Mediate Michigan

For 16 years, between the time I split up with my son’s mother and the time he left school and moved in with me full-time, I was what might be termed a quarter-time dad.

Although I was a parent to my son in the fullest sense, the real time I spent with him was divided into weekends, along with school holidays and half-terms. It wasn’t 50/50 shared parenting in exact timetabling, but Colum’s mother and I shared the parenting of him in every other sense. We shared the costs, we shared the decisions, we shared the worries, we shared the important days in his life together with him, birthdays, Holy Communion and the whole gamut and, most crucially, we let him share us equally, never pressurising him to favour one over the other.

We had Colum when I was young and although the split was painful, from the outset we were committed to being adults in our relationship with our son, rather than children fighting over him. We both fundamentally understood his need for each of us, to love us as his equal parents, along with his need to be equally loved by us without condition.

via My boy with two homes – Parents, Lifestyle – Herald.ie.