Mother's Day for the Alienated Father

Today is Mother’s Day and for the past 2 weeks, there’s been a common question asked amongst a lot of alienated fathers and fathers of high conflict divorces: “should I do anything for my child’s mother for Mother’s Day?”.

It’s a complicated question to answer on one’s own, which is why so many fathers ask it.

One one side, through the painful experience of custodial blocking, a high conflict divorce, or even just an unwanted divorce…pain can be a powerful driver in decision making, and the instinct is to not do anything.

On the other side, there are the fathers seeking help with this question because they know that despite the pain they’ve endured, they know that an acknowledgment of Mother’s Day to their children’s mother is something beneficial to the child.

But sometimes doing what might seem right is the more painful option.

I’ll share something from my life on this topic.

In September 2018, I went through an extremely high conflict divorce, a divorce carefully initiated one day using false allegations against me. That was the last time I got to spend a night sleeping under the same roof as my then 2.5 year old son. The next 5 years would be hell, fighting for visitations, going stretches of 9-24 months with no contact with my son, and having to adapt to a process where as soon as there is positive advancement in the courts, new false allegations are made to halt the establishment of reunification.

I received this email the other day. 

The name of the sender was a person, a woman with a Latin name, not a company. And in the subject line, was the name of my ex-wife, the mother to my child.

It was an anxiety triggering moment.

A million thoughts go through your mind during those few seconds.

The assumption is that it’s legal related. So is this yet another negative, false allegation-related issue being sent by email? Is this a court representative or lawyer going on the offense yet again? Is this an intermediary contacting me as her representative to try to do what’s best for my son and resume contact?

And then I open the email, and it’s a spam email from a florist.

Seems they hadn’t removed me from their list after I had previously sent Mother’s Day flowers to my wife.

But the date in which I sent those previous flowers was May 2019, 8 months after I the marriage was over.

Even with what I had gone through with false allegations to initiate the divorce, the custodial blocking those first 8 months, all I could think about was what was best for my son.

So I sent my ex-wife flowers that day with a little teddy bear for Alexander, and a note from “my son” that said: “ "Happy Mother's Day, Mama! Thank you for being my mother! I love you!”

She was grateful and thanked me. But it was something done for my 3 year old son since he didn’t have his father there to coordinate with him and teach him about Mother’s Day.

That was 4 years ago. The conflict between my ex-wife and I has just gotten worse with each passing year due to her custodial blocking, and we have had no contact since March 2021.

So like all of the other fathers in similar situations, I had to ask the question of what to do today as well.

And for me, regardless of the pain and agony over the past 5 years, directly caused by my sons mother, she is still the reason my son exists on this planet. She might not ever want to recognize my part in the basic biology involved in my son being created, and she might not recognize my role in raising our son. But simply put, for 9 months, she carried him inside of her and brought him into this world.

My ex-wife will always be a part of who I am as a person, because she was responsible for giving me the greatest gift in the world: my son.

So for you fathers out there today, not knowing what to do, sometimes it’s as simple as recognizing that: your children wouldn’t exist without that woman, so help your children celebrate their mother, regardless of the pain you have endured. Your children deserve that.