Elderly Jamaican father laments estrangement from children he ignored

Dear Pastor,

I am 65 years old and the father of five children, born to three different women, but I am only close to two of them. In my younger days I lived a reckless lifestyle and boasted about the number of women in my life. I refused to accept the children I fathered, and the only ones I claim today are the two who have stayed by me. Whenever friends urged me to acknowledge the others, I would dismiss them by asking whether they had ever seen me pregnant.

My own father had 12 children, and I am not close to most of my siblings either. The bond I share is only with those my mother bore for him, because we grew up together. He treated none of his children well. My mother used to quarrel with him and warned him that one day he would regret how he was raising his children.

That regret has now come to me. I think often of how absent I was from my children's lives. My mother was a remarkable woman. Whenever women turned up at our home claiming to be pregnant for my father or to already have a child by him, she listened and gave them whatever she could. When he came home, she would calmly tell him who had visited and what she had handed over. He would order her to drive them away, but she always refused, saying she could not do that to another woman.

Today my health is failing and I am struggling. I would welcome help, but these children will not even visit me. P.W.

Dear P.W.,

Your letter struck me deeply. Not long ago I counselled a young woman whose husband had been the same type of man. In every parish where he worked, he left women pregnant, never accepting the children nor offering any support. Those children grew up knowing exactly who he was and chose to have nothing to do with him. He is now seriously ill, and the responsibility for his care has fallen entirely on his wife and the two children she bore during their marriage. She does not have the means to take care of him. The man was wicked. He has no pension at all because the company he worked for never paid any of his statutory deductions.

You are not very different from him. You behaved as though old age would never catch up to you, as though you would never need anything from the children you ignored. Yet here you are, brought to your knees with failing health.

Let every man reading this letter understand that what has befallen you can befall them. It is time for men to wake up and take responsibility for their children. If a man doubts paternity, he should do a DNA test to settle the matter, and once it is confirmed, he must do his duty as a father.

Pastor