Divorced Dads -= Weekends =-

Divorced Dad's

I felt good after writing this. I like to look back on it during those questioning moments, and I can often find some solace here. I know how difficult the whole visitation process can be, I still look upon having to ask to see my children, as a huge injustice, but it appears to be the way it is. Not very prolific, but factual.

Weekends

Weekends now mean so much more than they used to. I find myself spending a large part of twelve days looking forward to the two days that I spend with my children. Weekends are no longer filled with household duties and lawn maintenance. I do my best to get those things out of the way before the weekend arrives. When the weekends do arrive, or more specifically six o’clock on Friday nights, there is a kind of magic in the air.

It is difficult at times to distinguish myself as more than a friend, because all I want to do is have fun with my kids. I learned, after a few months, that it is still of the highest necessity to enforce rules. The rooms still need to be cleaned, table manners insisted upon, and time schedules adhered to. That is not to say that I don’t bend the rules often. There have been many a Sunday night that I have spent cleaning the kids’ rooms, because I didn’t have the heart to ask their friends to leave so that they could pick it up themselves.

I always look at the time we spend together, as a time for making memories. We take a lot of pictures. I have spent many a Saturday afternoon on my hands and knees, searching for that deceptive toad that hops around the outskirts of a pond, and more than once we have caught him. We have created several memories as we huddled over a piece of paper with crayons in hand, and the creative juices flowing. I have several private memories also. The ones that are discovered at two in the morning when I pull the covers up to their neck, or when I find the word DADDY written inside a heart that was drawn by such small hands. The weekends are magical.

There have been some weekends though that just didn’t turn out the way they were planned. Maybe the weather intruded, or one of the kids weren’t feeling well, or maybe the budget just didn’t allow for certain extravagancies. It used to be that those weekends would really bother me. I would almost feel cheated. Then I realized that the kids really didn’t care about the extravagancies, and that sometimes it can be fun to play in the rain.

So, take it easy on yourself when things don’t turn out just so, and try and live through the eyes of your child. If only for a moment.

I get forty eight hours every two weeks, four days a month, forty eight days a year, to spend with my children. It’s not enough, but if nothing else, it will be full of memories.