Hey Danny

Later this month my youngest child, Danny, will have a birthday.  He'll be entering his fourth decade, certainly a fully mature adult now in terms of physical and brain development, although psychologically he might be far short of that as a result of the stunting mental debility his mother forced upon him and his two older brothers when all three were tender minors during the long divorce, when she and her two family-wrecking divorce lawyers thrust these three children smack into the middle of the litigation maelstorm by filing an "unconscionable" subsidiary lawsuit in their names, later labeled a "harassment petition" by the court when it sanctioned her and threw it out.  (A good linebacker and an excellent fullback, he claimed during the divorce that I "crushed [his] spirit" because I didn't celebrate a TD he scored well enough and so he would never play football again; do you think those were his words, or the phrasing of his mother's and his oldest brother's counselor, the deeply conflicted and court-barred Meg Sullivan, LCSW?)

This is termed Parental Alienation Syndrome (PAS), the overbearing of a not-fully-developed childish mind via emotional pressure applied to minors to induce them to reject permanently the other parent by a short-sighted needy parent, often as in this case with the help of a large coterie of so-called professionals who engage in quackery and hang out at the courthouse seeking paid work.  It is often termed child abuse, and it is alive and well, though largely hidden, in the American domestic law system perpetrated by the governing rubric of "best interests of the child" in our "mother knows best" biased courts wherein the woman's word is always taken at face value and the man's word is always suspect until finally, as in my case after years of litigation costing me a quarter million dollars (I couldn't get out of the endless litigation), the woman badly overplays her hand and gets sanctioned or assessed costs.  (We generally had fun on our court-ordered visitation but then I would be accused of bringing him home on time but "too tired" to finish his homework, or doing what I wanted to do instead of what they wanted to do, or letting him burn off a sparkler while supervised in the driveway on July 4th when didn't I know that months earlier he'd had a pyromaniac incident in an Arlington park with a friend?--No, because his mother never told me--and we'd be off on another expensive, time-consuming round of hearings over whether I was a properly fit parent; eventually I ran out of money, the children stopped coming in violation of the court visitation order, and that was that.)

I haven't laid eyes on Danny in a decade and a half, nor heard from him since the summer he was eighteen, when he sent me a letter (which endearingly or sneeringly, depending upon your point of view, began with "Dear Peter") asking me to provide for full payment of his college tuition and fees, which I did.  I haven't heard from him or his two older brothers since, I don't even know for certain if he graduated although I know that eight semesters of college were paid for by the funds I provided; I certainly wasn't invited to his graduation, or his wedding which I heard about long afterwards from a  person in town who I ran into.  (Such a lovely couple, I'm sure it was a lovely wedding, welcome to the family, Laura, I wish you two long and happy lives, and congratulations on your many notable job advancements.)

I have always made myself available to these three boys, and now the time is at hand to bow to the sad permanency of the horrible infliction of the scourge of PAS upon my three sons by, in my opinion, their covert-narcistic mother; once Jimmy, Johnny and Danny become Jim, John and Dan after this month, since they will all be over thirty by then.  Danny, (and Jim, John and Laura), for the last time I will be at the Lost Dog Cafe in Westover (Arlington, VA) at noon for lunch on your birthday, please come join me.  (Jim Lightboune's not your dad, I am.)