Filling Voids

Monday morning marked the start of Spring break for the girls. It’s a time of bliss; no homework or teachers to torment their lives for a solid week. For me it began that morning with a drive to the halfway point between here and Kansas City to meet their grandmother on their mother’s side. I didn’t mind doing the drive since it meant I got to spend a little more quality time with them. It gave me a solid hour and a half more of watching Megan text and Kylee listen to her iPod.

But it also gave me a return trip of what I like to call Contemplative Windshield Time, which can be golden. It’s that time where you can mentally fix just about everything that is wrong with your world, everyone else’s world, and the whole world in general. That morning I was pretty sure, by the time I put the car back in park, that I had the global financial crisis turned around. I almost called NPR with my answers.

Walking up to the door I remembered it was going to be another one of those entire weeks without the girls. Damn! I was trying my best not to think of that, or at least avoid thinking about it for as long as I could. Eventually I knew it would creep back in there, somewhere about the time I came home to the silence or ate one too many meals by myself. I can never push it off entirely.

The first time this happened was the week of Christmas a couple of months after Michelle had moved out. We were all planned for a trip to her father’s for that Christmas, tickets in hand and everything, when things came to that point you just can’t avoid any longer. I guess I could have been a jerk about it then but didn’t see the point of robbing the girls of a trip they had looked forward to and time with their cousins in the warm climate of the southwest. “Sure,” I said, when Michelle nervously asked about them doing the trip anyway, not even really anticipating anything about what it would be like to be without them for the holidays. When it finally dawned on me that I would be spending that much time alone and could easily slide off into a holiday funk, I was determined not to let it do so. I was braver than that, stronger than that. I would rise above the dismal gray of winter and be merry and gay (easy there) and productive with my time. I would volunteer.

And volunteer I did. That first Christmas I found a family in need through the Santa letters collected at the main post office downtown. I recruited several friends and peers at work and we managed to put together a large Christmas meal, a bundle of much needed clothes, and a few toys—for fun’s sake—for the family. I delivered it Christmas morning after making arrangements with the mother. I couldn’t help but hang back in my car after leaving it on the doorstep and ringing the bell. I felt more human that morning than I had in a long time. That Christmas was a special one for me, even without the girls.

I took that feeling and ran with it for the next two years. I joined Big Brothers Big Sisters. I volunteered time for my soccer league in addition to coaching both Kylee and Megan’s teams, and collected equipment and uniforms for kids that might need it. I got involved with exchange students. I think I was also the only Den Father on record for Megan’s Girl Scout troop. All the while I felt good about what I was doing and thought I was offering a great example to the girls about giving back, about caring about others, about looking out from within your self.

Then one day a friend told me, when I was bemoaning how busy my life had become, that I might be taking too much time for others and not for myself. This same friend also thought that maybe I was filling voids with my volunteering. I dismissed it at the time, but later had to admit to myself that filling voids was how it all had started and that they were probably right. Still, I told myself that there were worse ways to fill that void, that mine was a noble pursuit, and I found it hard to give up once I came to a point where I simply had to. Our lives changed a little and charity had to begin at home. The time and expense of my volunteering had to give way to the economy and a need to focus even more on the girls. It was the right move.

But what that left me, with weeks like this week, was the return of the void. So on the drive back from delivering the girls, somewhere between fixing the world economy and preventing global warming, I made a mental list of things to fill my time this week:

1. Catch up on studying my Italian.
2. Write furiously on this blog.
3. Spring cleaning, and then a little more cleaning.
4. Catch a few March Madness games (GO TARHEELS!)
5. Detail the car.
6. Write that great American novel I have been threatening to do for years.
7. Swap out the winter and summer clothes in the closet space.

All very exciting stuff, huh? And noticeably absent of any social activity. I was discussing this with yet another friend (yes, I have more than one) when I got another piece of advice, that maybe my identity and existence was too wrapped up in the girls.

Hmmmm. I hate it when advice like that is so dead on.

I’d never thought of it that way. I knew I was, by design, not dating and not out there really doing much of anything for myself, socially or otherwise. I thought I had pretty good reasoning in doing so. The dating scene really didn’t work for me when I tried it for a while, and everything else had to fit around work or time when the girls were with me. I resolved myself to being a father and father only, because it was the simpler life that felt and fit right. Some have argued that I have limited myself, that I need to take time for myself, and that I need to adjust to the new life where the girls are not with me every day and find a way to make myself a happier camper. Their arguments are not lost on me.

But then I come back around to the one question I can’t answer: why would, or should, anyone ever resolve to accept not seeing and being with their children every day of their life (within reason until they turn the age of thirty-something)? Why would it ever be okay?

It shouldn’t. The closest I've ever gotten to an answer for that was in telling myself that making the best of a less-than-ideal situation is what we all must do. That survivors—and I pride myself on being one, given my history—rise above life’s challenges and overcome them. I get that.

I found that the better way to attack the problem, actually, was to tell myself their time away is a reality I can’t alter, and dwelling on it idly when alone is self-indulgent and wasteful and a bad example for them. I would want them to do differently, so I should. It doesn’t mean that I have to accept it, but I can choose to distract myself from it even though I dislike it. How, is less a problem for me.

And so, if you don’t mind, there’s a closet back there calling my name.