Originally published June 2023.
Eighties stuff isn’t easy to talk about. But if I can bring the uncomfortable shit to light and show myself I deserve to exist because for damn sure the 80s weren’t communicating that message then maybe I’ve helped someone else who lived through it feel a little better, too. Maybe I can help us both feel a little less angry. I don’t want to be the kind of person who sees newly divorced people in 2023 establish a perfect child custody split and scowl because “these kids don’t know how good they have it.” In an effort to not be that person, I’ll write this.
Wanna talk about dads? I don’t, but I’m going to. Because someone needs to talk about how the 1980s let dads off the entire hook and vilified the overworked, under-supported mothers as chief disciplinarians and structure-bearers because they didn’t have two goddamned seconds of ease to be anything else. The 80s let men make children and then bow out of taking care of them just because they didn’t love the kids’ mother anymore. I’m talking about the absolute bullshit child custody strategy that was “every other weekend and holidays.” Whoever invented this, I’d like to take them out back while wielding an object large and heavy.
My parents divorced in 1988, I think. My sixth birthday was coming up and I was getting my first bike, that’s what I remember. I’d never heard the word “divorce” until my parents said it to me but somehow I knew exactly what it meant. My father was moving out of the house and into an apartment nearby, though he’d be remarried within nine months and move further away into my first step-parent’s house. I’d have two more by the time I turned 17. The day my parents told me they were getting a divorce my father had, unbeknownst to me, already relocated his belongings. So that was the last moment I was ever in a room with both of my parents at the same time. Seriously.
At some point people in a courtroom who had never met me decried out loud that I would see my actual human father every other weekend and holidays. That’s 96 days a year with my father, and 269 with my mother. Give or take. Notice how I structured that sentence? I said that’s how often I’d see my father. That’s how the people in that courtroom thought about it, too. But it’s not the truth, is it? Every other weekend and holidays wasn’t how often I saw my father. It’s how often my father had to be a father. Ninety six days a year versus 269. Thirty five percent of the year. Thirty five percent of a parent. Does that seem fucking fair to you?
An important aside: This is the arrangement my mother wanted. I think she’d have taken 100% custody if either of them had the guts to bring it up but I’m guessing my dad would have been too ashamed to admit that it would have been fine with him, too. My overall critique of the custody arrangement as an institution is not a commentary on my mother’s strong (correct) preference that I had as little to do with my dad as possible. (He would soon demonstrate a massive lack of interest in being my father at all. It is what it is, I don’t carry hate about it because I’ll be damned if his shit limits my life). My gripes are more about the burdensome ways single mothers were treated in the 80s and the narratives that were thus passed onto their observant children. I was an observant child.
Every other weekend and holidays. Are you hearing this? This is telling fathers their only responsibilities regarding the children they chose to make happen on the fun days, the days they don’t have to get kids up, dressed, fed, and ready for school. The evenings they don’t have to come home after a full day of work and again parent their actual children. An entire cohort of men got to do nothing but watch movies with their kids and take them bowling for entire childhoods with the luxury of delivering us back to our mothers on Sunday evenings when real life and homework began again. I didn’t even keep clothes at his house.
Oh but mothers are better caregivers, so mothers should have the children more of the time. I’m assuming this was the logic? I mean what else could it possibly have been? What still baffles me is why men were even allowed to make children when, during divorce, it was assumed they didn’t actually know how to care for one very well. The presumed and accepted incapability of men resulting in the burdens of women. I started learning that at six, when did you? When I was in school, if friends lived with their dad and only saw their mom every other weekend and holidays, that mom was fucked up. But the other way around was somehow the default arrangement.
Oh but fathers support the children financially, so it’s okay. Is it Stacey? My father paid $200 per month per child for the remainder of my childhood which was 12 years. It was never increased by a penny. Have you ever tried to feed or clothe two growing children? Have you ever tried to house them? Have you ever experienced the inflation of the dollar over a 12-year period? Every other weekend and holidays was an insult to motherhood. That arrangement made my father more financially secure and my mother less financially secure but guess which parent I lived with 65% of the time? I won’t ask you to make it make sense because it never did. And no one’s ever had to answer for it. If Netflix ever asked, and I hope that one day they do, I’d create a series called Every Other Weekend and rake 1980s divorce norms over absolute coals.
“Hey Shani, what about those two weeks in the summer?!” Right! Summer. When we weren’t in school. Again, give dads the fun time, the least-vital time, because they’re not really capable of handling anything heavier and we don’t want to stress them out. Let’s make sure the kids see that so that when they grow up the girl children make sure to bear as much weight of their households as possible, while the boy children grow up to build super fun man caves. Also the idea of giving moms a little two-week “vacation” makes me sick to my stomach.
I don’t have memories of playing with my mother. I have almost no memories of doing anything fun with my mother. That’s not my mother’s fucking fault. The fun time was given to my father and a kid’s whole life can’t be about fun. It has to be about learning, boundaries, communication, safety, and wellbeing too. When you’re a mother responsible for all of those things 65% of the time and literally ALL of the weekdays, you don’t have the time, energy, and definitely not the money to do the fun things a man you don’t love anymore gets to do with the kids you do love. You also need a place to let loose all the anger and frustration caused by your life circumstances because you’re a human being. Therapy wasn’t a thing back then. Eldest daughters were.
Give dads the fun stuff, leave the real work with the mothers. Who also have to work. Roughly a decade and a half of assigning lives to this garbage before anyone realized the inherent flaws or bothered to have the arguments necessary to change them so that this sort of thing wasn’t on the table anymore because it fucking shouldn’t be. One of the reasons this newsletter exists is that my precise generation is the one that got caught in this and many other kinds of crossfire, where seemingly no one had an ounce of foresight or common fucking sense to spare in our direction. We’re a generation of guinea pigs and I think it’s time we start throwing eggs. My present-day stepbrothers’ custody arrangement (I’ve had four more, I’ll tell you about them sometime) was established about a decade after mine was, and it was divided evenly between their parents. I didn’t know that was allowed.
Dads get to “see” their kids, moms have to care for their kids. That’s what I learned about divorce in the 80s. That’s what I learned about gender roles in the 80s. And shaming it now the way I used to be shamed for having a “weird” latchkey life feels a lot better than being jealous of a nine year old with a 50/50 split.
It’s better now, but it was bad for us, and I think we get to talk about that. I think we have to. I don’t think we have to absorb and diffuse the pain of things we were subjected to just so older generations never have to feel wrong. They were wrong, but they were also doing the best they could with the information they had. I’ll give them grace, but I’ll give ’em hell, too. It’s my birthright.