“Are They Also Pro-Styrofoam?” That’s what my friend asked after browsing the following link.
My piece on Child Support for Dummies has apparently struck a nerve amongst some rather strange folk over at my blog. I thought some of you might enjoy reading their comments over morning coffee. Call me naive, but I just can’t believe there’s a group of men out there who are campaigning to do away with their structured obligations.
http://predisastered.com/2008/12/08/child-support-for-dummies/#comment-116
–kristan
You’re naive. Sorry, no smileys with that; you did ask.
I don’t have anything remotely resembling a positive spin to offer on that, either, though this points in that direction: men working hard to avoid their familial responsibilities is as old as the hills (which were mountains once). We are living in the current cultural incarnation of that. I like to think that some of us are demonstrating a bit more maturity… but most certainly not enough of us. :-(
Well, hell, Franklin. What about the pro-styrofoam query then?
You know, these pro-father people annoy the fuck out of me, they really do. I mean, they all scream about custody–they all want JUSTICE and FAIRNESS in the area of custody….
But they don’t want to pay for a kid.
Just how does that work?
Is it because they really don’t want the kid so much as they want the ex to pay them?
What a hoot!
Do they really believe that a single mom is rolling in dough just because he’s writing a check? I mean, as much as they think they’re giving you, it’s never enough. And I’m not saying that because I’m a greedy bitch–I’m saying that because I know what stuff costs.
You made some excellent points over there–about how taking care of a kid is not just about the entertainment expenses (which, for some bizarre reason, they never consider exorbitant and don’t have a problem in the universe plunking down the money for). Dads seem to think that if the kid is entertained, then the kid is cared for–that’s why they’re such excellent parents, because they spend two days a week entertaining a kid. But when it comes down to getting them to school or doing homework or trying to figure out where the money for the next school project is going to come from, they are completely without a clue, and it’s by god YOUR fault, because if you had just chosen to put up with his sorry ass, you wouldn’t be having these problems. So you’ve made your bed and you frikkin’ well be prepared to lie in it…
This kind of argument leads me to two conclusions: 1) the dads who feel this way are the kind of dads who could never handle full custody, because they’d be completely lost within the first 24 hours and 2) they don’t want to pay for anything that kidlet might actually share with Mom–like heat, food, a roof, gasoline for the car…
It’s like they’re so bitter that they would be willing to deprive the kids of that stuff just because it’s stuff that the kid, of necessity, shares with the kid custodian. These dads only want to pay for the kid alone–and that’s just not even close to what it actually takes to raise a kid.
My ex was like this–all Dad’s rights and threatening to take custody and wanting itemized lists of what his blinking measly bit of money was spent on, like it was some vast fortune he was bequeathing on this child, rather than a sum that covered only about 1/8th of actual expenses. But the fact was that he could barely make it through a weekend with the kid, let alone handle the “permanent custody” he threatened, and his money was little more than a small help–I hardly got rich off the man.
These guys who think that women do so much better in divorce settlements than men do would do well to look at the actual facts–that a woman’s financial quality of life actually goes down when the divorce goes through, and thus, the quality goes down for her custodial children as well. Men’s invariably go up, because they have been relieved of all adult responsibility for maintaining and financing an actual family, and thus he has more money for Dave and Buster’s on a Friday night and whatever new female victim he’s wooing with his sad song about “the ex, the Bitch”.
Wooo–it sounds like I’m bitter, too, doesn’t it? Even after all this time?
But the truth is, these kind of guys need a serious wake-up, and they need to understand that they have children, and that children need cared for on more days than just the weekend.
It costs a whole lot more to get a kid from childhood to adulthood, in both money and effort, than a couple of mornings at the batting cage and a couple of burgers from McDonald’s.
Weekend dads will never in a million years know or understand that–not because they’re too stupid to know it, but because they’re too self-involved.
I think styrofoam would cost too much unless it was used to hold beer during that annoyingly unavoidable gap in space and time between the keg and the mouth. Priorities of life, and all that…
I laughed out loud at your Stepford quip. My cubicle neighbor groused at me, but I told him it was payback for the fourty-11 meetings he’s had there the past week. We both laughed about that. The guy in the corner office never closes his door, and thinks that state-of-the-art speaker phones must be yelled at and turned up to the highest volume.
Seriously, as a child of divorce, you and Anahata have said it all.
Gotta go handle the leaky roof now. Feh.