the situation its due. Even natural rites of passage that ripen and occur in their own good time bring pain with them, even when pleasures attend. The problem is not in giving attention to such natural separations, the problem is in ignoring those that are unnecessary, forced, brutally harsh and, often, damaging.
I am referring again, as I have in the past, to the needless pain inflicted on parents and children separated from each other by the routine malfunctioning of our misnamed family courts. Every year during the past decade and more, nearly one and a half million children are separated from one of their parents, almost always their father by divorce courts who don’t understand that single parenthood (in these cases aptly and grimly termed “custody”) is a tragedy to be avoided and lamented, not a situation to be wantonly and needlessly created.
Consider the following research findings that describe the feelings of children forced by family courts to endure repeated lengthy absences from one of their parents. “The most striking response among the six-eight year olds was their pervasive sadness. The impact of separation from the father appeared to be so strong that the children’s usual coping strategies did not hold up. Crying and sobbing were common, especially among the boys.”
It is sobering enough to read and reflect on such findings. To experience their living presence is agony, to stand in a doorway and watch and listen to your child cry for you, plead to stay with you and yet to be forbidden to provide the love and company for which he cries. That is a horror no parent should suffer. But that is a horror routinely meted out to millions of parents and children by the systematic and cold-blooded brutality of our courts.
How ironic that courts continue to justify this bureaucratic abuse what is called the ‘tender years’ doctrine, the Victorian notion that a child of less than ten or twelve years primarily needs his mother. The court, like the welfare system considers the father to be superfluous. As common sense and the research cited above indicates, someone forgot to tell the kids that their father’s are of secondary importance.
But as in war or terrible illness, or as a person learns to use a crippled limb, one adjusts. You know how to drive, you know the way to the motel so you drive there. You’re hungry and tired so you eat, shower and try to sleep. In the morning you take yourself to the airport, the shuttle, the flight; another terminal, the car. The clouds and tunnel and toll-way pass. There’s your driveway, your house, the rooms still filled with the absent life. Baseball cards on a table; a Lego half built on the floor; pajamas crumpled on his pillow…
But the little soul and heart and sweet face that’s absent hasn’t gone to college, only to second grade and to a far-away apartment where he doesn’t want to be; where he’s kept against his will. There is no freedom of choice here…
Perhaps it has become quaint to wonder how we will be judged by those who come after us. Perhaps we have grown too sophisticated to believe or care much about the future, to care much more than throwing a few slogans at it. Too sophisticated to care about more than who’s got power at a certain place and time.
But I know that a society that routinely torments the innocent and that sanitizes its abuse with legalisms is being judged. The tragedy is that the transforming judgment is being earned by children crying at a door.
[Middlesex News, Wednesday August 31, 1994]