Here’s this week’s Ask The Morning After:
Dear Morning After,
I have an issue that some of your listeners may have encountered and could give me some advice on how to handle my delicate situation.
I have a 9 year old daughter with my ex who has been non-existent in our lives for 8 and a half years. I moved my daughter and I to this area to be close to my parents who bought a shore house 5 years ago. If not for their help I don’t even want to imagine where we would be. My ex owes thousands of dollars in child support and although picked up as a dead beat and spent time incarcerated he continued for years to evade paying support and made no attempts to see our child.
You can imagine my surprise when we saw him in a local store and he approached us. He seemed to be more together than he ever had been. He also seemed genuinely taken back seeing our daughter. He asked for my number to contact me so we could talk about possible visitation. I took his number instead and thought long and hard and consulted my family before I contacted him. Over the past 6 months he has made a couple of child support payments and has had a couple of supervised visits with our daughter. He has already cancelled visits HE requested. I fear his temporary pang of guilt got the best of him and he still does not want to have the responsibility of being a father and all that comes with it and that he will likely disappear when support enforcement catches up with him.
Here is my dilemma, I was sending out Christmas cards and my daughter wanted to know why I don’t send one to her father and wants to know when we are going to go shopping for gifts for him. I have spent years sheltering my daughter from the truth of where her father has been so that she never felt unwanted. How do I look my 9 year old in the face and tell her I am not sending him a card and that I have no intentions of shopping for gifts for her Dad.
Angela/Cape May Court House
How should Angela deal with this? Call 522-0987 to let us know!