Fatherhood Doesn’t End With Divorce

It was next to impossible for him to utter the truth to his wife; he had delayed for weeks. But it was done now, and as the couple sat on their bed, sorrowful, their shaggy-haired 10-year-old son laid down his bicycle, entered the house and then the room where his parents waited.

The mother said to her son: “Your father and I have something to tell you.” And the father said: “Mom and I are having trouble getting along here. I need to move to a different house.”

Thus, Ron and Janet Hartung declared an end to the 16-year marriage they once vowed would last forever. And at almost the same moment, Ron made a new promise to himself: “That I would never stop being Jake’s dad.”

In a year when politicians are howling about violent, absent and deadbeat dads, Hartung, 44, of Tallahassee, Fla., represents the unheralded majority of divorced fathers - men who, even after leaving the family home, continue to nurture the singular bond between them and their children.

In Hartung’s case, he had the all-important cooperation of his ex-wife-to-be. In the weeks after their decision to split, the couple agreed on joint custody and child support. She would stay in the couple’s house, he would contribute to the mortgage payments and each would help the other with practical matters.

“As I was looking for my own apartment,” Ron Hartung recalls, “she was showing me how to make a casserole.”

Two months after the agony in the bedroom, Ron had moved out of the house. And at first, Jake suffered. He didn’t express it verbally; rather, he seemed to let it out in an agonizing series of headaches and stomachaches that plagued him during his middle-school years.

In his book of essays, “Daddy, I Got Chicken Pots!” (Tallahassee Democrat, $8.95), Ron Hartung recalls that these episodes “usually resulted in an afternoon spent with him on the couch - and with me and a wastepaper basket nearby. Only rarely did Jake complain.”

By the end of middle school, Jake’s sicknesses had subsided. But high school brought the adolescent a new set of challenges: adjusting to a stepmother, dating, working at McDonald’s. Through them all, his father kept his vow to be there for Jake.

Soon after Jake got the McDonald’s job, for example, Hartung wanted to know more about this now consuming aspect of his son’s life. So on several occasions, he drove across town to the restaurant where his son worked.

Then he would order an apple pie, sit inconspicuously at a corner table and watch the dark-haired young man in the uniform making change and asking, “Would you like fries with that?”

Jake lived half-time at his dad’s house. Many nights, Jake came home disgusted with his job, wanting to quit. His father would offer to go job-hunting with him, but would also remind him, “Whatever you do after this, it’s going to seem easier.” They did go job-hunting together once, but found nothing better than the job Jake already had.

Today, Jake, 18, still puts in his time beneath the golden arches. A recent high school graduate, he’s earning money to help pay college expenses in the fall.

Ron Hartung insists that there’s “never a finish line” in being a divorced dad, “never a time you can dust off your hands.” But in May, at Honors Night at Jake’s high school, something occurred that, at least for Ron, brought things full circle.

As Ron recalls, Jake was sitting between his divorced parents during most of the ceremony. When Jake was called to the stage to collect his honors, Janet and Ron joined in the applause. Then, in the din, Janet leaned across the empty seat toward her ex-husband and mouthed: “Aren’t you proud of him?”

Mention: In a study of 1,100 divorcing California couples, just 17 percent had established a pattern of “cooperative co-parenting”; 83 percent had relationships that were described as either “conflicted” or “disengaged.”

Source: “Fatherless America” (Basic, $23)

Male call: If you are the child of divorce, how did your parents tell you about their decision to split? Send responses to VoiceMale, P.O. Box 8071, Lexington, Ky. 40533-8071, or to e-mail address nchetaol.com.

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The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = Neil Chethik Universal Press Syndicate