Live and let live. The end of this saga is “and they lived happily ever after”.

Why don`t those who have moved out from under the dark cloud of manipulation and have created their own lives start feeling a bit of happiness so they let others who have moved happily on with their lives continue to do so without any more manipulation, hatred and despair. Do live and let live please. Wish you luck!

Yes, perhaps there is more to it than that. Perhaps the father does not know how babies are conceived.

Joe Xuereb: We have a President Emeritus, Dr. Fenech Adami, still getting involved in partisan politics !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

This is what I call wisdom.

If ‘A lesson to be learnt’ knows what he/she is saying, D (son) has to break the karma that has apparently dominated the family from his father’s side. By being a witness to these events unfolding before his eyes, D can gain strength to learn and to start anew.

This could be an occasion for D to break from the past and to start a new future for himself.

D, when your father was young there was hope that he would not emulate his own father, but unfortunately he was not strong enough. You can be strong enough, however. Others have done it, and so you can too.

How many people go back to a broken marriage once they’ve walked out of it?

[Daphne – More than a few do just that.I think a more pertinent question would be: how many men walk out on pregnant women?]

I am not justifying the father’s behaviour in ‘abandoning’ his family but perhaps there is more to it than that.

[Daphne – You are quite wrong. Babies are always ‘it’ unless you are particularly close, familiar and in their presence. ‘He’ and ‘she’ denote a personality, which babies are not not deemed to have. You may agree or disagree with this, it may be true or untrue, but that is the way it is, linguistically. Now let’s take Maltese, where babies are all female even when they’re male, because the gender of the noun takes precedence over the gender of the child…]

Since you seem to know what this wastrel is really like and feel you know more facts behind the story than anyone else, I would like to add to the information you think you know that not only was he aware that she was pregnant but also said that she was making the whole story up, and it took him ten days after the birth of the child to go to see him in hospital.

And what arrogance to judge an 18-year-old man who refuses to see his father for reasons of his own, and say he did this to spare his mother’s imprisonment! Just like the said wastrel you too think that the boy is a puppet and has no feelings.

If I recall well, the young man told a newspaper that he does not wish to live with his father and I’m sure that if he still, as you say, does not visit, it is because he DOES NOT want to.

I’m sure you understand that however hard it may be his father just has to accept harsh reality and not blame it on someone else.