A father who calls himself “Old Bird” was asked by his two sons, aged eight and five, to sleep between them after he divorced so he could “scratch them” back to sleep.
Divorced, bankrupt and living in a cheap rented flat, Old Bird and his two young boys managed to survive.
In the first winter following the divorce, they had no hot water, so Old Bird demonstrated how first to warm up by rubbing his body with a towel and showering in cold water, shouting and jumping. The boys followed suit, shouting and jumping with laughter.
After six years of sharing food, chores and pain, the three birds are now inseparable.
During the two days and one night the boys attended a free holiday organized by a charity group, Old Bird described himself as a “walking mummy” — he spurned TV, did not want to eat and even the computer that the boys always competed to use bored him.
A-Guei (阿貴), a divorcee with a young son and daughter, recalled that the toughest challenge soon after his divorce was handling his daughter’s hair.
After several disastrous performances, he got up half an hour earlier in the morning to perfect his skills and finally developed a knack for doing his child’s hair.
“I was so good that when my four-year-old went to kindergarten, the teachers were full of praise for her beautiful braids,” he said.
“Burning the candle at both ends” is too simple to describe his life after his divorce, he said. He lost his job after failing to meet his company’s requirements as he had to spend more time attending to his children.
To make ends meet, he continued to work, but did not shun his responsibilities as a single parent — often he ran home from meetings at 4pm to take his daughter from school to his sister-in-law’s and rushed home from work after 10pm to do household chores, attend to the children’s homework and mend their school uniforms.
The stress of this hectic lifestyle was so great that he needed medication for depression for nearly five years.
Yet these seemingly insurmountable odds did not daunt him, A-Guei said.
Despite earning only a meager income at a design company, A-Guei sent his daughter to music classes and helped his son develop his talent for painting.
He also developed a hobby of making mosaics with recycled materials — mounting pieces of glass or colored stones on ceramic and firing them — which showed him that even a broken vase laying in pieces on the floor can be transformed into a piece of art.
His son Eric, now 16, and daughter Sarah, 12, are required to make their beds and tidy their room before going out. They have been taught to empathize with people and to be grateful to those who help them and for what they have.
Old Bird and A-Guei are two of 11 single fathers invited by Shane Wang (王行), a professor at Soochow University’s department of social work, to join a research project in 2008 titled “Life Narrative of Single Fathers,” a trailblazing piece of research in Taiwan on men as single parents.
In the first year of the project, which Wang described as “a collective production of knowledge,” the 11 single fathers and one daughter who was brought up by her single dad told their stories at a seminar held at at the university every Friday.
Wang, who is married with two children, insisted that each of the 12 be paid NT$1,000 per session as co-researchers rather than being treated as objects of research by the project organizers, led by the Single Parent Association Taiwan (SPAT) and the Grateful Social Welfare Foundation.
The money was designed to boost their self-esteem as well as their willingness to attend, and it turned out to be a real help financially for at least four of the participants, they said later.
In the second year of research, the 12 put their tales into writing, which Wang published in December in a book titled Single Dad is Not Just Single.
One participant said that while writing, the most difficult part was actually facing himself, while others said it was embarrassing to put their sorry plight in print.
The research on single fathers and their families — a non-typical disadvantaged group as Wang puts it — brought attention to the questions of whether Taiwanese society is mature enough to face the problems surrounding single fathers objectively and whether the government has done enough to support single fathers.
It is hard for an unemployed single father to approach social welfare systems for help, Wang said. In Taiwan, like all capitalist societies, men who do not have jobs are stigmatized as “losers.”
These “losers” suffer second injuries to their delicate egos when they seek help from social welfare systems.
Until January last year, after an amendment was passed into law, single fathers were included in a statute benefiting “women and families who have encountered tragedies or accidents.”
This means that men, if they need government help, have to approach the office that handles women’s and family affairs, Wang said.
He quoted the results of a social work organization’s survey as showing that the number of single fathers in Taiwan seeking free consultations is less than one-fifth the number of women seeking the same service.
Taiwanese society remains ignorant and insensitive to men’s single parenthood, he said.
Meanwhile, SPAT cited a 2005 report by the Taipei City Department of Health that found 54 out of every 100 people who committed suicide were single fathers, compared with 26 out of 100 who were single mothers, meaning that 80 percent of those who killed themselves in Taipei City that year were single parents.
SPAT chairman Lee Han-chiang (李漢強) said tears are always shed for single mothers, but last year’s Asian Pacific Film Festival award-winning film No Puedo Vivir Sin Ti (不能沒有你, I can’t live without you), a movie based on the true story of a single father’s frustration over his efforts to maintain legal custody of his daughter, reminded people of the plight of single dads, most of whom struggle at the bottom levels of society.
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