Dads Dealing With Distant Parenting

Or What The Hell Do I Do Now?

I have a five year old son who lives about 500 kms away from me so my visits, now that he is in school, are only on long weekends.  There is a lot of travel time involved, usually by car.  Recently I have come to dread the visits, as the boy consistently cries himself to sleep on the first night, saying that he is missing his mom, who he just left around 7 hours ago.  It is hard to try to maintain a father-son connection with him when he's crying that he wants to be back home with his Mom and just wishes that I could live closer to him so he didn't have to come here.  Ow, kick in the balls...

I don't get along with his Mom; we've barely spent 30 minutes in total in the last 4 years since the Court Order talking civilly to each other.  She lives with him in her parents' basement suite in a wealthy area of Vancouver, and has ever since he was born.  We use a communication book to jot down important notes that one feels relevant to either the upcoming visit or a review of what happened for his return and text the small stuff, like where and when to pick him up or drop him off.  This might sound familiar to some.

Ok.  I can deal with this, I usually think.  It's just a phase.  After all, he wasn't doing this crying this last year.  I mean, it's been awhile, but still he was pretty okay with the visits up until last Christmas.  

Now, I've talked to a lot of people about this;  my wife has helped immensely in trying to help him realize all the good things that he does here; it's not like he's confined to a closet or anything.  We try to do family things, his little sister adores him and gets so excited when he arrives that for me that is half the fun, seeing her face light up when she sees him.

We ask him about how he is liking school, what he is doing and generally present as a strong family unit for him.  Yet he has taken to crying for his Mom once it's lights out and he's tucked into the top bunk, little sister underneath asking why he is crying, then getting him a tissue so he can wipe away his tears.  She even suggested that we drive him back to see his mom.  She's amazing, caring, empathetic and so adorable.

To me, his emotions are frustrating, annoying, aggravating, demoralizing, and back to frustrating.  Mom says he has cried for days about coming.  I am trying to be empathetic but it's hard to try comfort him as he says Mom 'is his favorite parent and the do stuff together'.  



There's a multitude of factors that I am sure go into his emotions right now and I am trying to empathize with how it must feel for him to be at one home for 90% of the month and then come over to our house for the last 10%.  Yet, from what i can gather from what he and his favorite parent do, there isn't really anything in particular that they do 'together' other than travel in the same car and go to IKEA to eat.

He attends kindergarten but his only friend moved away before Xmas and now he says he has none.  He takes swimming classes and Karate lessons (where Mom watches but does not participate).  He has gone to a ski day-camp 4x this year, which is basically a daycare system set up at the ski hill so his mom can go snowboarding.  For the last few months he obsessively talks about the video creation game Minecraft and he is good at it, to the point Mom puts up video clips on Youtube of his ...creations.  Before Minecraft it was Wii Mario Brothers after his Mom bought him a Wii last Christmas. I asked him at one point last summer how many games he had and he had 6 different variations of Super Mario.  That's a lot of games for a 4 year old, and he's good at all of them, meaning there has been a lot of hours logged onto the Tv.

So from that, this is what I surmise;

Ever since last Christmas, when she bought him that Wii, that has been his best friend and favorite parent.  His 'quality time' with his Mom is spent with the two of them either playing Super Mario or because a lot of them are 1 player (including Minecraft) she is merely in the vicinity while he plays.  It appears that she is using it as the electronic babysitter, which i totally get (from my 5 dad tips) but it's gone past being a reward for him, it's his routine.  The epiphany hits; when he comes here, he's going through video game withdrawal.   

We have a Wii, but there is a limit to how much he can play when he's here.  I have one Super Mario game and that's it. When he's here for only a few days we (my wife especially) encourages him to participate with us and his sister rather than play computer games.  Today we took out 3 board games and he was unable to focus on finishing a game of Hangman.  He played a simple matching game once, which took less than 2 minutes.  He went through his regular toys (the ones he hadn't seen since Christmas) and barely touched them.  The one thing he liked playing with was a balloon in the kitchen with his sister which gave them both a lot of laughs.  He also likes to make crafts with my wife, which was what he did after dinner instead of video games.  

So now I have to somehow find the ability to express to his mom, without causing the extra friction that I am judging her parenting style while I am the 'absentee father' that the amount of video games he is playing is affecting our time with him, creating this separation anxiety that appears not to be really about her but more that he gets to play Minecraft when she's around him.