Yeah, it's a shame so many men just give it up and move on. Then again, the court system hasn't been very kind to dads over the last hundred years or so. I suppose if me and the wife ever broke up and some judge told me that I wasn't good enough to be the parent, I'd probably chuck in the towel as well. Fortunately we never let it get to that. I made the stakes so high before we got married that it was gonna be worthless to let some judge decide what happens with the children.

While I've admitted I don't know any single dads personally, the ones I've heard of seem to fit my ideal. I am fairly sure that there's gotta be a good number that are just plain worthless as a parent, and still get the kids for one reason or another, and do just as horrible job as any woman could. Likewise, there's plenty of success stories out there of women raising decent boys (Jimmy Dean was raised by his Mama, and you never knew a more respectable pair of young men than him and his brother, so says my Grandma).

What gets my gizzard ain't whether its a woman or a man that makes the better parent. My belief is it takes both to really get the job done right. It's the arbitrary social preponderance that says a woman is automatically a superior candidate to be the only parent when separation is inevitable. There's been far, far too many court decisions that just automatically put the kids with a woman who was not as capable at providing for the needs of them kids, maybe financially, maybe emotionally, maybe other shortcomings as the father might be, and then to compensate for a bad decision, they force the father to pay for his "liabilities". That makes me want to wretch. It is wrong, it should never have been allowed to become a standard, and our society today is suffering at great expense because of it. It is also a big contributing factor as to why many young men shirk their responsibilities as a father, especially an illegitimate one, knowing full well they don't stand a chance in court of ever being a part of their kid's life. I can tell you, if my wife and I split up, and she fought me on custody and won, I'd likely put a bullet in her. That's what I told her before we got married, and I also said I expected the same from her if it went the other way. That crazy woman married me anyways. That's one helluva motivation to make things work out, don't ya think? We've been married 17 years now. I reckon when marriage ain't such an easy thing to get out of, you find ways to make it a success. Either that or you end up going to sleep every night with one eye open.

So the statement that a single mom is all that a kid has, for better or worse, in many cases is fairly true, but I wouldn't put it on the father so much as the state of mind of our society as a whole that this is now the case, and has been for most of my lifetime.

If we want better conditions for our kids, then lets make having kids a much more serious undertaking. Lets start imposing some real penalties on people who won't take the committment seriously, and let's be fair about it, so that one side isn't being run off while the other side gets rewarded. Lets get the parents of the kids that are having kids involved in this as well. That "free love, me generation" of the 60s and 70s has just about destroyed us, and the only way I can see we are gonna get it back is to take some pretty harsh measures.