LIFE WITH FATHER

It teaches humility.

-Tom Elder



HIS PITCH was polished, his flow charts in place. It was his first major presentation as head of a new information-systems consulting company. The meeting was interrupted by a telephone call. There was a head lice problem at 6-year-old Damian’s school. Could he come right away and take his son home?

That type of “humanizing interruption” has become the rule in Tom Elder’s life. Two years ago, he leaped into single parenthood-more as a consequence of a Kramer vs. Kramer situation than a bloody divorce. Tom’s ex-wife had a chance at a big promotion in her career. It required a move to California. She went. Tom and Damian stayed behind.

“The geography worked in my favor,” Elder says. “I had to buy her a new car, buy her out of the house, give her all the artwork and practically empty every room of furniture, but I won,” he recalls. “I guess the most difficult part is trying to give Damian all the pleasant things that I remember from my own childhood-soccer practice, birthday parties, friends spending the night- and manage a new business at the same time. But I have an incredible network of friends. I couldn’t make it without them.”

The one advancement that has made single fatherhood practicable is the microwave oven.

-Dwight Smith



“WITHOUT A doubt, the most miserable period in my life was when my ex-wife moved the kids to Roswell, New Mexico. They didn’t really like living in a small town, and they were unhappy with their new stepfather. I was in such a state of shock with the divorce, I hadn’t contested anything. I felt totally powerless to help them.

“But, gradually over the months, my ex-wife realized that things weren’t working out. We hashed out a joint custody agreement over the telephone. On the last day of school, I was waiting outside with a U-Haul”

Eventually, Smith’s former spouse found her way back to Dallas, too. The two children -Blair, now 16, and Mac, 11- live with their father and spend most weekends with their mother. “Joint custody is very adult,” says Smith. “It assumes we can put our heads together on matters pertaining to the kids.”

Occasionally, those matters assume epic proportions, but more often “I deal with ordinary traumas-like all of those associated with being a teenage girl. You could write volumes about what I don’t know about a teen-age daughter.

“I wish I could say we had some type of Brady Bunch operation, but it takes all kinds of flexibility, patience and perseverance. And the ones who have to be the most patient are the kids.”

Our kids took remarriage harder than divorce.

-Craig Fowler



“CHILDREN ALWAYS harbor a fantasy that their parents will get back together,” says Craig Fowler, the father of two teen-age boys and a custody lawyer himself. In the Fowler family, the reality of remarriage hit at the particularly vulnerable age of pre-ado-lescence. “Both boys had trouble adjusting to their new stepparents-my older son especially. It took a summer at a Christian-oriented Outward Bound and military school to straighten him out.”

Fowler was divorced in 1977. His ex-wife got custody of the boys, and everything ran smoothly for about three years. Then the younger son, John, decided he wanted to live with Dad. It is difficult-but not impossible-to go back to court and reverse a custody order, lawyers say. The Fowlers did. John, now 15, has lived with his father ever since.

“There’s not a lot of freedom when you’re a single father,” says Fowler. “When you live alone with a 15-year-old, you’ve got to be around a lot. Teen-agers require a lot of supervision. Their bodies are big, but in many ways, they’re still children.

“But I look forward to going home every night and making dinner for him-especially when the pressures of working on other people’s custody cases get to me. You get sucked in- you have to believe in it. Every time I try a case, I leave a little of myself at the courthouse- and when I come home, I guess I find it again.”

How has it changed my life? I haven’t had time to look.

-Bob Brandt



THE FIRST shock wave of divorce crashed over Bob Brandt when the sheriff handed him a temporary restraining order (TRO) barring him from his home. “This guy just walked up, handed me a piece of paper and said, ’Don’t get the children, and don’t go back home.’”

That was before the law was rewritten to require petitioners for a TRO to show just cause-reform that Brandt was in part responsible for as head of the Texas Fathers for Equal Rights. Brandt’s battle for custody began at a hearing in response to that TRO. He succeeded in having the order overturned, a victory that was “tantamount to winning a jury trial.” Brandt says, “I think only two guys before me ever succeeded in getting one of those things thrown out.”

The first thing he did was to go to Jessica and Robert’s school (“I hadn’t seen them for 10 days”). Three weeks later, their mother moved out. Now the routine juggling of tumbling classes and church meetings with grocery shopping and paper work falls on Dad. “It gets pretty hectic sometimes,” says Brandt, an independent real estate appraiser. “I think most men end up doing double time because they’re not very good at delegating responsibility.”