Mama Malone

                                           Malone has a bombshell dropped on her

My child’s father has dropped a bombshell: he is moving to Hong Kong. He will be working there for a few years, returning a couple of times a year. He has convinced himself that it’s only a ten-hour flight and that it’s the same as if he was working in Scotland! He is blaming it on Labour not getting back into government. (They were backing a project he was set to work on next…) Surely there are other jobs in the UK for civil engineering?

Image: Dan Evans www.idrawforfood.co.uk

He says he is in negative equity with his island country home and that he doesn’t want to lose his little flat, so he’s off to earn the money to try and keep it. I am shocked; I think the relationship he has with his daughter should come before bricks and mortar. I’m worried that him seeing her a few times a year is not enough to maintain the bond they have built up. In the last six months he has seen her three weekends a month, and before that he saw her once a month, and she really struggled with that. Only months ago he said that he’d never take jobs abroad. Only weeks ago he said he was moving to Brighton.

“He’s convinced himself that it’s only a 10-hour flight and that it’s the same as if he was working in Scotland”

This year she starts school; apparently it’s illegal for us to take her out of school for more than five days a year! This means when he proposes to see her, he’ll have to stay in Brighton for that week, seeing her for a few hours before bed. I couldn’t help but search online the effects of ‘absent father’, (I know I’m an idiot – this is the same search engine that tells me sore eyes means kidney failure rather than conjunctivitis…). It claims that girls with absent fathers are more likely to be promiscuous and do badly academically! This may dash his hopes of her growing up into a doctor in a monastery!

I am a firm believer that the more money you earn, the more money you spend… I really think that this carrot being chased will never be in his grasp. He’s still taking ‘him’ with him. It’s easy with money worries to think that a scheme will solve everything: “This time next year, Rodney, we’ll be millionaires!” If you ‘excel at spending money’, you need to change that, not just earn more money. He doesn’t count the pennies: he won’t walk 100 feet to the cash point, which doesn’t charge £1.70 per withdrawal.

He buys designer stuff on credit, never waiting or saving to buy things. I find it hard to believe that someone could be so ‘teenage’ with money, and I’ll be the one picking up the pieces when my daughter is missing her daddy, as he’ll be in a bar with work colleagues in Hong Kong. The moral of the story is walk 500 yards to the next cash point.