The Chronicles of a Single Dad

The time was now. There was no time to turn back. This was the moment of truth. I had to make the decision on what I was to do. I had to commit. If I second guess, they will know my weakness. I stuck my hand out and took the object that was presented to me. As I stood there with a ball of actual shit in my hand, I knew that I messed up. That was the day that I learned to never, ever trust a two year old when he says, “ I made something for you!”

I started out that year as a normal 23 year old with no responsibilities and no cares in the world. I was a bachelor with no ideals of being a father figure to anyone. What happened next was the time old story of Boy meets Girl. Girl has two children. Boy falls in love with Girl and builds a life with them. Boy and Girl have another child together, named Gibson. They were all happy and had a good life. Boy and Girl get divorced. You know...that time old story.

By the time of the divorce, she and I had been married for five year and together for seven. As far as me and the boys are concerned, we were like three peas in a pod. They were my buddies. When I first came into their lives, the two older boys called me “Mitchy,” but now I’m just called Dad. They are my world. We all did everything together and we just shared a special bond that I had never had with anyone. I know that in the eyes of the world, I was just their stepdad, but that wasn’t the case. I just happened to have two sons that were born a couple years before I met them.

After the divorce, life was a big adjustment. I went from being the typical dad that took on the typical roll as a father. My ex wife did pretty much all the hard work when it came to raising the kids and I just went to work and came home and filled in where I was needed. Now, I'm a single dad and at the beginning, I had no clue what I was doing. On top of everything, I had the battle of my lifetime just to try to keep my two older boys in my life, since in the eyes of the law, I was just their stepdad.

My two oldest children, Maddox and Connor, were from my ex wife's previous marriage. Their biological father wasn’t much to speak of. He hadn’t been in their lives for most of it. So, when it came to doctors appointments and little league or runny noses or skinned knees, I was the superman in my household. I did all those things that a dad is supposed to do. Maddox is Autistic and has Microcephaly and Connor has Cerebral Palsy, so there was a lot of extra work that took place that you don’t have with a typical functioning child. Those struggles and experiences are part of what, I'm sure, helped form the bond that we three developed for each other. To them, they just know me as Dad. I was nothing but Dad. I will always be Dad. I had to fight for them. To not fight and let them not be in my life anymore would have been unbearable.

Long story short, I now have all three of my children at least fifty percent of the time and we just live a happy life together and i wouldn’t change that for the world.

So as I had said before, life was a big adjustment when I became a single dad. It was a huge adjustment for all of us. I was struggling with the destruction of my marriage and my children were struggling with not understanding why their mom wasn't coming home. It was a weird time for all of us. The first 16 weeks of that year, their mom had checked out and abandoned us. It was just me and them and we had to figure out this new dynamic. See, I was never one to be soft and gentle and I wasn’t good at dealing with emotional situations. On top of this fact, I was too caught up in my own situation and my own feelings to be emotionally available to my children. I knew that I needed them in my life and I knew that I couldn’t lose them, but still, what a selfish bastard I was.

I was angry all of the time. I stopped eating and stopped bathing. My house was in shambles and was a total disaster. Moreover, my children were hurting. Although I was physically there and providing for them, I was completely checked out. They were suffering but I was too selfish to see past myself.

One day, I woke up and took a good look around my house and I no longer saw a home. I saw a place of sadness. I saw a place of hopelessness. I looked around and thought about how I hadn't seen a smile in this place for so long. I looked at the trash and the filth and I looked at my children that I had emotionally neglected for too long and I knew that we couldn't live like this anymore. What good was me being in their lives going to do if they were miserable with me every moment that they were with me?

From that day forward, we all changed. I knew that we just had to find our new normal. It was a scary time. It was a difficult time. I knew that the only way that we were going to make it through this is if we did this together. So we packed up our things and sold everything else and all four of us set out to start out new lives. We found this piece of shit old house that wasn’t much to look at and we settled in. We had to start new. We had to rebuild. We had to move forward. Life was definitely different. The house was not what we were used to. It wasn't the nice five acre property that we were used to and it didn't have all the fancy bells and whistles that our old house was, but it had something that we hadn’t seen in a long time. On the day that we moved into that old crappy house, i saw the excitement of the boys checking out their new rooms and exploring every corner of this new place. I saw joy and I saw smiles on their faces. That was the day that I realized that a building with four walls is not what makes a home. Hope and love and joy is what makes a home. Regardless of the fact that this was just an old cruddy house, for the first time in a long time, all four of us finally felt like we were home.

See, life is filled with surprises and twists along the way. We never know where we are going to end up. We can't always plan for the storms that life throws at us, but what we can do is try to grow and get back up on our feet when we get knocked down. I wish I had done a lot of things differently and I wish I had made a lot of different decisions during that period of my life, but I did learn a valuable life lesson during these trials and tribulations. I learned that sometimes change can be good. I learned that being a father is more than just being there physically. I learned that we determine the quality of life that we want to live. Lastly, I learned that life isn't always fair but even when we struggle, if we work hard and push through, we just might make it out the other side and discover a whole new world filled with love and joy and hope. We have to have hope for a better tomorrow. So, even if today hits and live kicks you in the gut, just remember that tomorrow is another day.