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The dean of my college invited me into his office.
“Take a semester off,” he said. “Rest. Be with your
children.”
I don’t know what I would have done if it had not been for
that half-year sabbatical. As it was, I was so full of sadness
and fear and anger and despair that I wonder whether I was
really able to be a father to my children or to be a friend to
my friends.
We endured, somehow.
After the semester’s rest, I taught for one more year. I
feared that immersion in work would become my narcotic against
pain and fear, and thus my children would effectively lose their
other parent. Therefore I stepped out of teaching and found
other ways to get our living.
Raising two children as a single father was the hardest thing
I have ever done in my life. And I would go back and do it all
over again in a red-hot minute. I was always exhausted, often
afraid, and perpetually lonely. But even now, after John and
Stephanie are grown and on their own, I miss the life of those
days in spite of the exhaustion and fear and loneliness. I loved
being my children’s father.
We moved to a suburb of Birmingham. It was a way of beginning again.
The children went to school. I worked part-time at our church,
part-time at stained glass, part-time at building maintenance.
We had friends over, and they had us over. We took vacations to
Gulf
Shores sometimes and to the Smoky
Mountains
sometimes.
Stephanie and John grew to adulthood. Stephanie studied at California Culinary
Academy in San Francisco. John studied at Herzing College
in Birmingham.
Stephanie and her husband Konstantine now live in rural
southern
Vermont with
their two girls. John and Andrea live in
Richmond,
Virginia, with their baby boy.
I want my children and their families to live forever, and I
want each year to be fuller and happier than the year before.
Next: Second Marriage Begins and Ends |
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