I Had An Absent Father. When My Ex And I Divorced, I Was Terrified I’d Repeat The Cycle

"Were they actually better off staying with their mother, and just joining me for fun weekends and holidays? I’d be lying if I said I didn’t have these thoughts almost daily."

“[Your ex wife] is filing for primary physical custody. In this set up, you would be granted limited parenting time every other weekend from Thursday evening until Monday morning,” my lawyer informed me.

The words “limited parenting time” sent a cold shiver down my spine.

“No,” I said firmly into the phone speaker, my voice cracking. “I will do whatever it takes to get equal custody.”

I stood up and started pacing around the kitchen island as one thought played on loop in my head: “I can’t repeat the cycle. I can’t be an absent parent to Lydia and Peter, just like he was to me.”

Mere months before that phone call with my lawyer, I had flown to Ghana, to ask my own father why he didn’t fight for me. The decision to visit him had been partly spurred by Father’s Day in 2019.

Father’s Day was always one of my worst days of the year, as it would bring up feelings of abandonment and rejection, and there were no Hallmark cards that said, “You weren’t present, but thanks for being a part of my birth!”

A few years after my father and my mother divorced, he remarried and eventually moved to Kenya with his new family. Meanwhile, my mom, stepbrother and I struggled with a period of being unhoused and living on welfare.

When I visited Ghana, my father’s answer to my question about his absenteeism surprised me: he said he had never intended to leave me behind. He’d had custody struggles and interpersonal conflicts with my mother, and he decided that the best thing was to let me find him when I was ready. Minus the last part, it sounded eerily similar to what I was facing today.

I forgave him, but I have never stopped wishing he had fought for me.

And now, pacing around the granite kitchen countertop of the apartment I’d rented to be close to my kids after my ex-wife and I separated, it felt like history was repeating itself.

Knowing my own father’s story, I was plagued by the thought that giving up equal custody was a slippery slope. First, it’s custody. And then, it might become easier to skip a weekend here and there, or let a new........

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