At heart, this is a love story gone horribly awry.
Poor Karen Richardson, the clever, working class Northern girl from a dysfunctional family, taken under the wing of older radical feminists. Works at tiny York charity for single mothers. One day she meets Nick, and her carefully constructed feminist narrative falls apart. She falls deeply in love and renounces everything she used to believe.
“In 2006, I wrote a book with my husband Nick called Putting Children First. The book was intended to set out for parents, the ways in which working together after separation can bring better outcomes for children. As separated parents ourselves, we had gone through much of the difficulties that family separation brings. I was a single parent in the late eighties, struggling to bring up my daughter alone and, when I met him, Nick was recovering from the shock of separation from his very small children after their mother had decided to move on and move out, taking the children with her. Over the intervening years we both shared the care of our children, me with my daughter’s step father and he with the mother of his children, whilst he and I put off living together for some seven years in order not to disrupt our children’s lives too much. Not only have we both worked at the Centre for Separated Families for a combined thirty five years, we have lived the experience of family separation including single parenting, sharing care and step parenting.”
“When we wrote the book, the idea that family separation could damage children was way off limits. The prevailing orthodoxy back then and still, to some degree now, is the belief that talking about damage to children will somehow stigmatise people (usually single mothers). I could never understand the hysteria around this. As a single mother myself, who had been abandoned to bring up the baby alone, what I wanted most of all was information and support on how to ameliorate the impact of the lack of a father in my child’s life, but I couldn’t find it. What I could find, however, was a wealth of support which told me how brilliant I was as a single mother, how equal I was to everyone else and how normal I was. I didn’t feel normal. What I felt was abandoned and anxious about my child and being told I was brilliant didn’t make that feeling go away. What would have made it go away was information and support around how to help my child deal with the lack of a father in her life. How to answer questions about why she didn’t have a father and how to manage and maintain boundaries around what became a very chaotic pattern of her father turning up out of the blue and then disappearing again. I had to learn the hard way (as did my child) that this kind of engagement caused upset, hurt and attachment problems and that the way to deal with it was to set and maintain boundaries.
Then I met Nick and discovered the other side to family separation, a side in which his life was controlled by the whims of his children’s mother who remarried and became better off financially whilst still taking child support from him, even though he was caring for his children for half of the week. I watched the difficulties that young children struggle with as they try to make the transition from one household to another and once again, when we looked for help, we found nothing but silence or worse, a thinly veiled hysteria that hissed warnings about shared care and harm to children.”
“I won’t be rising on Valentines Day, unless its to make my husband breakfast in bed (listen out for the sharp intake of breath from the billion rising advocates on reading that one!) You see I love my husband. I love him because he is a man. I love him because he is, like me, full of strengths and weaknesses and I love him because he survived the worst that the eighties could throw at him in terms of feminist dismissal of who he is a person, of his position in the world and of the assertion that he is basically, at heart, a rapist. This horrible assertion, which demonised, demolished and devastated too many young men in that decade, was the result of second wave feminism gone, in my view, completely out of control. I could say more. I won’t. I was one of those feminists, I am not now.”
“I thank my best friend and my beloved husband, for his wisdom and his creativity and his fierce and unrelenting love for and protection of me. We are more together, more than we could be on our own and I am thankful for every day of this congruent life we are living together. Not perfect, not by a long chalk, for we are both as real and vulnerable to bumbling through life as everyone else is, but honest and courageous enough to look life right in the face and say bring it on.”
“Your clarity of vision, your refusal to be crushed, bent or broken despite it all is what keeps me going even when all around seems like it is descending into madness and those who are destined to suffer most are buying into the very concepts that will eventually render them extinct. Thank you for keeping on keeping on.”