Browsing Tag

dad

Binders, Guest Posts, motherhood

In My House

September 22, 2015

By Stephanie Land

When we moved to Montana, Jamie stopped calling Mia for months. We had our own place in this old house next to downtown and we’d go for walks to the park and the river. Then he called to say he’d moved to Portland and had a new job which meant regular paychecks. He said a judge would make me move to Portland if I tried to get more child support. He said the money they garnished from his pay and sent to me kept him from living his life the way he wanted. It kept him from pursuing his dream of opening a bicycle shop. It kept him from cross country bike trips. He made over a thousand a week and I got seventy-five. He called and said he couldn’t afford her visit that summer. He couldn’t figure out how to pay for childcare and feed her and pay support and pay rent. He’d told her he’d buy a big girl bike and teach her how to ride on two wheels. The training wheels stayed on her bike at home. I couldn’t convince her to try.

When we moved into our new apartment last fall, I gave her the big bedroom. She hung pictures of her dad all over the walls. She’d done this in the past, hanging the one in the red frame in particular. The one where we’re both smiling in our hooded sweatshirts. He has his arm around me and I’m leaning in. Mia’s sitting in my lap, looking at us. I might be imagining it, but I can see the uncertainty on her four-month-old face. We’d just come from another useless counseling appointment where Jamie confessed he wasn’t attracted to me. He said it like that, out loud, in front of another person. He said he kept seeing this girl riding her bike around town. The girl was skinny and shorter and had a style of dress that he liked and he wanted to be with her. Not me. “The girl on the bike” would be his new phrase. As in “you’re not the girl on the bike.” As in “I want the girl on the bike.” I’d leave the picture where Mia hung it for a while before I moved it back to a slightly hidden somewhere by her bed. Continue Reading…

Binders, feminism, Guest Posts

The Man in My House

June 23, 2015

By Teri Carter

The first thing he shows me is his ID badge, his authenticity.  The badge hangs around his neck on a new blue lanyard but the ID itself is hidden inside a thick plastic case with white spots where his eyes are supposed to be.  He holds up the badge.  “I’m showing you my badge,” he almost whispers.  And when I don’t acknowledge the badge, don’t acknowledge that he is who he says he is, he holds it higher, closer to my face.  “This is my badge, see.” And I say yes, yes I see it, yes I see you, sure, come on in, even though all I can really make out is the worn plastic case.  The evil-seeming, white, rubbed out, ghost spots for his eyes.  How many times, I wonder, do I let a strange man — a man I don’t know, a man I’m not sure about, feel odd about, a man who strikes me as not-right-to-be-here-with-me-alone – into my house?

I am reading The Burning by Jane Casey.  The story of woman detective after a serial killer.  I have not read a book like this in more than 20 years, and I still remember the exact moment, the exact night, I knew I could no longer read books like this. I was in my bed in my apartment under a flowered navy blue bedspread.  It was after midnight.  The lamp beside me cast a round shadow on the ceiling above as I read the true crime story of Jeffrey MacDonald murdering his family.  I remember thinking, ‘what dad butchers his entire family?”  I remember setting Fatal Vision down, forever unfinished, and turning out the light.  And sometime that following week, I buried that book in the bottom of my trash and took the trash out.  I could not read it, but even more I could not even have the story of this man in my house. Continue Reading…

Guest Posts, healing, parenting

How My Father Taught Me I Was Not Beautiful

June 7, 2015

beauty-hunting-jen-logo-black1-300x88By Heidi Paulson

My parents split up when I was nine. A tender age where everything is up in the air anyway, from your laugh, to your smile to the way you walk in the world. A very pliable age.

It wasn’t long before my Dad starting looking around for women to date. All kids want is for their parents to be happy. My brother and I watched as Dad would ogle women in the grocery store, say certain things and join social groups to be around more possibilities. Before the divorce, I hadn’t thought much about attraction, dating and how people actually got together. You have your Mom and you have your Dad, and they walk around the house and feed you.

It was back in the 80’s. The internet was just a figment of Al Gore’s imagination. The only way to meet people was at work, church, through friends or by writing a personal ad in the Willamette Week newspaper. We did not attend church, so Dad wrote an ad. I remember when the letters came pouring in. Dad sat with me on the couch and showed them to me. All interested women responding to his classified.

It is here where the damage began. He would shuffle through the letters; the ones with the photos were kept the others thrown away. Then the next tier of decision making began. I am sure he did read the letters as a stroke of his ego; however the next cut would be made by looks. “She’s pretty, we will keep her.” It went on and on. He started to date, and meet these women. Sometimes, if he liked them very much they would come and meet us.

A pattern soon emerged. Blondes. Tall blondes, that were thin. It was his preference. Mom had been blonde when they got together, bleached hair like straw, but blonde. In good shape from tennis.

I came along after a number of years. Dark, dark brunette hair, blue eyes that turned to hazel. Actually I have the coloring of my Dad. My Mom thought I was beautiful, she loved the contrast of my pale skin and dark hair, “My Snow White,” she said. Your Mom is supposed to tell you that you hung the moon, so I put it aside as just another reference point.

Dad’s years of chasing blondes wore on me to where I could not even look at blonde women without feeling inferior. Ugly. I had no blonde friends, as I instantly felt like the ugly stepsister of the group. I was also petite, so the vision of the tall blonde, blue eyed women was the polar opposite of what I was. And in his eyes that was beauty. No room for someone like me to be “Beautiful.” Continue Reading…

anti-bullying, Fatherhood, Guest Posts, Men, parenting

What Happens When a Guy Gets Bullied For Years? The Dadvocate.

February 5, 2015

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By Andy Malinski.

Oftentimes, men intimidate me.

I’ve spent a lot of time very uncomfortable around men. A group of women makes me feel much more at ease than a group of men. Why? The surface answer is that I’m not the typical guy. Although I enjoy a baseball or hockey game, I’m not a big sports fan and don’t follow any teams of any sport; I much prefer music and theater (and even when it comes to music, I’ll take Beethoven any day over any rap artist). I’ve taught my wife terms like valance and duvet and Mirepoix.

The deeper answer is that I’ve experienced some intense bullying in my 35 years and so my hope, through The Dadvocate, is to reach out to men and help establish healthy ways to express emotion and bond with wife and baby. Fearful about having a boy who might, someday, have to endure what I did in grade school, our midwife asked me, “Why wouldn’t the world want another you?” That’s a big motivator, right there, to do all I can for him, for my family, and to try and reach out to others with what I have experienced and learned from over my years.

Bullying started for me around 1st grade.  At that point it was the “fatso” name-calling on the playground.  When I was in 4th grade, I was out riding my bike one afternoon enjoying a beautiful New Hampshire afternoon when a group of bullies from school approached me.  They destroyed my bike, throwing pieces of it into the woods as I stood there, helpless, not knowing what to do.  Once they left, laughing, and were out of sight, I picked up all I could and made my way home, holding back my tears as long as I could, carrying a wheel and a seat, scared more about having to tell my parents that my bike was broken than I had been bullied.

Jen Pastiloff is the founder of The Manifest-Station. Join her in Tuscany for her annual Manifestation Retreat. Click the Tuscan hills above. No yoga experience required. Only requirement: Just be a human being.

Jen Pastiloff is the founder of The Manifest-Station. Join her in Tuscany for her annual Manifestation Retreat. Click the Tuscan hills above. No yoga experience required. Only requirement: Just be a human being.

Continue Reading…

death, Grief, Guest Posts

Eventually, We All Become Members of the Dead Dad Club.

November 19, 2014

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By Erika D. Price.

Maybe there really is a Jungian super consciousness that our minds all float upon, like ice atop a still liquid lake. Maybe it’s just that some ideas are so obvious that everybody has them. Whatever the reason, I keep running into other people, other women specifically, who speak of their membership to the Dead Dad Club.

The idea first occurred to me very shortly after my dad died. I was eighteen, living in the freshman dorms at The Ohio State University. He died randomly of unchecked diabetes after a two-year period of mutual estrangement.

The whole thing came as a shock, but an easily buried one. I kept it a secret from everyone around me, except for my then-boyfriend, who was on a Valentine’s Day date with me the moment I got the news. I went upstate for the funeral, I invited a handful of childhood friends, none of whom came, I got drunk and crawled into bed with my little sister, I went back to the dorms, I didn’t miss a day of class, I didn’t miss a day of work, I said nothing. I felt so much. I cried so little.

A few weeks later, a girl down the hall lost her father. Heart attack. I had met the guy; he had a pleasant, square face with handsome features and rich bronzed skin. Their relationship was good. A widespread email told everyone in the dorm of her troubles. We were all encouraged to go to the funeral, to give the girl our regards. People rose to the occasion. She took a few weeks off.

I resented the massive embrace that she received and I had not, even though it was my fault for not telling anybody. I resented that people were warm and sympathetic to her. I resented that my boyfriend forgot about the death in no time flat. I resented, even, that her relationship with her father was healthy. But I could not hold it against her for long. After all, she was a member of the Dead Dad Club.  Continue Reading…