Either way, the way he describes his kids here is just a complete 180 from Mary's letter. I can't wrap my head around it.
Remember that this piece is 10 years old, and Mary's letter was about the last few years after he remarried... The entire point of Mary's piece was that he made a 180° change in his presence in his children's lives.
Alright, no clue what the fuck is wrong with cutting and pasting, but this post is a fucking mess. I tried to use another browser to see if it cleaned up, but Chrome saves my password so I don't remember what it is. My account here is attached to an email I no longer have access to. I can't reset my password because I can't access the email it would be sent to and I can't change the email because you need your password to change it.
The only reason I changed the size of my comments in between quotes is when I hit preview, they were so tiny it must have been font size -17. So I made them 12 point so we could read it and now I have brackets and /size all over the place. Hope it makes sense.
No offense, but I am not certain we read the same letter. My criticism from the beginning was that she did not show a 180; she wrote how he always sucked as a dad. She doesn't mention one nice thing about him at a father, not even one."You might ask, 'How were we to know? We read that he loved spending time with his children and that he'd been drug-free for years!' In reality, what you didn't want to acknowledge was a paranoid man who couldn't remember his own lyrics and who was only photographed with his children a handful of times in 15 years of fatherhood [emphasis mine]. I've always wanted to share more than anyone was comfortable with. When writing a book years ago, it pained me to sometimes gloss over so much grief and struggle, but I did what I thought was best for Noah and Lucy. I knew they would one day see and feel everything that I'd been trying to shield them from, and that they'd eventually be brave enough to say, 'That mess was our father. We loved him, but a deep-rooted mix of love and disappointment made up the majority of our relationship with him [/size][again emphasis mine][/size].'"[/size][/size]It basically says Scott was nearly always a fuck up and sucked as father. Seems pretty clear to me, but she goes on.[/size][/size]"Even after Scott and I split up [once again, emphasis mine], I spent countless hours trying to calm his paranoid fits, pushing him into the shower and filling him with coffee, just so that I could drop him into the audience at Noah's talent show, or Lucy's musical. Those short encounters were my attempts at giving the kids a feeling of normalcy with their dad. But anything longer would often turn into something scary and uncomfortable for them . . ."[/size][/size][/size]
That first phrase also makes it clear that it wasn't just the last few years, it wasn't just after the split it up, it was EVEN after, which means all the stuff she's talking about also occurred when they were together.
"When Scott did move on to another relationship, I hoped it would inspire him to grow . . . Instead, when he remarried, the children were replaced. They were not invited to his wedding; child support checks often never arrived. Our once sweet Catholic boy refused to watch the kids participate in Christmas Eve plays because he was now an atheist. They have never set foot into his house, and they can't remember the last time they saw him on a Father's Day."[/font]
[/size][/size]The way I read this, all that other stuff was going on during and after their marriage, but after he remarried he was gone entirely, stopped even paying for them, and didn't want to see them.
