Jeffery Waller, 36, will be back in court next week fighting for time with his son.

It’s a familiar scene after a bitter, two-year custody battle. He says he’s probably been to 40 hearings since he and his ex-wife split up after five years of marriage.

It’s drained him financially and emotionally.

He remembers hitting a low point in an unemployment office nearly two years ago. He was in between jobs. His family lives five hours away in Tennessee. There were times when he wouldn’t be able to see his son for months at a stretch. He noticed a flyer for the St. Louis Crisis Nursery, and out of sheer desperation, he called the hotline.

“Hey, I’m a dad,” he said to the woman who answered the phone. “I’m not being allowed to see my child. I don’t know where to turn. I don’t know where to go. I need some help. Can you help me out in some way?”

The social worker on the line listened to his story. She offered to help him and suggested he also contact the Fathers’ Support Center in St. Louis. Waller had never heard of the group, but decided he needed to take whatever help he could get.

He called at 4:30 p.m. on a Friday. The center was closing in half an hour, the staff told him, but they had a parenting course starting on Monday. Waller jumped in his car and drove 30 minutes to the FSC office, where the staff stayed late to enroll him in the six-week program.

Waller was initially skeptical. He imagined a group of discouraged men sitting around in a circle telling their sad stories. He wanted no part of anything like that, and didn’t see any value in a support group. Talking about his troubles wouldn’t actually fix anything, he thought.

The program turned out to be nothing like what he had expected.

The faculty and staff had one question for all the participants: Are you here to be the best parent you can be, regardless of what the other parent is going to do? If so, the FSC would help them get there. Waller spent six weeks taking classes on effective parenting skills and child nutrition, and receiving credit counseling, legal counseling and employment counseling to help place him in a solid job. The center provides lunch several times a week, plus bus passes or gas money for transportation. And there’s always a counselor on hand to talk to when life gets too stressful.

“They make sure you have no excuse not to be there,” he said. He was amazed by the support, education and attention he received.

“I’ve never seen in my life so many people focused on creating a cohesive family,” he said.

Once he completed the six-week course in December of 2017, they helped provide some legal resources. The course made him a better father, and it gave him hope.

He learned never to disparage his ex-wife or refer to her as a “baby mama.” He appreciated that most of the faculty had been through the program themselves and had lived through many of the struggles he was experiencing.

“They brought a realism and honesty to the subject that is completely ignored,” he said, referring to the societal lack of support for fathers. He’s started speaking on behalf of the group to raise awareness of the resources available and to share his story. He gets a little emotional when he talks about his hopes and dreams for his 5-year-old son.

“The thing I wish the most for him, even after all the terrible things he’s experienced, is that he gets to see his mother and I in a positive light. ... I want him to see, even though things are not ideal, they can still work,” he said.

It’s a dream he refuses to give up on -- regardless of how many times he ends up in court.

Danette Duckworth wasn’t going to let death stand in the way of her long-standing love for the St. Louis Blues.

When she found out last fall that her cancer had come back and spread, she started telling her husband, Ken Duckworth, 61, her final wishes. She wanted to be buried in the jersey of her favorite player: Chuck Lefley, a forward for the Blues in the ‘70s and early ‘80s, who had given Danette a hockey stick at a game when she was 18 years old. She cherished it her entire life.

Ken was determined to honor her dying wish. In November, the couple got a special Lefley jersey made with the number 25 on it.

Danette got to wear it once.

Ken and Danette both grew up in the small Missouri town of St. Clair. They became friends in high school when she was 16 and he was 15. She was the only girl Ken knew who subscribed to Hockey Digest, Baseball Digest, Hockey News and Sporting News. He would read the magazines with her in study hall. One day she came over to his house and played table hockey with him.

“Of course, I beat her,” he says.

Their friendship turned into something more following high school, when Ken joined the Navy. They kept in touch through letters and saw each other on his visits home. On their first date, he took her to a Blues game.

“That night I lay in bed, and I knew I was going to marry that girl,” Ken says.

He did marry her on Sept. 6, 1980. They spent all their wedding money on Blues season tickets. The family never missed a game -- every preseason, regular season and postseason game. If they couldn’t go watch it live, they watched on television.

The games brought out a different side of Danette’s sweet demeanor.

“Shoot the dang puck!” she would scream at the top of her lungs at the TV.

“Pipe down,” Ken would tell her.

Their daughters laughed to see their sweet mom lose her cool and holler during the games. Jenni Hills, 28, of De Soto, Missouri, said her earliest memories are of watching hockey with her mom. For years, Danette made one prediction over and over: The Blues would win the Stanley Cup the year she died.

Two years ago, Danette was diagnosed with a rare and aggressive form of pancreatic cancer. She couldn’t go to many games after that because of the rounds of chemotherapy. But she never missed watching -- and yelling at -- the TV. Ken, her husband of 38 years, said the last few weeks of her life were extremely difficult.

“She was the most resilient, mentally strongest person I have ever known,” he said in a eulogy he delivered at her funeral. He described their last moments together.

“Last Friday, she was in much pain … I sat with Danette all night, holding her hand, and softly talked. We prayed for God to take her home. Sometime around midnight, she took off her wedding rings and handed them to me. I told her she wasn’t going to die without those rings on her finger.

“As the sun began to rise, with the fireplace softly glowing brightly, I played Alan Jackson singing ‘Softly and Tenderly’ on her phone.

“After he finished, I told her I loved her and it was OK to go. I know she heard me and acknowledged me with a faint squeeze of the hand.

“Moments later, she slipped into a coma.”

He slipped her wedding rings back on her finger.

Danette was 62 when she died on Feb. 2.

Her beloved team was in next-to-last place in the Central Division. But when she knew she was dying, she figured it was their year.

“If they make it, you spend the money and go,” she told her husband a month before she died.

Ken breaks down into tears when he talks about how much this Stanley Cup Final would have meant to her.

“She’d be literally overjoyed,” he said.

Once again, Ken is honoring his wife’s final wishes.

“I’m spending the money and taking them,” he said. He and his daughters attended Game 3 in St. Louis.

Hills made a big poster with her mother’s picture, and they wore special T-shirts with her mom’s name. The shirts said: “She waited 49 years for this, and now she has the best seat in the house.”

Years ago, I overheard two parents talking at a fifth-grade graduation.

“We’ve got seven more years,” one father said, after which he and his wife were headed to Florida. He was sharing the countdown to his kid’s Big Graduation on one of the Little Graduation days. It may not have been the most sentimental response to the ceremony, which also featured a slideshow and ice cream, but I smiled in commiseration.

Who among us hasn’t done that same math at some point? This dad was just saying the quiet part loud.

In fairness, by the time high school graduation rolls around, many parents have already sat through kindergarten, fifth-grade and middle school graduations. I’m not mad about any of these. We may not have had the same ceremonial markers at younger grades growing up, but we also didn’t have to worry about dodging bullets during a math test. My point is that each generation has its own reasons to party, or at least let out a collective sigh of relief, before turning the page.

Our generation has grumbled about kids’ participation trophies and over-the-top “promposals,” while shrugging at kindergartners hiding in cabinets during mass-shooting intruder drills. Maybe it’s easier to get caught up by the small stuff that feels controllable rather than the big stuff that makes us feel powerless. Consider the posts on countless parenting groups’ pages: Someone’s upset because of a school district’s swimsuit policy at pool parties. Another parent is irritated about a teacher’s note on an unwelcome bag of chips in a school lunch.

Most of the chatter is about the small grievances and demands of daily parenting. And this makes sense. It’s what we are dealing with day-to-day.

But I do wonder how this depletes our focus from a more fundamental risk facing our children: How do we prevent the kind of gun violence in schools that is a regular feature of the news cycle now? Obviously, people have different ideas on how to do this. But think back to our school days. Can you imagine someone giving your English teacher a gun to use in a possible shootout in the hallway? It seems too ludicrous to even imagine, but this is a real idea that lawmakers, particularly those beholden to the National Rifle Association, have put out there.

The probability of a child dying in a school shooting is still very low. But the chances of a child carrying the scars of living through a mass shooting are significantly higher. Last year, the Washington Post did a yearlong analysis on the collateral damage of the “uniquely American crisis” of mass shootings in our schools. They found that, beginning with Columbine in 1999, more than 187,000 students attending at least 193 primary or secondary schools have experienced a shooting on campus during school hours.

The report noted that the number of children who have been shaken by gunfire in the places they go to learn exceeds the population of Fort Lauderdale, Florida.

It made me wonder: What would our response have been if nearly 200,000 children had been sickened by school lunches? Food poisoning would have far less of a long-term impact on a child than surviving a shooting. But I bet we would have gotten rid of questionable lunches right away.

In the meantime, we’ve let a nightmare haunt our kids from kindergarten to college graduations. We’ve let them live with the anxiety of a classroom turning into a bloody war zone.

We don’t spend nearly as much time talking about things we haven’t been able to protect our children from, partly because there are countless immediate things for parents to worry about. But this new reality we’ve created for our kids has changed my countdown clock at these minor league graduations. When my youngest finished middle school this year, I was proud of the young man he’s becoming and excited about high school for him.

But in the back of my mind, I was relieved another school year had gone by without incident.

Four more years of high school, then hopefully, four years of college.

Along the way, I’m letting more of the small stuff slide.