Goodbye

So today was the day that I offically said goodbye to my daughter. The family courts recieved my request to withdraw my application for contact and with that my daughter is now no longer a part of my life.

I have fought the system for 18 months, spent somwhere in the region of £14,000 (not including time off work), countless hours of jumping though any hoop I was asked to, and this is where it ended. I cut my hair because I was asked to prove I wasn’t drinking in excess, test came back close to abstinent. I attended consuelling every other week, at £50 per time (not included in the £14,000), to prove I was taking steps to improve my mental health, which was only in such a state because of the loss of my daughter from my side. I proved everything that I was asked to do, I pushed myself beyond breaking ponit serveral times, and it wasn’t enough. Anybody who is close to me knows just how much I’ve fought for this and I can’t thank all those who helped me in it enough. And anybody who has seen my with little ones knows how good I am with them.

Myself and my daughter regualrly video called when I was fighting for her. Some calls where a struggle to engage her as you can imgaine with a 4 year old, but on the whole she enjoyed them. We played hide and seek, we played tea partys, nurses, schools, etc all over the phone, somtimes talking for up to an hour about life in general. We made cards together weekly that I would then send to her, with drawings (I can’t draw for toffee), stickers, glitter, feathers, and other arts and crafts stuff in. Even though contact was being denied she still called me daddy and told me she loved me. However this didn’t last long as she soon started to be very nervous and shy on the phone, often asking for approval to talk to me. The weeks leading up to me withdrawing I saw her get upset and cry every time she saw me on the phone, she wouldn’t speak and didn’t even want to be in the same room as the phone. Rightly or wrongly my daughter hates me now and that is the reason for me withdrawing from the court process.

She now has her own family and somebody else she calls daddy. She is happy in her new life and isn’t interested in who I am anymore. I would’ve fought until the bitter end for my baby girl but how can I justify it when all its causing her is pain? How can I keep fighting every day knowing it’s making her cry every time shes reminded I’m still there?

I’m not asking for a ‘u ok hun x’ style sympathy, I’m asking for anger. Anger that in a world where everybody now has equal rights that fathers don’t have any. On paper we are equal to mothers but in practice, by every professional, its not the case. Social services, cafcass, gp’s, the police, and most of all the family courts. I once asked a policeman what would happened if I denied the mother access to my daughter? I was told I would be arrested on kidknapping charges, yet its common place for mothers to do it the other way around. My barrister told me that equal rights was not “the flavour of the month” in family courts, “not since the 90’s”! Social services have conducted serveral reports , not related to me at all, and always stated on them that they tried to get hold of father but weren’t able to. No calls, no letters, no emails were sent to me and they made zero effort to contact me unless I rang them and even then didn’t include me in the reports or give me copies.

How can it be right that fathers get treated like social outcasts when they can offer that child so much. Fathers are just as important and have just as much to offer their children as mothers do, but it seems everybody still holds firm the dated belief that men are nothing but emtionally retarded bread winners.

I hope that when my daughters is older she seeks to find me and I will show her everything I did to fight for her until it wasn’t in her best interests anymore. I still write her letters and express how I feel on a personal blog which hopefully one day I’ll get to show her, but for now I have to grieve the loss of my daughter and accept I’ve lost the battle to see her to systematic sexism.