welcome to the moth podcast and welcome to 2018 I'm down Kennedy every year we try to make it happen or at least we hope that will finally follow through on a resolutions to start living life as our best selves and we give it a year but in reality can take a whole lot longer than that for things to even begin coming together our first story today comes to us from Kemp Powers Camp has been on The Moth Radio Hour he's been on the podcast both of those I think a few times before but he told this story back in 2011 the theme of the night was point of no return your scam
I'm 37 years old and I wasn't really very good at much of anything in my twenties least of all marriage but the decision to get a divorce wasn't an easy one it's interesting because
 404 a lot of people
 the legal Tangles what stops them from getting a divorce but in my world that wasn't really a big decision maker was because we had a daughter and going through with that meant that on some level I was going to be losing her not literally then figuratively
 so when people have a really bad breakup it's not uncommon for one parent to be left feeling like
 basically their kid is better off without them and in my case it wasn't very hard to convince me to put it very simply I really really really sucked at being a dad
 when my daughter was a small infant I swore that she was going to break some kind of record for falling out of bassinets falling out of cribs falling out of beds and it always seem to happen when I was the one that was watching her and I was hardly ever around I travel so much for work and in the rare occasions that I was there any effort that I made try to bond with her always seem to backfire I bought her this when she was 3 months old I bought her this gangly little puppet that I name Sanchez after my favorite reggae dancehall singer and she was she was really in the Sesame Street so I really thought this puppy was going to bring her a lot of Joy instead it Terra fighter
 and from there things just continue to get worse I mean by the time when she was 6 months old I decided that it was really smart for her to know that fire was dangerous and it was something that she should stay away from so one day when I was making a cup of tea I picked her up holding her in one hand and the hot Kettle in the other I explained very carefully that you should never ever ever touch hot things because they can hurt you at least I did in my mind because in reality by the time I got to the word touch she already reached out and grabbed the bottom of the steaming Kettle and burned herself so by the time my daughter was 1 years old I was already pretty much afraid to be left alone with her she suffered from a febrile seizure at 18 months and vomited in the middle of the night and inhaled it almost choking to death she was in the hospital for a week and I remember looking at her in that incubator with the tubes up her nose and the Butterfly IV in her hand and thinking to myself dude
 just going to fucking get somebody killed
 and so I didn't fight because I didn't really think I had any right to I didn't fight the incredibly restrictive visitation rights that I had I didn't fight when her mother asks for my approval to relocate to Phoenix and I didn't even fight when the visitation that we did agree upon fell by the wayside because at the end of the day you know they were too busy in there life out there for her to keep up with her schedule a visitation in Los Angeles
 so my friends they were really supportive but they weren't really able to offer media Council it was this really bizarre twist that we had all grown up in this world where divorce was just the fact of life but suddenly I found myself in this Adult World where every single family that I knew was nuclear it was like we were suddenly back in the fifties only I didn't have to drink out of a separate water fountain and I didn't have to worry about getting lunch from having had a kid with a white lady but every single person that I knew my age was either so happily married that it bordered on kind of sickening or so relentlessly single that it bordered on parody and I love my friends love me and I love them too but all of them to this to the friends were married I was basically that single guy that they could live vicariously through and to the ones who were single I was the divorcee with all the responsibilities that prove to them that them not having any kids and not getting married have been the right decision to make
 so I basically went on with my life and got used to the routine that we had that was all I really had the sporadic phone calls the grudging pickups that happened at the halfway point between Los Angeles and Phoenix in an apple eating shit hole of a town called Desert Center there was a Barren Place Phil Whitmore scorpions and dust devils in people and our drives out of the desert my daughter and I hardly ever spoke and I was pretty glad about that cuz not talking meant that I never really had to explain why we were in the situation that we were in so one day back in March I get this telephone call early in the morning and it's for my daughter and I'm pretty surprised because she almost never calls me when I answer she's distraught she's crying she says Dad a tsunami has just destroyed Japan and it's heading for California you need to get out of bed right now and get to a Hi-Point immediately now initially I just had to assure her that there was no chance of the tidal wave was going to wash a wake
 Koreatown anytime soon but she was still too worried to be calm down so it was suede your fears I had to talk to her and we talked we talked about her piano lessons we talked about her upcoming 13th birthday we talked about her now 6 year old brother who live with me if she missed dearly and we talked about me who she miss just as much it turned out that she still had her puppet Sanchez would she hung on the wall next to her bed
 well my daughter's 13th birthday came around we made a pact going forward we would speak every Sunday at 12 p.m. no matter where we were and when we spoke she would get to ask me one question it didn't matter what the question was I had to give her the answer and this was something to maybe a little bit nervous because I was finally going to be held accountable for something when the first question came it was what was my favorite book after that it was what was my favorite movie a week later what was my favorite song and it's a week's turn in the months these questions Revolt about the things I've done the places I've been and how I was living my life
 my daughter is 13 years old and 5 foot 10 inches tall but I can still pick her up and I can still hold her in my arms
 we talk every week now and when I hold her every time that I see her and when I do I just make sure that I keep that hot Kettle just a little bit Out Of Reach thank you
 can powers of the playwright screenwriter an author is award-winning Play One Night in Miami is currently being adapted into a feature film was most recently a ride around the television show Star Trek Discovery and now resides in Los Angeles Kim's daughter is now 19 years old she's a sophomore in college in Arizona they sometimes spend the holidays together and they actually spent their New Year's Eve together earlier this week several years ago they started this tradition of going on one big family trip every year usually to someplace new and often to someplace out of the country camp tells us it's been a wonderful bonding experience but not just for the two of them for the entire family we hope to have many more trips to come and many more stories to tell