This post kind of serves as an open letter to people “back home” who don’t understand why I’m away from my kids. It will also address those of you who haven’t known me long, and who ask, “Why’d you have to move to a different state (MI) instead of living where your children are (FL)?”
Truthfully, I’m not the only dad who’s been torn from his children via the Perfect Storm. So this is a good opportunity for me to explain the steps that can lead a man to leave his children unwillingly.
STEP 1: The Layoff And Divorce
Like many other dads, I went through a layoff during a time when economic situations made finding work very difficult. I was also living separately from my wife, and she was in the process of divorcing me.
Times were tough and my wife’s employment wasn’t sufficient to cover summertime daycare expenses for the kids. So when I was without employment, she asked me to move back in with her so I could care for the children while also looking for work. (Yes, this moving-back-in situation does happen to divorcing couples when times are bad enough!)
STEP 2: The Threat Of Homelessness
My wife told me one night that she and the kids were moving to a house her family owned. She claimed she couldn’t afford rent, and that she and my kids were moving to a place that would be free.
My wife didn’t want me living with her (since she was divorcing me) and her family’s offer to live in the house they owned was only for her and my children. And the house was almost 2 hours away from where she and I were living. My response to this news was to beg.
STEP 3: The Begging that Falls on Deaf Ears
Although I’m a copywriter by profession, I asked her to let me get a fast-food or janitorial job to at least cover the rent so I could still be with my kids. (This was also a brief time in my life where I was not freelancing.) With her income and mine combined, we could at least stay in that house until I landed employment in my field. But my begging did nothing to change her mind.
STEP 4: Choosing Between Two Horrible Things
I was asked to stop wasting my breath. Her decision had been made, and her advice to me was that I should live with friends. So my choices were:
Horrible Thing A: To live in poverty as a vagabond (with no employment, no money, no home,) living from house to house and family to family; eating other people’s food and living off other people’s utilities; using their computers to look for work; using their cars and gas money to drive to interviews, and taking up space in their homes.
This did not seem like a feasible option for me – an almost 40-year-old marketing guy living in homelessness and inconveniencing everyone else who would have had to take me in. Possibly for years to come. In my eyes, Horrible Thing B was my only option.
Horrible Thing B: To move away from my children altogether in order to stay with family members as I looked for work.