An Abandoned Son Says to hell with Father‘s Day

June 19, 2002

Looking back on his childhood, Ted Rall says his hero wasn‘t his father -- his hero was his mother‘s divorce lawyer.
Rall was abandoned by his father in 1966 when he was three years old. His mother struggled to raise him on a teacher‘s salary of $8,000 per year, living literally on the wrong side of the tracks in an impoverished city in Ohio. There were times, he says, when his mother didn‘t eat lunch during the day so there would be food on the table for dinner.
“My mom and I would surely have starved to death after my dad wallked out on us if our attorney hadn‘t fought him in court,“ Rall writes in his book, Revenge of the Latchkey Kids. “He not only squeezed cash out of my pathologically cheap dad, he repeatedly dragged him back to court over the next two decades to make him fulfill his obligations under the divorce decree one line at a time.“
Like many trusting, vulnerable children, Rall thought that his father would try to stay in his life, maintaining the family ties that we accept as normal from anyone who has a heart.
“So I, like every other product of a broken home I know, spent years waiting for Dad to come to his senses and come home,“ he writes. “And when it became clear that wouldn‘t happen -- his new wife probably wouldn‘t have approved -- I waited for him to fulfill his minimal responsibilities as a father. After I gave up on that -- when I went to college -- I hoped that we might at least be friends.“
It didn‘t happen.
I met Rall at a newspaper conference in Madison, WI, and by some alchemy of conversation, we happened to be talking about kids who have been abandoned by their fathers. Rall, a cartoonist whose work is featured in alternative newspapers across the nation, jumped up from the table and returned with his book as a gift. Some of the quotes here are from his first chapter entitled “To Hell With Father‘s Day.“
Conservatives like to blame America‘s problems on the ‘60s and the counterculture. Liberals point to the deficit spending and greed of the Reagan years. But Rall, a member of Generation X, places the blame on the epidemic of divorce which is raising emotionally damaged children.
When Rall was in the first grade in 1968, he was the only kid in class whose parents had divorced. By junior high school, he knew of a half-dozen other children of divorce, and by the time he graduated from high school in 1981, “about one in four Americans my age were products of ‘broken homes.‘“ Today, half of all marriages end in divorce.
That, perhaps, would be manageable if fathers maintained ties with their children, but Rall claims that many divorced dads simply abandon their kids beyond writing a child care check.
“Most divorced men have almost nothing to do with the upbringing of their children,“ he writes. He cites a 20-year study by San Francisco psychologist Judith Wallerstein which found that only one father out of 150 families provided more financial support than was ordered by a family court, with the majority not even paying that much, even though the study focused on men with high incomes.
“Perhaps more disturbing than their astonishing cheapness was the revelation that they spent little to no time with their children. By the time their former tax deductions became teenagers, the vast majority of ex-fathers had stopped visiting them.
“And spare me the letters from you model divorced dads who got screwed in family court, adore your kids, and are denied visitation rights by your vindictive, greedy ex-wives,“ he adds. “Like men raped by women, there aren‘t enough of you in the whole country to fill a phone booth.“
Is Rall being fair, or just angry?
Personally, I know several for-real “model divorced dads“ who raised children on their own as the result of women who weren‘t fit to be mothers. And I know dads who not only pay crushing levels of child support, but are also part of their kids‘ lives at every opportunity.
But I also know a number of men who‘ve utterly abandoned their children and never seem to give them a second thought. It‘s all they can do to lift up the phone at Christmas or a birthday. They‘re usually the angry guys cruising the bars in search of “bitches.“
And I know a number of people -- children and adults alike -- who spend their whole lives wondering, why has my father abandoned me? Why doesn‘t he call? Why is there never a word, never any sign of love or connection?
In Rall‘s case, he finally came to grips with the realization that his father didn‘t love him after a two-day meeting with the man when he was 28. His father didn‘t have a clue as to the pain and emotional damage he‘d caused by his silence and his coldness all through the years. Rall wrote him off as insane.
So here‘s to the dads who hang in there and something to think about for those of you who don‘t. Let Rall have the last word:
“Parenthood is a privilege; the millions of parents, mostly fathers, who walk away for their kids every year are the real losers. They‘re the sorriest bunch of human beings in our society -- overgrown children who are so irresponsible and worthless that they can‘t even fulfill the primordial, instinctual imperative to raise offspring...
“The single parents who remain behind to raise the kids are the heroes of America... Raising children on limited funds, without enough free time, is a nearly impossible task to which millions of women (and a few men) rise every day.“
Be one of those men, will you? Get in touch with your kids and stay in touch.