Divorce

On the world wide web this week a blogger I have been following for years shared that she and her husband have separated. I don't have any opinions about their marriage, I mean, they aren't people I know in real life so who am I to speculate on the inter-workings of their home life? It's really just made me think about the impact divorce has in a long reaching sort of way. My parents have been divorced since 1987 (they were married for 20 years) and I think back to what it was like at first, and all of the usual things happened. Lines were drawn. A villain was cast. Fortunately (I guess) my sister and I were old enough to hop in a car and go see my Dad whenever we wanted. We didn't have a whole custody thing, it just wasn't necessary. Even though my Dad played the part of the villain, in all honesty, as far as divorces go, my parents was pretty clean and tidy. It was only  years later, well into my own self absorbed adulthood, that details started to spill out and I learned things about my parents that I didn't necessarily want to know. You would think that the biggest impact to our lives would occur at the beginning. My Dad moved out. My Mom cried, a lot. And my sister was angry that her senior year in high school had been hijacked by my selfish parents. But where I really feel the effects, where it interrupts my life and makes things complicated, is now. Not when I was 16. Divorce sucks because it forever requires the children involved to choose. Christmas: Mom or Dad? Thanksgiving: Mom or Dad? Want to have a birthday party? Do we invite them both? In my case, the answer is yes, invite them both, because my parents do not have a vicious hate for one another, or if they do, they keep that shit to themselves, as they should. And it's not just the holidays that are complicated. Although that is where I generally feel the effects most often. When my son was born, I wished it could have just been my parents there, and not my step parents too. That sounds so shitty doesn't it? But it's not like I grew up in a house with these step parents. I was in college when my parents remarried, so like it or not, they are really, in my head, My Mom's Husband and My Dad's Wife. I call them both by their first name. I don't feel especially parented by either one, although my step dad did at one point in my complicated young adulthood counsel me and try and help me navigate my emotional terrain, but that's more because he's a minister, and that's what he does, than because I am his step daughter. There are times, even now, 25 years later, that I resent the hell out of their divorce. Not because I want them to be together, really, because I never had those "My parents will get back together" hopes and dreams, but I resent it all the same. When people with children get divorced, it changes everyones lives. Forever. Not just in the short run when it comes to who lives where and who gets what. But in the long run too. They will always have to choose, no matter how you try and set it up so they don't, at some point, in the quiet of their own home, they will have to choose.