How to create a parent-sized hole

Missing -- our dad

Are you finding that the other parent to your children is becoming insufferable?

It may comfort you to know that you are not alone. But it does rather lead one to ask what has changed so much given that you did, at some time, "lie with" that other parent. You have offspring to prove it.

No matter, you don't have to put up with it. So, here's a plan by which you can create a parent-sized hole.

Step 1: make allegations that the other parent has been violent, and seek a restraining order or aggravated or domestic violence order that legally locks the other parent out of the house and keeps them at a distance from you and the children.

You don't have any evidence of such an incident? It doesn't matter: make it up. No-one is going to check or challenge you -- or at least, not for a long time... which leads to the next step.

Step 2: in court (multiple years later), highlight the time the estranged parent has been absent from the lives of the children and that therefore, this parent is no longer relevant.

Voila - one parent-sized hole.

There are however, a few caveats.

First, this is a messy operation. It will very likely rip the heart out of the other parent in a manner akin to surgery conducted with a wood saw, without anesthesia and very likely leave the patient breathing, but only just and simultaneously wishing it were otherwise. (It might have been more merciful to simply dig a hole and bury the offending parent).

Second, it is a scorched earth policy destroying that which is precious to human life, the very life that we create. That is, it will almost definitely burn the children - although the legal system will argue that this in the best interests of the children.

And this then leads to the final rather more legal caveat. Existing laws really only allow this strategy to mums, not to dads.

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(The illustration is by Gaye Dell and appears in the book, The Other Glass Ceiling.
For more detail on how this strategy is executed, see this person's expanded account.)

Confessions of an alleged child abuser

Discouraging child abuse or encouraging father abuse?

August 21 was a horrible evening. Blustery winds and driving rain buffeted the windows and the door.  

A knock at the front door that no-one was expecting heralded the arrival of a different kind of storm.

I had three boys spreading toys around my home - my four and a half year old son and the two boys from next door.  To help me oversee this  chaos was the father from next door as well.

I left them to answer the unexpected knock at the door. I wondered if it might be my neighbour’s wife arrived home early come over to join the party. Or perhaps my partner.

Nothing prepared me for what was there.

There, huddled in the wintry, wet porch were five people. Five people who were quite willing to stir up a storm.

At front was a shortish man with a rather striking white shirt with odd black decorations on it. Beside him, a very tall man (well over six foot) in dark blue shirt and jeans. And alongside, a youngish woman, dressed in a unmemorable way, but normal-enough looking. This core of three was backed by a further two men for whom I have no description whatsoever. I guess I never got to processing who they were, or if I did, it was masked and lost by the events that followed. It was astounding enough, in such intemperate conditions, to come to my door to be confronted by five people. Five people as I was to find out, who were exceedingly keen to talk to me.  

Seemed a little like overkill for Mormons. At any rate, salespeople generally call by the telephone at this hour – yes, almost exactly this hour, 5.30pm the buggers. Trying to sell me some new telephone service from the middle of India. No, they didn’t look like salespeople.

However, they started like most of the salespeople do. A shortish man asked asked me to confirm my name.  I did so and I asked them their business – as I do when they contact me by phone.

The shortish man stepped forward and said they were from the Child Protection Agency and they wished to come inside. What the ... ?! My guts wrenched sideways. The Child Protection Agency? What did they want? Isn’t that the service that comes and takes children away from families that they deem are unfit to care for the child. My mind screamed. What was this about?

Despite my fears, my nerves, I realized that no accusation was being made. I was merely ‘catastrophising’ as one of my friends would put it. I needed to establish what they were here for. Later I would realize that five people showing up at your front door either from or supporting the Child Support Agency is not ‘catastrophising’ – it is a catastrophe.