Weekends with Jimmy - Part I

I watched him as I pulled into the diner parking lot. He was sitting in the passenger seat of his maternal grandfather’s Lincoln Town car. I took some encouragement when I saw his face light up as he noticed my car approaching their parking space. I waited in my car while he fished his bag out of the backseat and said good-bye to his grandfather.

When he crawled into the car, he was already raring to go with stories of his daring do within his school experiences and of course his ongoing bouts within video games.

He was my eight-year-old son. His mom and I had broken up less than two months ago. I wound up following a job opportunity in a neighboring city that was about 100 miles away from the home that I left. The home that my son and my soon to be ex-wife still lived in. We had mutually arranged for meeting half-way between our two homes on a weekly basis in order to allow my weekend visits with my son.

Because my ex-wife wasn’t keen on driving, she had somehow talked her dad into doing the driving for these visits, which required the two of us to meet once on Saturday morning and once on Sunday evenings every weekend. This pattern would persist for the next 13 years.

The two-hour drives on both weekend days (1/2 of which) afforded me an unfettered captive audience with my son. These encounters would become some of the most treasured and best times within our father / son relationship. These hours of talk would become the means we took to keep each other up to date with what was going in both of our lives and they also afforded me the chance to talk through all of the adolescent problems that my young son would be going through.

I treasured these times. My career became the escape mechanism that I used to not have to deal with the dissolution of my marriage. The damage to my emotional make up coupled with the shake to my ego made the first five years after the breakup very hard to work through. My relationship with my son was the one bit of stability in my life.

My standard workweek with the organizations I was employed in over the first ten years after the breakup averaged around 60 – 70 hours a week. Despite the all-consuming aspects of my career, I devoted every weekend to my son.

“So, dad… this week mom is considering sending me to a different school next year.”

“Oh… why…? ( I was already calculating what this was going to cost me…)

“Well, she thinks that I would do better in a private school.”

“What do you think?” I asked.