Owen's Story, Spring 2025

One of the things I did that I never figured I would do was I became a single parent. I have one son in his early 40s. When he was in kindergarten, his mother got sick and basically was incapable of taking care of him. So I had to do that and I had to get him up, get him to school, then I go to work and I bring him home from school. I make him dinner, his mother dinner, rinse and repeat. And as he got older, I did it more.

Finally, his mother and I divorced. I basically got custody of him and it was very difficult, because he was very difficult. He was very upset and angry at his situation. He did understand his mother's illness was a problem, but at the same time, he had a propensity to get himself into trouble. He would sometimes claim that he was getting himself into trouble so that I and his mother would be back together again. That wasn't gonna be the case.

I had to be a combination of mother and father. I still had a full time, very demanding job. I had a huge amount of frustration and anger that I think was pointed towards him, because he didn't let me live the life that I wanted to live. Usually, when you get married and have kids, you figure everybody, you know, takes their turn at doing stuff. And when one person has to do all the stuff, you gotta blame it on somebody.

I was angry at him. I was angry at him for quite a while. And one day, an episode happened, I yelled at him, which I did on a regular basis when I got frustrated. I realized at that point that it wasn't him I was angry at. I was angry at the situation. And it wasn't the right thing for me to take it out on him. And that was one of those aha moments, one of those things where I grew up, um, sort of proud of the fact, if you will, that I grew up at that moment.

I stopped yelling at him. He was surprised. You know, you could see in his, you know, when I catch him with something or doing something, you could see that look in his eye. Okay, here it comes. Dad's gonna yell at me. And I didn't yell. It was like, he was very confused. And after a while, I just told him, I'm not gonna yell at you anymore. I said, I'm just gonna talk to you. Like I said, it took him a while to accept that as a reality.

Being a single dad takes a lot of emotional energy and that doesn't leave you much time to have emotional energy to go out and find somebody else to share it with. There was another bit of anger and frustration, if you will. By my understanding that this is what was happening and, you know, I was very unhappy about it. But again, I was able to realize that it wasn't his fault. It was the situation we were in.

Over the course of a number of years, we became good friends, which is interesting cause sometimes people look at their parents as their parents and other people can look at their parents as their parents and their friend. You know, as he got older and he started to try to be out on his own, it didn't always work. Sometimes he came back, you know, we talked a lot. I gave him advice.

One of the things he taught me was that even if he doesn't do what I suggest that he does, he listens to me. Again, to me, that was a success because I was able to build a relationship with him that allowed him to communicate with me. So we communicate with each other and he would take that in as a piece of data when he made the decision about what he should do and what he shouldn’t do.

Now, you know, he's 47 years old, he's married, he's got kids, he's got a dog, he's got a house, he's got a job. You know, we're still friends, we still talk. He will sometimes call me and say, hey, dad, I have this situation. What do you think? And it could be something to do with work, it could be something to do with a personal relationship, something to do with finances. Like I said, he doesn't always do what I suggest, but he listens. And that makes me feel real good that I was able to have that relationship, build that relationship and keep the relationship.

In part because I've met so many people when I ask them about where they came from and their parents, and they say, oh, my parents were total basket cases. And, you know, this one was an alcoholic and this one was this, this one was never around, this one was terrible. I'm thinking, how lucky my son is that he has a good dad. And I'm very proud of that.