Sandra was the proverbial Supermom. A mother`s place is with her children, she believed, and so she stayed at home with her two boys until they were in grade school. She baked cookies from scratch, sewed most of their clothes and alternated carpool duties with other stay-at-home moms. When her children entered school, she became active in the PTA and was eventually elected president. Her family was her career, and she was content with a traditional family role. There would be no day care, no substitute parent or part-time mother for her children. What, then, was this dedicated-and-now-div orced mother doing without custody of her children?
No one, not even her own parents, could understand. The one unpardonable sin of motherhood is giving up your children, and Sandra had given up hers.
I met Sandra at an Austin, Tex., gathering of Mothers Without Custody.
”It`s the one place I can go without feeling like someone`s going to nail me to a cross and accuse me of being a bad mother,” Sandra said with anger in her voice. Like the 10 other mothers in the group this evening, Sandra has had to defend her actions countless times to people who invariably look at her in horror and say, ”How could you do something like that?”
There are, by some estimates, at least 500,000 mothers without custody in the United States. An ad placed in newspapers in Dallas, Houston, San Antonio and Austin by a University of Texas student working on her dissertation on this topic produced more than 500 replies in Texas alone. ”If that many women contacted me through these small ads,” says Cataline Herrerias, herself a mother without custody, ”imagine how many others there are like me who are still in the closet.”
Not having custody of one`s child is the last closet issue for women, says Dale Blanchard, a founder of the national organization of Mothers Without Custody, based in Maryland. Blanchard receives 200 letters a week from women who need either support or advice in their noncustodial situations. ”I`d say that most of them, most of us who don`t have custody, have either been forced by economic conditions to relinquish custody or have given custody to the father at the time of divorce for financial reasons,” Blanchard says.
Sandra`s situation is typical. She`d dropped out of college to support her student-husband, who is now a successful dentist. When the kids came, she stayed at home with them, figuring that she would go back to work sometime in the vague future. The family didn`t really need the small income she`d make as a receptionist. But then, after 10 years of marriage, the divorce came. The courts, which in Texas determine custody on the basis of the ”best interests of the child,” in reality give custody most often to the mother. They follow an older precept, the so-called ”tender years doctrine.” This notion, which states that very young children are psychologically better off staying with their mothers, has dominated Texas custody decisions for some 50 years. Only women who were proven ”unfit” didn`t get custody.
Sandra, too, was awarded custody of her two children, but economic realities impinged on her and her family. She found that with little work experience the best she could do was a receptionist job that paid $9,000 a year. On that she could barely afford a one-bedroom apartment in a decent neighborhood. Her ex-husband, who had also wanted custody of the kids, refused to pay the requisite child support awarded by the courts. (Only 40 percent of fathers actually pay the full amount of child support.) Sandra couldn`t afford an attorney to ”go after him,” and the backlog of cases for nonpayment assured her that it would be at least a year until her case could be heard. Still, she`d heard that other women go to school at night to earn their degrees and work during the day and still manage to support their children. So she tried, too. After nearly two years, she gave up.
”I did the only thing that was right,” she says. It is a rehearsed speech she gives to herself every day. ”I decided in the best interests of my children. It wasn`t fair to have them live in a cramped apartment, with barely enough to eat, with no new toys, away from their friends in their old neighborhood. And I had so little time to spend with them. Their father wanted them–he was making a good living, still had the house. And I was reaching a breaking point.
”I couldn`t make it financially. I just couldn`t. I did what was best for my children by letting them live with their father. That`s what mother love is all about, isn`t it?” She breaks off to talk with another woman in the group, one who relinquished custody at the time of divorce. Again, this woman`s motives were primarily economic: She couldn`t afford a lawyer to fight a custody battle against her ex-husband in court. Most lawyers demand part of the money up front, and a custody battle usually costs anywhere from $5,000 to $15,000.
This mother without custody is bitter. ”I didn`t decide to give up custody,” she states, puffing anxiously on a cigarette. ”It was a matter of who had the most money. Let me tell you, it doesn`t matter what the courts say: Whoever has the money to fight a custody battle gets the kids. And that`s the truth. No money, no kids.”
More and more women are either giving up at the custody-battle level for lack of funds or, like Sandra, are finding that being a single mother on a low income and going to school and working full-time is really not in the ”best interests” of their children. Like Sandra, they`re reversing custody to the father, who is usually in a more stable economic situation. And, for this, they are labeled ”bad mothers” by friends, family, society.
Sandra`s defensive pose falters. Anger flashes across her face for one terrible moment. ”I fell for it. I fell for it all–the whole traditional mother scene,” she says. ”And then I saw that they were right, the women who yelled about women earning only 59 cents on every dollar a man earns. I thought feminism was stupid and anti-family. But I was wrong.” Her indignation mounts. ”If I had it to do over again, I would have gone to school and worked while I was married. Then, maybe, I`d have my kids with me today. By staying at home with them, I lost them.”
Sandra mistakenly assumed that motherhood is a job with lifetime tenure.
