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About 17 years ago I divorced my wife. It was an acrimonious, heart-breaking divorce (in the real world, aren’t they all?) made worse by the fact that our two little children, still at primary school, were thoroughly perplexed and hurt by the bizarre antics of their lunatic parents. My ex took the furniture, the children, the newly paid-for car and a good chunk of the modest proceeds of the sale of our house. But I mustn’t exaggerate – she left behind a single bed, a cheap radio, a second-hand bicycle and the dog.

Aching loneliness

I lay in bed nights often crying bitter tears about my wounded, sad children, wondering if they were going to be taken to Johannesburg along with their mother and her (then) skulking, married lover. I was nursing deep anger, which for many long months threatened to spill over into melodramatic and uncivilised acts of retribution against the adulterous pair. To this day, I regret not succumbing to at least one manly, honest impulse of anger. A smashed car windscreen, for example, would’ve made me feel a lot better, and that’s the simple truth of it. I hung on grimly to sanity and purpose. After work, walking home in the rain on a dark winter’s night, back to a large gloomy, empty, childless house was misery itself. Loneliness is like an aching cancer of the soul.

With at least one in three or more marriages in South Africa ending in divorce – most of them involving the wrecked lives of children – men are, as never before, facing the brutal challenge of rebuilding their lives and somehow staying connected to their children. Few get it right.

Ongoing loss

The devastation that a man feels when he loses his wife and children after divorce is convulsed outwards in a silent scream that society seldom seems to notice. Often society doesn’t want to hear it and men themselves are not equipped to articulate their agony and sense of ongoing loss and failure, much less deal with it. Most divorced men feel that everything is against them – their ex-wives, the legal system, society itself. Unfortunately, this perception is often rooted in reality. Even now, in this modern age, men are summarily ordered into the role of an absent guardian parent who is only given permission to see his children every second weekend, while his ex-wife almost routinely gets custody of the children and expects regular payment for the maintenance of his children in someone else’s home. A home that is often led by a rival male.