I noticed a drive for people to restore dead echoes, and this one came
immediately to mind.  Not that it's totally dead, but I figured I'd post a
little something in here, being as it's a relatively rare area of expertise in
current [USA] society.
    I've been a single parent of a mixed race (mulatto) boy for over six years
now.  Our situation has been very far from normal; nothing about it has been
routine.
    When I was deployed with the US Army (don't judge me on that, please, I
didn't support the war effort and my logic for joining _is_ available for
discussion privately or in another echo, just point me there [I'm an open
book]) in Germany, supporting operation OIF, I met the woman whom I was quite
sure I was going to be spending the rest of my life with.  She was from Nairobi
Kenya, living in Germany after having immigrated there due to her first
marriage to a German man whom she married after they met when he had been
vacationing on Kenya's beach resorts.
    It took me weeks to woo her properly, but I never gave up, and eventually
it paid off.  Our romance took off in an absolute whirlwind.  I had over a year
left of my deployment, and except for some annual training and one short
disagreement, we spent the entire time together.  We knew that we would be
getting married and near the tail-end of the deployment we decided to have a
baby.  She was a couple of months pregnant when I began demobilization with my
unit.
    Unfortunately due to the discontinuities between the national guard and the
'active' army, what would've been a routine matter to have JAG assistance with
was completely shuffled under the table.  Nobody would help.  I got back to the
United States and nobody in my local unit when I transfered back to North
Dakota knew what to do, either.  It appeared that the only possible recourse
was for me to spend a hefty chunk of the money that I'd saved in Germany and to
go the civilian agency route.
    This was a pain.  I had to send her, expenses paid by myself, to Nairobi,
to gather documents from her highschool, which had burned down a decade before
during a civil war, _twice_.  I think in the end the lawyers and consular
officials that I had finally made friends with just said 'look we don't care
that the documents were probably torched; just send her to Kenya to get the
papers-- as long as she comes back with some it is all good' (advocating
counterfeit papers).  It took about a year to get things this far.
    In the meantime I had flown out to see her once again while she was at the
8th month of her pregnancy; I had decided to spend that time with her to help
with the tail end of the pregnancy, and to help her with the first couple of
months of dealing with my son.
    Unfortunately, during this period, things became apparent in her treatment
of her two daughters that would end up terrifying me about the treatment of my
son in my absence.
    To make what is truly an epic story of military and legal incompetence,
heart-shredding drama, and personal agony bordering on insanity a little bit
shorter, I'm going to summarize what happened here.  Unless, of course, y'all
would like a little bit more information on these matters.
    Wages in North Dakota had not yet inflated from the oil boom that has now
been so widely publicized around the USA.  I had no college degree, nor no
strings to pull.  The North Dakota national guard wasn't helping me local
decent employment nor giving me temporary work at the armory as the New Jersey
national guard had been kind enough to do.  I was unable to find a job that
would meet the minimum salary requirements for _national poverty standards_ for
a family of three.  Which wasn't applicable, because in North Dakota you can
live quite comfortably on the entry level wages that I'd been making even for a
family of three, at least at the time.
    I went out to see her and help with my son one more time, but these
difficulties were starting to tear us apart (along with the internal demon
gnawing at my gray matter and telling me that maybe she wasn't the woman I
thought that she was, with the way that I now knew she treated her children in
high stress situations).
    Our engagement fell apart.  I was able to obtain custody later on,
utilizing the very last of the money that I had squirreled away from the army
deployment, when her abuse because public knowledge and she was reported to a
German social worker (Jugendamt).  It took well over $10k, and left me pretty
close to absolutely penniless.
    Eventually she married another soldier that was deployed there and got her
permanent trip to the states.  Now that she was here, due to a clause in our
international custody agreement, we had to have yet another hurdle making sure
that she wasn't going to be able to get my son and do god knows what with him
(she'd discussed middle school, kidnapping him, all sorts of other fun things
in the interim).

    I'm interested in hearing the stories behind how others have become single
fathers, and what kind of influence it has had on their lives.  I know that if
I wouldn't have gotten my son, the insanity of not knowing he was safe, and the
drunken calls from his mother, may have well killed me.  I'm pretty sure that
they would have, honestly.
    My son has become the rock in my life that has provided me the stability to
work for something to permanently better myself that I've needed all of my
life.  Every day, no matter how tired I am after trying to do what I need to
for our survival, I sit down with him and answer any and every question that he
has to the fullest extent that I can.  I try to explain everything to him, and
to keep that thirst and curiosity to know how the world works alive with him. 
I want him to be able not to aspire to the level of my shoulders, but to be
able to start there and go as high as he would like in his life.
    People seem to judge me on this, though.  I mean, some of the comments are
kind of cute, especially from teeny-boppers going through the mall and the
like.  Saying things like 'awww, I want a mixed baby,' although that does
strike me as objectifying a child of another race a little bit.  When it comes
right down to my role as a single father, though, people seem surprised when
they watch my son and I long enough and they noticed that I am a single father
who _cares_ and is taking time to attend to everything that he needs.  Some
people still just assume that he'll end up broken.
    I'd like to hear other people's comments, ideas, feedback, and most of all,
if there are any single fathers around and reading this, I'd love to hear your
stories.
    Best wishes & happy new year to everyone!

    -Damon

    --Damo dice, "Perhaps today IS a good day to die!"
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