Fatherless students try to fill the void

"Nice to meet you, Angela. I am your father," the man says to his eight-year-old daughter. Angela looks at him uneasily—she has no memory of the unfamiliar man in her living room. And now, the father she never knew is standing right in front of her.

Five years after that encounter, 13-year-old Angela Hayes begins visiting her father more regularly—every holiday and maybe a few weeks each summer.

Now a senior, Hayes says that despite their attempts to reconcile, she still has a distant and unstable relationship with her father.

Although Hayes sometimes feels that no one understands her emotional pain, many other children are also coping with the absence of their fathers and can empathize with her frustration. Of the 19.8 million children in America living with only one parent, 83 percent live with their mother, according to a March 2002 report by the U.S. Bureau of the Census.

This national figure is reflected at Blair: An informal Silver Chips survey of 100 Blazers with divorced or unmarried parents on Sept. 20 reveals that 86 percent live with their mother. For many of these students who are living without a father, dealing with emotional hardships has only made them stronger and more independent.

When junior Nolan Burke's "dream family" began to crumble as the fighting and yelling between her mother and father escalated, her parents' separation seemed inevitable. Four and a half years ago, when the divorce became official, Burke began a new chapter in her life, one that her father would not be part of.

Burke explains how her father's absence permanently damaged their "normal father-daughter relationship." She says that because her father lives two hours away and now has a conflicting schedule, she is no longer as close with him as she was before the divorce. "I hardly even know him at all anymore," she says. She only sees him twice a month, and she misses the interesting conversations that they shared as well as his "crazy sense of humor."

Hayes also wishes that her father would show more interest in her life even though she does not always get along with him. "Whenever I come over, he'd rather spend time with my brothers, man to man. He just hands my mom the credit card and sends me to the mall," she says.

Lynn Metzger, a private psychotherapist in Silver Spring, emphasizes that a child being raised by a single parent must become more independent at a younger age than "your typical, suburban high school kid." The parent expects the child to contribute more in doing household chores.

Burke says that the pressure to be independent and responsible is overwhelming at times. When her brother was younger, she was in charge of him every day after school. "My mom wanted me to be there with him because she was concerned that had no male role model in his life and that he would fall into the wrong crowd," she says.

Not long after freshman Chris Sanchez was born, his father left the family, abandoning a wife and two sons. As the oldest son, Sanchez feels obligated to help his mother around the house. "Because there is no man in the house to do the physical work, I have to do chores that my mom can't do," he says.

Although these Blazers struggle with emotional stress and more responsibilities, all of them say that they can appreciate the long-term lessons they learned from being in their family situation.

Burke says that her experiences with her father have taught her much that she can treasure for life. "One thing that my father taught me was to be tougher in life, and to get over things. He said that life is too short for whining," she explains.

For Hayes, her father's absence has made her more independent because she doesn't have much to rely on. "I can do what I need to do by myself, and I can succeed when I need to succeed," she says confidently.