Here’s one thing Elijah Mattox, a single Lead Dad of two from Orange County, Calif. who works in business operations, has learned: He’s a better dad today for having gone through a tough divorce when his daughters were young.
“I had to step up,” he said. “I was scared to take them places when they were younger. It just took doing it.”
He said a lot of the challenge came from trying to figure out the logistics of being a Girl Dad while worrying about what other people thought. “In the back of my mind, I was worried about the judgement. I thought, ‘I’m going to be judged as a single dad out there in the world.’ Where, in reality, people were saying, ‘Isn’t it great this dad is out there with his daughters’.”
Now, six years after splitting up, he and their mother live 10 minutes away and they’ve come up with a co-parenting schedule that puts their 11- and 14-year-old girls first. “Today we split the responsibilities,” he said. “Sometimes she doesn’t have the time, or I don’t or sometimes we both do it together. We did that with dentist appointments the other day – one of us was in one room, one in the other.”
When he thinks about what he can tell other single Lead Dads, he talks about the benefits of going to therapy and reading. “There were these stereotypical pressures of being a man and a father and trying to make as much money as you can,” he said. “My therapist recommended Brene Brown who wasn’t as well known then as she is now. I realized I could be who I wanted to be. I didn’t need to be this stereotypical portrait of a good dad. I could be my kind of good dad, which was about having a good relationship with them. I could share things with them, as opposed to being this mysterious dad.”
He also credits managers who focus on what needs to be done, not on a strict in-office schedule. “When I started here, they asked me what’s your schedule?” he remembers. “My boss [at Wynne Systems] said we had someone who starts her day, then two hours in takes her kids to school and then comes back. You can’t ask for much more.”
Indeed, managers like that are models for any working parent. Thank you for sharing your story, Elijah, and welcome to The Company of Dads.
