Blogging, that is. Along with splitting up with my wife, only seeing my kids two or three times a week, and internet dating. Oh, and scuba diving, but that's a different story altogether.
This being the first entry on this blog, I suppose I'd better start with the introductions. My name is... well, I'm keeping that to myself for the moment, but let's say for the moment it's Patrick. I have three delightful kids whom I love so much it hurts. Just over two and a half years ago, my wife decided to end our 13-year marriage - effectively evicting me from my house, my life, and even my own identity.
You think that's a little over the top? Not a bit. Back then, I knew what I was. I was a husband, a father, a householder. I was Nuclear Family Man. Middle England, Two-Point-Four Children (well, not literally, obviously), Mortgage-paying Man.
Now? Well, now I'm part of a huge and growing diaspora of single men who don't even know what to call ourselves. Absent Dads? Except we're not, we're with our children in our hearts every moment of every day. And anyway, for many of us, it wasn't our choice to absent ourselves from our families, so terms like this that imply a degree of blame seem a little unfair. Estranged Fathers? No, because estranged implies you never see your kids, that you've become strangers. Single Dads? That's what we'd be if we were living with our children, bringing them up alone, so that's not quite right. Non-Resident Male Parents? Well, it's technically correct, I suppose, but a bit coldly bureaucratic.
So we're the No-Name Dads. Who represents us? No-one. Single mothers have their advocacy groups, not to mention the family courts and the Child Support Agency. We've got Fathers For Justice, God help us. Fair play to them, hiring all those superhero costumes must be hard work, but who wants to be associated with a bunch of dingbats with a popularity rating on a par with the Daleks and Didier Drogba? Let's face it, we're on our own.
I'm not looking for sympathy here (well, a little, perhaps, if you have any going). Just trying to explain how utterly alien and alone we find ourselves. Cut off from all the things we spent our married life building up, and suddenly expected - in our early middle age, just as we were beginning to get a breathing space between the mortgage payments and house improvements - to rebuild our lives from scratch.
What's more, there are no real guides to how we're supposed to go about it. Plenty of column inches are given over to the plight of single mums (and that plight is very real, and I'm not knocking it, don't get me wrong). But the only things you're likely to read in the press about single dads are the legal battles to win access to their kids, or how their absence has created a generation of embittered, behooded teenage boys, and so on. The real experience of single dad-ism - the strange mixture of loneliness and freedom, the unexpected dilemmas over issues as diverse as new partners and Christmas presents, the weirdness of dealing with your ex-wife while divorcing her - none of that gets a mention. It deserves to. There's a lot of us about, living that life right now, and it's time someone read about it.
I never really finished with the introduction to my own particular experience, did I? I said that my marriage had broken up after 13 years - but the last 3 of those were very unhappy for both of us, and involved a lot of arguing and shouting. On both sides - I'm not going to duck my share of the blame. But that was it - just a general falling out of love with each other (and a falling into mutual contempt and dislike, if you will). There was no-one else involved, no other woman/man, no domestic violence, nothing sordid or dangerous. Just two people who couldn't stand being married to each other any longer.
How it happened was like this. My Soon-To-Be-Ex-Wife asked for a separation. I said no, we should stick together for the kids. She asked again, I said no again, she threatened to take the kids away unilaterally (and I was unversed enough in the legalities of divorce to take this as a serious threat). At which point, I agreed, and my then life abruptly evaporated.
Since then? Well, we're still going through the legal shenanigans - the decree nisi is through and the decree absolut isn't far off. I live round the corner from my old family home, in a flat so small that there should be sawdust on the floor, and a little wheel in the corner for me to run round and round on. I've had one serious relationship in the last two years, and have just begun another (but more about those, and the difficulties a single dad faces with them, at another time). My Soon-To-Be-Ex is still single, but claims to be happy, which was the point of the exercise, I suppose. Am I happy? I don't know. I regularly feel lonely; I often feel tired, as I laboriously build a new life from under the ruins of the old one. But I'm not unhappy, well, not most of the time - just still weirded out by the whole Divorced Dad Experience.
OK. That's enough for one evening. I want to use this blog to tell you about why being a Divorced Dad IS so weird, but I'll have to do it in bite-sized chunks. First up will be about, I think, the immediate aftermath of having your marriage collapse on you. Unless you'd rather hear about the internet dating of course...