A Mother's Vengeance
Men don't have children.
No, don't roll your eyes as if I've said something patently obvious. A lot of couples I see don't seem to know this—they say that 'they' have children. But they don't. The woman has the child. The man has whatever she allows him to have.
Some women are generous. They allow the father to participate with the children—to play with them, read to them, spend time with them. They may even insist on an equal share of the donkey work; the nappy changing and other unpleasant tasks. If a man does enough work, he may even feel a legitimate claim on the child, may feel that this makes him a parent of equal importance. This is an illusion. A woman wants to share responsibility not control.
Picture this: A mother in a business suit stands with her husband at a local playground. They chat with other parents while their small son runs around with the neighbourhood children. The boy falls over, scrapes his knee and starts to howl. Both parents run over to the child who looks up, lifts his arms and cries:
'Daddy!'
The man sees the look in his woman's eyes. He hands the boy over and the woman takes him inside. He goes over to the other parents with a sheepish grin on his face. The men smile awkwardly back, the women seem immersed in their own conversations and act like he's not there. For a while he pretends that everything is normal.
But from that day, the man experiences a change in his woman's opinion of him. He's no longer a husband who supports his wife's decision to work—he's a loser whose wife works because he can't earn enough to support them. He's no longer a man who believes in sexual equality—he's a hypocrite who uses Feminism as an excuse not to be a real man. He's no longer a devoted father—he's a wimp who spends time with his son because he hasn't got the balls to pursue real ambitions like normal men.
The man doesn't give in easily. He refutes her arguments, stands tall in his manhood and carries on regardless. So she begins an affair and makes no secret of it. The man finds himself eating dinner with his son while his wife is upstairs on the telephone or he's alone in the house at night, tortured by thoughts of what his wife is doing. He retaliates with everything he can think of save forcing her to leave. She's the child's mother; he can't bring himself to do that.
She has no such compunction. Finally, when he's broken and sleeping on a mattress on the floor of a friend's house, he asks what he did that she should hate him so much. 'You gave me the most beautiful boy in the world,' she said. 'And then you took him from me.
'And I am going to punish you for that.'