DAY 1
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GREG DERR photos/The Patriot Ledger
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| Emily (not her real name), a 17-year-old from the South Shore, says the the child support check her father sent for $2.31 ‘‘broke my heart.”. |
One child would rather have her dad than money
The Patriot Ledger
Emily is excited about starting her senior year of high school, but the thrill of her upcoming prom and graduation is tempered by her fear that one important person will not share in those special moments: her father.
“My dad has already missed so much of my life, and now I know he won’t be around for my prom or my graduation,” said Emily, 17, whose name has been changed to protect her privacy. “It hurts so much.”
Experts say when parents don’t pay child support, that lack of responsibility often translates into poor relationships with their children. Children feel abandoned, angry and unloved.
In Emily’s case, her father made sporadic child support payments, but went months at a time without sending any money. A week before Christmas, Emily’s mom showed her the child support check her father sent. It was made out for $2.31.
“That broke my heart,” said Emily, a South Shore teen.
It was during that time of on-again off-again payments that her father began to drift away from his three kids. At one point, he told a judge he wasn’t seeing his children because he didn’t want to deal with his ex-wife’s demands for money.
“When he picked up the kids, I would say, ‘You’re three weeks behind. The kids need food,’” Emily’s mother said. “He didn’t want to hear it, so he used the money as an excuse not to show up.”
Emily’s mother took her father to court a number of times for failing to pay, and when a judge finally threatened to put her father in jail last year, he began making regular payments.
But Emily’s struggle has always been more about the loss of a father in her life than the loss of his money.
Emily was in first grade when her parents split up.
At first, she and her brothers saw their dad weekly, she said.
But then her father got engaged, and the kids weren’t invited to the wedding. After her father had a baby with his new wife, he stopped showing up as often.
The kids had only a pager number for him and didn’t know his address or phone number. When Emily paged him, he didn’t return her calls.
“He started really backing away when I was about 11 or 12,” said Emily, who has been in therapy for four years. “Every once in a while, I’ll get sad about it and try to page him, but I’ll get no response.”
Every night before bed, Emily looks at a favorite picture of her father - a shot of a beaming dad holding a tiny, beautiful newborn daughter. On Emily’s 17th birthday, she wrote him a heartbreaking letter, pleading with him to get back in touch. She has never sent it.
“It’s my 17th birthday, and my dad is nowhere to be found,” she wrote. “I don’t want any presents and money. I just want to know my dad still loves me.”
It is heart-wrenching for Emily’s mother to watch what her ex-husband’s disappearance has done to her children. Her sons have reacted with anger. When her ex-husband called on one of her son’s birthdays after a long absence, the 16-year-old said, “I don’t have a dad,” and hung up the phone.
Emily went through an angry period as well when she called her father “the sperm donor,” but lately she is more sad than angry.
“The boys had a hard time, but they adjusted better than my daughter,” Emily’s mother said. “She always idolized him like a little girl does. She said, ‘If I give up on him, I’m like him.’”
Dina Gerdeman may be reached by clicking here.
