I’m watching a Spanish TV show right now about a man who is a compulsive cheater. He was married, had a daughter, kept cheating on his wife, so she kicked him out. The worst part is that the wife kept their daughter from having any contact with the father. The daughter hasn’t seen her father for 15 years.
Then the man got married to another woman, had two daughters with her, and kept cheating. So she kicked him out and told the daughters that their father was dead. The poor kids had to visit a psychologist for years.
Now they are all grown women and their father has invited them to the program to get reunited. All three daughters are extremely happy to see their father, all three say he has nothing to apologize for, all three say that their mothers will be livid when they see the show but they don’t care because they are very happy to be back in touch with their father. And the sisters are especially content to have met each other. All of this happiness has been stolen from them by selfish, self-centered mothers and a weak, pathetic father who has only dared to get in touch with his daughters now after suffering from a life-threatening disease.
It is very sad when people are so incapable of getting over their partners’ cheating that they take revenge on the children and force them to pay the price of their unhappy relationships. The really tragic part is that both mothers have long since remarried. The daughters, in the meanwhile, have continued to pay for their parents’ incapacity to be happy together 15+ years ago.
This is why I always laugh whenever I hear people mention maternal instinct. (I would also laugh if people talked about paternal instinct but that myth doesn’t really exist.) There are too many people who are incapable of noticing that their children are human beings with needs and interests of their own.
Clarissa's Blog 
I’m not sure what maternal instinct has to do with stopping fathers seeing their daughters. It’s more what kicks in when your child is suddenly in some sort of danger, or when you feel something isn’t right with you child who is supposed to be somewhere and turns out to be somewhere else and has problems.
There are a lot of women out there who can’t get over their own hurt and misery, and punish their kids and the father of their kids by depriving them of contact. It’s petty, small and unnecessary. I know no one’s perfect, but parents are supposed to be adults and able to handle situations with a minimum of understanding.
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I think that the daughters saying “he has nothing to apologize for” really sums up the nature of these cases. He has nothing to apologize to them for (at least in terms of cheating on their mothers). The mothers have every right to feel hurt and betrayed, and only they can decide what’s best for them. If that means ending their relationship with him, that’s their decision. However, it’s not their place to decide to end the relationship between their ex and their daughters. Once you have a child with someone, you sign up to have that person in your life forever. The only time it’s acceptable to keep a child from their parent is if that parent is a danger to them. Compulsive cheating is not one of those cases.
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This father is a fucktard: he was not coerced to have these children.
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Who cares? He can be the biggest fucktard in the universe but, for these women, he is still their one and only father. They were not the ones who chose to procreate with a fucktard. But they are the ones paying the price for that decision.
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I agree that the children should be the victims of their mother’s revenge, but I wonder why this fucktard want to have these children at the first place?
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I agree that the children should NOT be the victims of their mother’s revenge, but I wonder why this fucktard want to have these children at the first place?
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“I wonder why this fucktard want to have these children at the first place?”
– How can this possibly matter when these women already exist and are about your age?
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The mothers’ behavior is harmful in another way as well; there’s a non-trivial likelihood that supressing contact with their father gave them major daddy issues which leaves them horribly open to abuse from men who know how to push those buttons.
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Exactly. Depriving children of contact with one of the parents is extremely harmful. What is shocking is that these mothers don’t even care. It’s a mystery to me how anybody can do that and still claim to love a child.
The only healthy approach in that case is to say to the child, “Your father cheated on me, not on you. He left me, not you. None of this is about you. You are loved by and important to us both, even if we can’t figure out how to be happy together. This is our problem, not yours.”
All one needs to adopt this approach is to love one’s child more than one loves one’s petty grievances.
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“Your father cheated on me, not on you. He left me, not you. None of this is about you. You are loved by and important to us both, even if we can’t figure out how to be happy together. This is our problem, not yours.”
I agree.
But factually, he cheated his children too, but the mother should not tell them about that.
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“But factually, he cheated his children too”
– Nobody owes sexual fidelity to their children. This is all getting quite creepy.
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The assumptions are 1) that this man was a good father and 2) his compulsive cheating had nothing to do with the love and affection he showed his children and 3) he would have continued to show love and affection and financially support them had their mothers merely divorced him.
I don’t know that those are valid assumptions to make even though the ex-wives shouldn’t have kept the children from seeing their father.
A lot of men cease their relationships with their children once the relationships with the mothers end, ime.
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He could have been a totally crappy father, so what? He is still the only father these women will ever have. Crappy or not, he constitutes half of them, and his history, the history of his family are crucial for the daughters ‘ understanding of their lives. Only a monster deprives her children of all that because it pains her to accept that she is lousy in bed.
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In short, these assumptions have nothing whatsoever to do with what is being discussed.
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I’m learning more and more about my own father, since his stroke. Some of the material isn’t pretty — which I kind of knew anyway. My exposure to him in the post-migratory years were traumatic for me. The first two years were not so bad. I guess he felt he didn’t have to financially support me after the age of 17 or 18 or so. I’m afraid he did, though, because I hadn’t had the kind of training that would enable me to find my way around in a vastly different society from the one I was brought up in. Also, my parents had not given me very much emotional nourishment or support beyond the primary school years. So, I didn’t have what was needed to strike out on my own.
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How old are the daughters now? If they’re significantly older than 18, I think there was another component there: when the father began “suffering from a life-threatening disease”, he felt he needed all kinds of help from his now coveniently adult children.
Regardless of 2nd horrible mother , a man, who lets such happen, is not too interested in his children. There are courts, he could have come to their school or home, shown himself. It’s too easy to cast it as horrible all-powerful mother vs wonderful, albeit pathetic, father.
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I’m sorry to say this but this worldview guarantees you a really sad personal life. The women on the show decided that servicing the mothers’ needs is less important to them than.personal happiness. This is the only mature and healthy choice.
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I’m also bothered by this fixation on the part of various readers on whether the father is wonderful. It is completely and utterly unimportant whether he is wonderful or horrible. We need our mothers, fathers, siblings, children and grandparents not because they are good and can do something for us. But simply because they are ours.
Even if the father (or a mother) is a criminal, a serial killer, whatever, it is still crucial for the children to get to know him (or her), look into his eyes, and construct their own narrative of him. Or her.
The idea that fathers need to prove their wonderfulness to be considered fathers is promoted by cannibalizing mothers. A parent who has at least a modicum of love for the child will do everything – and I mean, everything – to facilitate contact between the child and the other parent. Even if the other parent is serving a life sentence.
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\\ I’m sorry to say this but this worldview guarantees you a really sad personal life.
Which worldview exactly? That a father shares a big part of responsibility for not being in daughters’ lives? I don’t say mothers are great here, but a father is more than this pathetic, suffering character. In both cases he decided children were not worth fighting for. Because it was easier for him at that point.
\\ Even if the father (or a mother) is a criminal, a serial killer, whatever, it is still crucial for the children to get to know him (or her), look into his eyes …
They should have that choice, but not all children would want to do that. I hope you don’t mean children, who decide to cut off criminal fathers and not to look into their eyes, have a problem.
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“Which worldview exactly?”
– I think you can go back and look at the comment.
“I don’t say mothers are great here, but a father is more than this pathetic, suffering character. In both cases he decided children were not worth fighting for. Because it was easier for him at that point.”
– As I already said: this is completely unimportant.
“I hope you don’t mean children, who decide to cut off criminal fathers and not to look into their eyes, have a problem.”
– If a person gets to know the absent parent and then decides on the basis of personal knowledge not to maintain contact, that is extremely normal. But an adult who accepts the worldview of a divorced or abandoned parent without trying to crate his or her own vision of the other side of the family does, indeed, have a huge problem. That problem is called immaturity.
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\\ We need our mothers, fathers, siblings … because they are ours.
Of course, there is a question whom consider a sibling and what “ours” means. F.e.
what about a divorced couple, in which a man fathers a child from another woman. Both children know of each existence, live far away, have never seen each other and don’t feel need to keep in touch. Are they siblings, like you and your sister are? Is something wrong with them, if neither shows any desire to have a connection with a completely alien to them person they have never seen? Are they “their own”? Life is not always black and white with 1 right way of behavior, and people have different ways of experiencing the world and deciding who a relative is or isn’t for them.
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“Are they siblings, like you and your sister are?”
– Yes, of course. This is a biological category.
” Is something wrong with them, if neither shows any desire to have a connection with a completely alien to them person they have never seen?”
– They are extremely immature people who have stopped developing as individuals. I can’t imagine a person who would not want to know the siblings.
” Life is not always black and white with 1 right way of behavior, and people have different ways of experiencing the world and deciding who a relative is or isn’t for them.”
– How can one decide if one wants to keep in touch without actually trying to meet a person? A decision should be based on some first-hand knowledge. I have chosen not to keep in touch with my cousins but only after learning all I can about them.
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