The role that’s been most rewarding and significant in defining the course of my life is being a dad.
At the age of 45 I’m a father to two daughters aged 17 and 21, and two step-kids — a boy, 15 and another girl who just turned 13. I’ve been a parent for most of adulthood and it’s shaped virtually everything about me — where I live, what I do for work and how I live my life.
It’s because this role has been so pivotal that my current struggle is hurting as much as it is; my younger daughter seems to want as little to do with me as possible and I really don’t know why.
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A little of my backstory seems relevant — stop me if you’ve heard it before.
My first wife and I divorced when our daughters were just 4 and 7 — we were both young and impetuous when an accidental pregnancy brought us together. We tried to make it work over a few event-filled few years but eventually conceded that there was no long-term future for us. We took the difficult decision to part while we were still young, but acknowledged we were parents for life. We remained resolute that we’d both play an active role in the raising of our daughters.
We established a slightly unconventional model of equal co-parenting where the girls would live with me one week and their mum the next. It was unusual among our friends and in our community, and certainly compared to other divorced couples we knew. It worked well in spite of the novelty.
We were ‘that divorced couple’ — the ones who were civil and friendly towards each other, who could be in the same place without shooting daggers at each other and who showed up at school meetings and events together.
As parents, we were both actively involved in raising our kids, sharing in the burdens of parenting but also getting equal shares of the joy and good times. We were both afforded equal space and time apart from the kids to rebuild our lives after divorcing and each contributed equally to the financial costs of raising them. We both had time to establish and grow in our careers and each eventually met new partners and married again. My second wife brought two bonus kids along with her from her first marriage — my kids gained a brother and sister.
Most importantly from our kids’ perspective, it seemed to work well too. They grew up knowing that their home life was different to their friends, but fundamentally both their parents were active and present in their lives. They were loved, supported and comfortable in both homes and had equal and regular access to wider families on both sides.
Things weren’t always rosy of course — we had our fair share of sadness, upset and hardship along the way. Fundamentally though, I don’t believe our kids’ childhood has been better or worse than their peers whose parents remained together — it’s just been different.
If I sound evangelical or self-congratulatory about it then I apologise — that’s not my intention. I’ve written extensively about our experience both here on Medium, on other websites and in books that I’ve self-published on Amazon. I’ve written an article for a national newspaper here in the UK and we featured in a story in another paper. I’m sufficiently passionate (and I guess, proud of what we’d accomplished) that I’ve wanted to broaden awareness of our unconventional approach to parenting after divorce, to try and open the minds of other divorced or divorcing parents to a different way of raising their kids than is perhaps conventional.
This has always been accompanied by a certain amount of imposter syndrome, which is particularly stinging at times like this when things seem to be falling apart.
The Ends of Eras
I look back on parenting and my experiences of raising my girls from birth to adulthood as a series of eras that come and go.
The baby years are a blur — thrown in at the deep end and with a newborn to care for and keep alive, you act largely on instinct. It’s the era I coped with the best — taking the lack of sleep in my stride and forming a strong bond with both my girls through tending to them through the nighttime feeds and changes.
That era set the tone for their whole lives; I’ve struggled at times with the emotional sides of parenting but I nailed the practical and logistical stuff from day one.
The toddler years are harder — kids learn to express their will and desires by whatever means necessary. Then comes schooling where the influence of their peers is brought to bear and continues to shape and exaggerate their personalities and preferences. Nurture seems to overtake nature as the dominant force behind their development. As kids get older their whims and desires shift drastically as they learn from observing and experiencing what goes on around them.
As parents, we have to submit to our kids being shaped by various influences from throughout their lives, many of which we can’t control.
As teenagers, our kids seem to need the most input and support from us as parents, particularly now that social media and smartphones are an ever-present and destructive force. And yet teenagers are at their most belligerent and resistant to our input —to accept our help or listen to kindly words of wisdom and advice would be to admit defeat, or so it seems.
When the Wheel Comes Off
The era that I’m currently living through with my 17-year-old daughter feels like the most challenging to date. I’m sure that rose-tinted retrospection means that I’m overlooking plenty of equally hard times in the past. She currently seems resistant to every word I utter or gesture that I make. In the last few months, our interactions have been reduced to a few hours every couple of weeks where we used to live together for alternate weeks.
She no longer wants to move back and forth between my home and her mum’s, which I can understand. It hurts a little that she’s chosen her mum over me and I get that teenage girls probably need and relate to their mum rather than their dad, but it still smarts.
I’ve gone along with the suggestion but still try to spend time with her as much as I can. Often this amounts to little more than a few short hours every other week when we’ll have dinner together or when I drive her to and from work.
Conversations are stilted, verging on non-existent. I try to open discussions only to receive grunted and begrudging answers, or sarcastic and provocative responses to innocuous questions. It feels like my efforts are taken as an annoyance or an intrusion. She asks little about me or my life, and shows little interest in what I’ve been doing but then acts as though affronted when she learns of things I’ve been doing, that I didn’t tell her about.
She’s never enjoyed speaking on the phone so I text her regularly — about one in five messages receives a reply even though I’m sure she reads them all the moment they arrive.
As I list these dissatisfactions it makes me feel and seem needy and self-centered. Parents who are more seasoned and objective than I am might dismiss her behaviours and my experiences as entirely normal for a teenage girl relating to her dad. And yet I cannot help but feel hurt.
I feel like I’m losing her. For all the ways I thought I’d got parenthood figured out, suddenly I feel disarmed and like I’ve got nothing to deal with this situation.
There are no tools in my parenting toolkit that seem appropriate or effective in bringing this around. And so I feel like a fraud — the imposter dad who’s spent years writing about how to successfully parent kids after divorce and is now struggling to do so himself.
Everything Is Changing
I used to have solutions to the challenges my kids brought to life. I used to know what to do, or could figure out the best response to a problem. Right now, I’m drawing a blank other than to keep showing up for her — and so that’s what I do.
When her older sister was a similar age I didn’t feel so helpless or useless. I still felt wanted even though she used to test me in different ways. With this one I feel like she’s somewhere else — behind a wall of some sort, one that I can’t even see let alone break through.
I miss when she used to hold my hand as we walked and talked together.
I miss throwing a ball back and forth between us while waiting for the school doors to open.
I miss being able to entice her outdoors with the promise of an ice cream or watching her ride her scooter up and down the hill near our house.
I miss her wanting to sit and watch a movie or TV show with me (unless I’m willing to concede to watching the Kardashians shout at each other).
I miss sensing any enthusiasm from her about spending time with me or even a willingness to have a conversation.
I get that kids grow up and their needs and wants change — but when did I cease to have anything to offer or appeal to her?
In the absence of her being willing to discuss it (if indeed there is even an ‘it’) I trawl through my memory for things that might be at the root of the problem. I may be overlooking the shifting and natural dynamic of father-daughter relationships in the teenage years, but still I search for a moment or event that might explain it all.
All I can come up with is the change of situation when her elder sister left home to go to university might have left a gap in her life. Throughout my daughters’ lives the most significant constant was each other — no matter where they were, they were together — traversing back and forth between their mum’s home one week and mine the next. Whatever they went through, they went through it together.
In later years we experimented with birds-nest co-parenting where the kids stayed in one home and we parents moved in and out for alternate weeks. The burden was rightly on us to do the shifting between homes, not the kids. Even then, they had each other as the one constant presence in the home.
If there’s one factor that’s played its part in shaping the changing of my daughter’s world and hence her demeanour, could that be it? The effects of her sister moving on and leaving her behind — the sole and uncomfortable object of her parents’ focus?
Maybe? Maybe not? Will I ever know? Will she?
A Shred of Hope
Sometimes I meet up with a close friend for a beer and a chat. Much of our conversation is spent comparing our parenting woes and occasionally the moments of magic too.
His kids are much younger than mine and one of his sons has a number of serious medical conditions; his challenges as a parent are far more real and valid than my own. And yet in spite of this he always patiently listens as I vent, and empathises when he can. He reminds me that when my elder daughter was a teenager I had my struggles with her too — different struggles, but struggles nonetheless.
For much of her teens, we didn’t see eye-to-eye. Her approach wasn’t to shut me out but rather to constantly test boundaries, pushing me to the limits of my patience. We’d fall out regularly but bounce back quickly too. Nowadays, she’s my greatest fan and ally and phones me daily just to check-in. How times change.
The tiny ray of hope that I cling to right now is that in a few years’ time, perhaps my younger daughter will have worked through whatever is occupying her mind right now. Maybe this whole phase is just a side-effect of her brain developing? Maybe it’s just her being a teenager, doing what teens do.
In just a few weeks my elder daughter will graduate from university and move home once again while she looks for a job. We’re all excited about having her back and none more so than my younger daughter (although I doubt she’d express it with much more than surface enthusiasm).
Perhaps having her sister around again will help as she navigates the socially awkward final year of school and the transition to her university career (if she chooses to go). Maybe by being reunited with her sidekick sister, she’ll feel less like the object of our focus and return to her old self once again.
I hope during this next phase that my relationship with her goes through some sort of a renaissance, just as it did with her older sister. It hurts like hell to enjoy and rely upon such a close bond with your child, only for that to diminish to such a great extent. It’s been one of the more painful experiences of my life as a parent and the one that I’ve felt the most powerless to change.
Reflecting on the recent past I’m reminded of a quote that has struck me as prescient on many occasions throughout life, particularly as a parent:
“The bad news is nothing lasts forever,
The good news is nothing lasts forever.” — J. Cole
It’s a message of hope for those who are weathering a time of difficulty as I feel I am at present. It’s also a useful reminder for those in danger of taking a good thing for granted.
Right now I’m trying to remember that its unlikely things will stay like this forever. I’ve been resolutely present throughout the rest of her life and I’ll continue to be there how she needs me now and into the future.
If I have to deal with feeling like I’m not needed or wanted so much right now, then so be it.
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This post was previously published on Medium.
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Photo credit: Alex Iby on Unsplash