When Adrian and I were first dating, my nine-year-old daughter, Blixy, was going through a difficult transition. I had just broken up with Herb, a man we had lived with since Blixy was two years old, and whom she had come to call “Daddy” even though we had never legally married.
My memory of Blixy’s early years is that she was always a happy kid, and she seemed to love going to public school in Newfield, a rural community in upstate New York. But in the middle of fourth grade she had to transfer to a school in Chatham, New Jersey, where we had moved after I left Herb.
Blixy hated the new school. She said the other kids called her names. She hadn’t made any friends. And she started to come home with puncture marks on her palm where she’d dug the point of her pencil into her skin.
I freaked out. I went to the school, met with the teacher, and insisted that something be done. But after several meetings, nothing was done.
Adrian had four sons of his own, all older than Blixy, and he was as fanatic a parent as me. When your child is in danger, you forego your own safety and well being to save the child. Isn’t that a law of Nature or something?
It certainly was for me. And for Adrian.
When he heard about what was going on with Blixy, Adrian recommended a child psychiatrist, and we went to see him. But I was not able to wait for the weekly group therapy to have a positive effect.
I decided that the school system in Chatham was to blame, and we needed to move. I started looking at houses and bought one I could afford in Lake Hiawatha, a working-class neighborhood where there wouldn’t be those snooty types of kids we’d found in Chatham.
If I’d had more patience, maybe the therapy would have helped. Maybe Blixy would have gotten to know the kids in her class in Chatham better and made some friends.
But I’m not that kind of person or that kind of parent.
Neither was Adrian. He was the kind of man who would do whatever it took to fix the problems in his son’s lives.
Shortly after we married, he moved to Titusville, Florida for a few months with his son Eric in an attempt to save his life. Blixy and I remained in New Jersey so she could finish school. The arrangement was OK with me.
I knew that Adrian’s sons were his priority, and that meant he would understand that Blixy was my priority.
Over the years we continued to support each other as parents. As it turned out, having four sons meant we put four times as much energy into his children as mine, but it was the principle that mattered to me.
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I’d dated men in the past who had no clue. One even said to me, when Blixy was a baby, “If we show an interest in her, then other people will, too,” as if there were no way we could be genuinely engaged by her. This same man wanted me to leave her sleeping on the beach on a blanket while we went for a swim without her.
OK, I had no interest in babies either before I had one. I’m sure this man changed his tune once he became a father.
But before I met Adrian, I had never known anyone as committed to his children as he was. Herb’s two children, in fact, had warned me that he was not a good choice as a father for Blixy. They had survived his authoritarian parenting and still loved their Dad, but they wouldn’t recommend him to anyone else.
Blixy’s birth father never found work in the four years we lived in LA, and after she was born, he didn’t then either. In desperation, I left him in California and brought Blixy home with me to New Jersey when she was nine months old. She lost a father but gained two sets of loving grandparents. He never bothered to have contact with her again.
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It took me a number of tries to find a good father for Blixy, but I got it right in the end. She said to me recently that Adrian is the only man she considers to be her father.