SingleDad.com: Poway pop launches networking web site for fellow fathers

By KATHY DAY - For the North County Times | Saturday, July 26, 2008 10:51 PM PDT ∞

Richard “RJ” Jaramillo is a man on a mission.

And he’s got two new friends to help him along the way as he builds a Web site aimed at helping single dads on their journeys with their kids.

Jaramillo, a 43-year-old Poway father of three, is a twice-divorced dad whose career in the mortgage industry has thrived despite the industry’s tough times. Now he’s also an owner of a graphic design firm that’s involved with SingleDad.com.

The site went live, appropriately, on Father’s Day, offering a social networking site to exchange information and ideas, combined with advice on everything from to how to braid your daughter’s hair to getting back in the dating game.

It also is a place where single dads (and single moms and grandparents) can see YouTube-like videos from Jaramillo and his co-contributors, and soon can upload their own.

His feature contributors and managing partners are Escondido native Jesse Lozano, a 28-year-old DJ with a 5-year-old daughter, and Jon Graves, a 36-year-old whose wife died a year ago, leaving him with two sons.

All three express a passion to help others with the challenges they’ve faced, from figuring out "how to plan your day before it plans you” to getting through your own grief while helping the kids with theirs.

In separate interviews, and without prompting, each of them said, “Things happen for a reason” as they talked about how they share their desire to be the best dads they can and to help others through the process.

The founder’s story

Since the day his first wife of nearly 10 years told him the proverbial good news-bad news story that “I’m going to have another baby” and “I’m divorcing you,” Jaramillo said he’s known that he didn’t want to be a part-time dad.

“I had taken fatherhood and parenting for granted,” he added. “I realized that you don’t get many second chances.”

His daughter Mia was born when the couple’s other two children were 3 and 5. “It was a tranquil delivery �- almost like a peace treaty.”

But what came next “was a humbling experience, going from the Scripps Ranch lifestyle to an apartment in Carmel Mountain,” he recalled. He and his wife, Susan, who had been his college sweetheart, worked out a 50-50 shared custody. They had some rough times, he said, but now they have a “wonderful, amicable relationship.”

They shared a nanny and alternated having the children for three days and then not having them for two, and trading weekends.

“I didn’t want to shame myself or my family, “Jaramillo said. “I told myself, ‘I have to make something out of it.’ ”

To do that, he pulled in every resource he could find, from books to single moms, his parents, his sister and his friends.

“I went through things every single mom went through,” he said, recalling sleepless nights, seeking relief by having his parents help with the kids on the weekends, and handing the three children off to his ex-wife.

Finding his way

For the first year, “most of my friends looked at me like a car accident on the freeway ---- they’d slow down enough to see but not enough to help.”

As he navigated the waters of that “very dark” first year, he joined play groups with divorced moms and learned from them.

That’s where he met his second wife, whose daughter was a year older than his older daughter, Alexa.

“It was another chapter, learning about co-parenting and blending our families,” Jaramillo said. He looks back on the relationship as helping him learn to laugh again, even though the marriage ended when his new bride left him “because she found happiness elsewhere” after 24 months.

“This time I was more tuned in,” he said. “I had learned to be more focused on others ---- more like a mom.”

He also realized, as he got calls from newly divorced friends and friends of friends, that he had “turned into a 411” for people asking for help.

His revelation that he might be able to make something out of his experiences, which he had been detailing in journals, came the day before Thanksgiving 2007.

He said he was standing in line in the grocery store, buying food for his family’s gathering the next day. Mia (the youngest, who's now 8) needed to go to the bathroom; his other children, Mossimo, 12, and Alexa, 14, were nowhere to be seen, he said, “and I wasn’t about to give up my spot in line.”

His cell phone rang and the caller said, “I’m Dave. You don’t know me but I’m newly divorced �- Can you help me?”

Right in front of him

That was when it hit him, he said, that he was actually helping people.

“There are fathers out there with no resources, nowhere to turn for help,” he said. “I had an idea that I couldn’t let go.”

So the next day at dinner, he announced his plan for a social networking site to help newly divorced, widowed and single dads through the transition.

He started with research. When he Googled “divorced women” he said he turned up lots of sites for advice, counselors, playgroups and the like, but when he tried the search for “divorced men” he found mostly dating services and lawyers.

There were no sources centered on life, family skills, or education for men, although there were 23 sites with related information ---- 20 were blogs, two were nonprofits and the third was multidisciplinary, he said.

“What is society telling us?” he wondered aloud.

He said he took the platform concepts behind Facebook and YouTube, some ideas from Rachael Ray and Oprah Winfrey, and found seven common features that he thought would attract a male audience: home/food, advice/dating, health/fitness, wealth/career, family/fatherhood, travel/entertainment and style/grooming.

The site also includes his own and his partners’ “Single Dad Diaries” ---- video clips of family time that range from the morning ritual to shots from a visual and performing arts school called “A Reason to Survive” and a trip to “the coolest park in L.A.”

Embodying simplicity

The site aims for simplicity, he said, “because men are very uncomplicated.”

The domain name SingleDad.com was owned by another man and Jaramillo spent seven months trying to persuade him to sell it. The man walked away, but then came back and said he would “pass the torch,” Jaramillo said.

As launch approached and the design was fine-tuned, Jaramillo’s partners at Belladia Design focused on the need for a logo. They found it in a photo of Jaramillo and son Mossimo taken after the boy was lost for a time on one of their family trips to Mammoth. It’s a silhouette of the two walking back to camp holding hands.

“It’s been a marathon of passion,” Jaramillo said, detailing the changes he’s faced in the past year from the mortgage meltdown, which for a time affected his business, to selling what he had thought was the dream house he would live in forever to starting SingleDad.com.

Adding value, variety

The site, with about 170 members registered and attracting about 1,000 hits a day, continues its evolution. Jaramillo and his staff have linked with Sara Snow of Discovery Health, who shares tips on living green, and the Clever Cleaver Brothers, a cooking duo featured on national television.

But he’s added a much more personal touch with the recent inclusion of Lozano and Graves. Not only do they bring different perspectives because of their ages and their children’s ages, they bring the views of a dad who’s never been married and one who was widowed a year ago.

Their connections with Jaramillo exemplify the network that he wants to build.

Lozano readily admits he’s kind of a “poster child for Planned Parenthood” ---- young guy in the radio scene meets girl at party, has daughter and a relationship that never matured. But, he said, “just because I didn’t have the physical parts to bear a child, I’m just as much her parent as her mom, and I live my life that way.”

It was easy, he said, when he lived in San Diego. He and Savannah’s mom, who lived in Escondido, “would meet in parking lots” for the hand-off. When he got his dream job with KIIS-FM in Los Angeles, he had planned to take her with him, “but it didn’t work out." Instead, he drove back and forth twice a week so he could take Savannah to school and volunteer in her class, or he would take her to his place for their time together.

Since then, she and her mother moved north and now live a mile away from his home, he said.

Coming into focus

When he was the “commuting” dad, Lozano started making videos of the two of them, which he put on his daughter’s IPod so she could see them together whenever she wanted.

He’s always talked about his role as a single father on his radio shows, and when friends saw his videos they encouraged him to add them to his Web site. Now he’s got a catalog of more than 100.

“I never felt I had a true outlet for the Web content that was focused on single parents” until he heard about SingleDad.com through e-mail.

“I get e-mails from PR firms all the time,” Lozano said. “Every once in a while, one catches my eye �- I figured after I’d gotten a half a dozen different ones about RJ that maybe I should respond.”

They met for lunch in La Jolla and “shared stories of our journeys as single dads and focused parents,” and now they’re working together, bringing Lozano’s connections, Internet knowledge and ability to “pump up the site on the radio” to the project.

He said he sees SingleDad.com as a place where fathers and their children can hang out, look for a recipe, find things to do together or watch kid-friendly videos.

Being a single parent “is a unique lifestyle,” Lozano said. “What would it be like (for a married parent) to have to all of a sudden have to pull up in a KFC parking lot and hand off your kid? �- It’s crazy, terrible, heart-wrenching.”

Maybe, he added, they can serve an untapped market with something very useful.

If it catches on, “Maybe we won’t have to be embarrassed anymore.”

Life after cancer

While Lozano leads a sort of celebrity life with his daughter’s mother nearby, Graves' life as a widower is more daunting.

Jeseca, his wife of 11 years, died last year after battling cancer for six years. He said last week that the children, now 6 and 9, grew up with her illness.

“They never saw a day when she didn’t have to deal with it, he said. “They understand what’s precious.”

And so does he.

The day Jeseca died, he said, was “the moment I had to stand up on my own two feet �- I had to bring the boys to her room and let them say good-bye.”

He also had to figure out how to deal with his own grief as well as theirs, he said.

Since the boys had been home-schooled, he and Jeseca had arranged the week before she died for them to enroll at the Rock Academy at Liberty Station, near their Point Loma home. Their enrollment meeting was the day after she died.

He realized then that he should do a “test week,” where he went through the routine of getting them up, dressed, fed and delivered to school.

“I realized I can do it, but also that cereal just doesn’t cut it,” Graves said. As the week wound down and he shifted to serving cereal for breakfast instead of a heartier meal, he found the boys whiny after an hour. “I needed to make sure they had a good breakfast.”

The small lessons along the road were learned quickly, but it took him a lot longer before he realized he "didn’t want to be sad anymore.”

That moment came three or four months ago, when he was reminiscing and playing their favorite music.

“I decided it was time to start a new life,” he said.

He had started blogging when his wife was sick, recently wrote an article for New Man magazine and now is writing a book based on Jeseca's journals.

Once again, the web of a network was the connection to Jaramillo. After exchanging an e-mail and phone calls, they played a round of golf and “hit it off.”

Saying he is “amazed at RJ’s passion for helping,” Graves agreed to share his stories on SingleDad.com, many of which are also posted on his own site. He has started contributing videos, including one from last weekend with his boys at Sea World when the younger one overcame his fear of Atlantis.

Perhaps the words he posted on his introductory blog on SingleDad.com explain why he ---- and Jaramillo and Lozano ---- are putting their emotions out there.

“Instantly becoming a single dad is daunting, especially when it comes with the loss of your wife, and it’s a tremendous challenge to your character as a man. But let me encourage you to allow yourself to feel what you feel and to squelch that urge inside to hide from it at work, throw yourself into a bottle, or attach yourself to the first beautiful woman with a smile.

"You’ll make it through, and we hope that in some small way SingleDad.com �” and the network of men going through the same experiences �” can help you get there.”