In 1975 Roger Volkman and his wife, Pat, decided to separate. It was a moment Volkman still remembers with anguish. "Nobody in our family had ever done that before," he explains. "We were the kind of people who had always stuck together. My first thought was, how are my kids going to get through this? How could they accept it?"
The Volkmans eventually arrived at a surprising answer. It was split custody, an innovative agreement sustained by trust rather than law. Pat moved to an apartment eight miles away with Paula, now 18 and a high school senior, and David, 15, a sophomore. Roger and Danielle stayed in the family's house, where he began a new life as a single parent. "Danielle was very young then," explains Pat of the unusual division of children. "Roger had really missed out on raising the other kids when we were having our problems. But here was this little girl. He saw that there was still time for him to be a father to her. They have become very close."
Yet Roger's life with his daughter bears little resemblance to the single parenthood depicted in the movie Kramer vs. Kramer (which Roger has not seen). A boiler fireman at a Pittsburgh steel company, Shenango Inc., Volkman often works arduous night shifts: from 3 p.m. to 11 p.m., or 11 p.m. to 7 a.m. The hours do not give him much flexibility in his schedule with Danielle—nor does he expect sympathy from management or friends on a job "where you're not supposed to show emotions," he says.
Danielle feels the lack of another kind of support. "I'm growing up but sometimes I don't have any ladies around when I have questions," she complains. "Dad doesn't understand about boys. I ask my older sister Paula. She listens and she understands." Roger was dumbfounded recently when Danielle scored a near-perfect grade on a sex-education quiz at school. "How could she have known all those answers?"
Roger knows that Danielle will soon be dating boys in their blue-collar neighborhood of Spring Hill, and he worries about it. "They will be taking my Danny away, and I don't know how I'll handle it," he admits. "I do know a lot of other parents have gone through this, and I'm not as reluctant as I used to be about asking advice."
Roger's romantic life is of equal concern to his daughter. "I don't want another woman moving in here," she has announced. "Danny's got a hangup about that," says Roger, who has had no serious girlfriends since he and Pat separated five years ago. "She doesn't want anyone taking the place of her mother." Roger spent some nights with Pat even after the separation but found "I couldn't handle it. I finally stopped. Our sex was always good, but I need more than a roll in the hay." Roger began dating again a year ago and visited the local chapter of Parents without Partners, a nationwide group of single parents. "I met a nice secretary," he remembers, "but it was right into bed, and that's not what I wanted. I needed companionship."
Inevitably, there are other conflicts between father and daughter. "He says I look like a floozy if I wear makeup on weekends," Danielle moans. "My older sister tried to teach me how to put on eyeliner without poking my eye out. If I were home with my mom more, I'd learn to get it right." Roger and Pat have somewhat different ideas about household duties. For example, Roger does not ask Danielle to wash dishes, because he thinks she leaves them too greasy. At her mother's, where she spends every other weekend, Danielle is expected to do them.
Danielle has never fully accepted the separation. "Nowadays a lot of the TV movies are about parents splitting up," she says, "and when I watch them, I cry." She does not tell her father. "It's not very important that I cry," she shrugs. "But I just don't think Mom and Dad are trying hard enough to patch things up." Her parents are aware of her feelings. "This has been very painful for her," says Pat. "Until a few years ago at school she would draw pictures of a mommy and a daddy and three happy children together."
Danny admits from time to time, "I love my dad, but I'd rather live with my mom. Dad doesn't know. It would hurt his feelings if I told him." But the word has already reached Roger: "I know Pat loves Danny as much as I do. She's better at handling the girls' questions. She's a good mother. I'm sure all the kids wish we were together. I have to remind Danny every now and then that I get along with Pat, I just can't live with her." One solution the parents are discussing is for Danielle and David to switch homes for the summer.
Roger blames himself for the breakup of the marriage. A high school dropout son of an alcoholic father, Roger spent a roistering youth in the hills of north Pittsburgh, drinking so heavily "that I wrecked every car I ever owned." He married Pat only to find that "the two of us were still growing up, and after we grew apart we didn't face it. You've got to be friends with your wife before you marry. I never got past the physical side. That's the way I was brought up." Though Pat bar-hopped with Roger and his crowd, she later sought out Al-Anon, an organization for the families of alcoholics. Then she tried but was unable to convince him to join a drying-out program. In 1971 Roger finally did seek outside help and stopped drinking, but his problems were not over. "When you take away the alcohol, all you have is a dry alcoholic," says Pat, 37. "For two years after he stopped drinking, there was tremendous tension in our house."
The Volkmans' home life deteriorated "until I was just staying there for the kids," Roger says. "Still, I knew the arguing wasn't doing them any good." After one quarrel, Roger finally left and did not return. "I had never understood how a man could walk out on his kids, and there I was," he winces. "I felt so damned bad for them."
His brother Robert's family took him in for a year. In 1976, while Pat was hospitalized for back surgery, Roger attempted his first long solo stay with the children. "I was wondering how the hell I'd take care of them and work too," he says. "But then I saw what an opportunity it was, a chance to grow." As an experiment, Pat later moved to her own apartment, and he took care of the children for eight months. "I leaned on my relatives," Roger concedes. "They all stuck by me."
Meanwhile Roger had spotted a newspaper ad for a county agency, the Center for Children in Family Crisis, and went to a counseling session. "I didn't even know such groups existed," says Roger. "Besides, I used to figure, 'I'm a working man, I don't have to ask anybody for anything.' Well, I was hurting too bad to let that idea stand in my way." Soon Pat also began going to the center, which charges an income-based fee of about $10 a visit. Together they later received "divorce counseling" from a local family therapy center, Karma House.
Such unfamiliar reaching out led to Roger's discovery of unexpected strengths within himself. "The counseling helped me open up to my kids and tell them I love them." In his own upbringing, "We just didn't speak our feelings. I didn't even realize somebody like me was allowed to have them." The center's director, Karen Miyares, recalls, "Roger just blew me over because of my stereotype of a steel-worker. He knew what it meant to be a good parent—to feel his children's pain as well as his own. He could be sensitive and warm and vulnerable." Miyares recommends counseling even for irrevocably broken marriages. "Like anyone else, Roger and Pat needed help saying goodbye," she says. "Otherwise they could live out their anger for years. They have to recognize that they both participated in the marriage and its failure."
Without underestimating their troubles, Pat and Roger work harder on their separation arrangement than many couples do on a marriage. At first, Pat acknowledges, "My friends were against it. There was a lot of animosity against me, especially among the in-laws. Split custody isn't that common. But people should realize it's a plausible alternative to the mother taking all the kids. Now everybody says, 'It's worked for them.' Some even admire us." Karen Miyares adds: "A misconception in our society is that once a man is separated or divorced, he's free again, but that the woman must remain the mother. But, for the sake of the children, separated or divorced couples must learn to withdraw from their relationship as lovers and develop in its place a working relationship as parents."
Pat has a job as an advertising representative for the Family Digest, a Catholic magazine, and dates occasionally. She concedes that the chances of a reconciliation with Roger are "remote," though sometimes she wonders aloud about the convenience and economy of merging the two households. By oral agreement, Roger sends one-third of every paycheck to Pat, and if Paula decides on college next year, he is prepared to sell the house or take a loan to help her. "I know right from wrong," explains Roger. "I'd never turn my back." But, he notes, tax laws prevent him from deducting his voluntary payments (unlike alimony), a ruling he resents as "unjust." Roger also admits that one reason he and Pat have delayed a divorce is the expense of a lawyer. "I don't need to pay that kind of money just to have a piece of paper in my hand," he says.
The whole family also continues to suffer from Roger's working schedule. "That damn job is awful for everyone," worries Pat. "He should do something about it." "It's hard on Danny and me both," allows Roger, who earns $22,000 a year. "But the job is good, and I don't have the seniority for a daylight shift." "It's absurd that it's so hard for single parents," comments counselor Karen Miyares. "People like Roger are afraid to mention their personal problems at work. But employers should be providing in-house counseling and referrals, flexible hours or even just a few hours off to help someone past a difficult time." Miyares believes that "single parents like Pat and Roger who have split custody are pilgrims. Because of the speed with which society has been changing, there is no history for them to rely on. It will be years before we know what works."
But the Volkmans have an idea of what their experience has meant to them—and others. Danielle says she's learned that "when I get married, I plan to talk to my husband about everything." Pat thinks that "what has helped Roger and me was knowing that if the split custody wasn't working out, we could change it ourselves. There was no court telling us what to do." As for Roger, "I learned through counseling that there were other people like me in this world, asking the same questions about their families. Our society has to stress that it's okay to seek help. If you're having a problem, there's no reason to be ashamed. The better I understand myself, the better it is for everyone in my life."
Saved by the Bell Reunion
The hookups, the meltdowns, the memoires
The case reveals what was really going on what they think of each other now!
