So who is the bad guy?

I am a single Mum. I have a 9 year old daughter who I am raising alone. I get great support from my lovely Mum and some terrific friends but essentially I’m doing it alone. I left my marriage five years ago after years of abuse, both verbal and physical. Believe me, I didn’t envisage myself as a divorced, single parent at this stage of my life but here I am!

My ex-husband deeply resents the fact that I left our marriage. As members of a fundamentalist church community as we were, you just don’t get a divorce, ever, for better or for worse. Our marriage and its problems were well hidden from our friends and the leadership of the church until I left.

To this day, despite his remarriage, my ex-husband continues to verbally abuse me and blame me for the failure of our marriage. He pays the barest minimum child support, rarely sees our daughter and even when he plans to see her, often lets her down at the last minute.

So, I guess by now, some of you are thinking this is going to be another man-bashing rant about ex-husbands and how they are all bastards. Not so.

In fact, what I want to talk about is the way our society and the media talks about divorce, separation and children. What has bothered me immensely in recent years is the combative, gender-based approach that society and the media often seems to take with this issue.

The tabloid media often depicts the cliche “dead-beat dad”who won’t pay child support and is unreliable and irresponsible. How often have we seen a bloke being chased along the street by a reporter having loaded questions thrown at them about how they don’t pay child support? It’s not helpful and serves to perpetuate a gender based myth that heaps of guys are dead beats and women are all badly done by.

Then we see blokes climbing bridges and protesting about the way that fathers are treated by the court system. For a while, the media seems to pick up on this and we see stories about fathers who are prevented by the courts from seeing their kids and how difficult and obstructive ex-wives can be.

Often when people divorce they seek out others in a similar situation to talk to. Usually it will be a person of the same gender. I believe that often what happens is it turns into a gender bashing exercise. If you are a divorced Dad, you will have no trouble finding a bloke in a similar situation who wants to join you in a conversation about their bitch of an ex-wife and how she takes all his money and makes it impossible for him to see the kids. If you are a woman, you will find no shortage of women ready to tell you about their bastard ex-husband and how they won’t pay child support and how difficult they are to deal with.

It seems to me that this gender based, combative approach is entirely unhelpful. Yes, no doubt there are Dads who don’t pay child support. Some are violent and present a real danger to their kids. Equally, I know some Dads who are simply beautiful examples of caring, committed and responsible fathers. They do their very best to maintain routine, stability and show great unconditional love to their kids. I can think of three such men, straight off the top of my head!

My situation is sadly, not so ideal. The thing is, just because my ex behaves this way, doesn’t mean I paint every ex-husband and father with the same brush.

I know some women who do it very tough. They have very limited support; financial, emotional or physical. Their ex-husbands try to punish them through the children, using manipulation to put their own vindictive agendas ahead of the children’s best interest. I know some men who experience the very same thing, women preventing them from being able to see their children, being obstructive and difficult and bad mouthing them to their kids.

The thing is, it’s not just Dads who let their kids down. It’s Mums as well. We can’t generalise about who the bad guy is. Every situation is different. Every family is different. Every divorce or separation is different. Until we stop with the cliché“dead-beat dad” stuff or the “difficult ex-wife who makes my life a misery”stuff and put the kids first, we are never going to be able to give our kids what they need.

It’s not about gender. It’s about character, purely and simply.