In Praise of Divorce
Several years ago I wrote an essay called “In Praise of Divorce” on a website that’s no longer active. This is an updated version of that essay. I was reminded of this topic when I read Lisa Belkin’s New York Times piece today on staying in an abusive marriage: http://parenting.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/08/23/staying-in-an-abusive-marriage/?src=tp
I had just turned 16 years old when I was relieved of the idea that love overcame all. Perhaps a brighter kid would have picked up that lesson a decade earlier, when my own parents’ violent marriage came to a merciful end.
My high school French teacher, Madame K, was taking a group of her students on a three-week trip to France. My mom had saved money and taken out a loan so that I could go on this once-in-a-lifetime trip, my first real foray out of our home town in Wisconsin. Soon enough, my girl friends and I were galavanting about at night on the fringes of our curfew and smoking Madame’s More cigarettes when we ran out of our own Malboro Lights. Madame wouldn’t go so far as to drink with us, but she was cool and acted like she didn’t know when we came home to whatever dive hotel we were staying in, wasted, from whatever neighborhood bar down the street in Mont St Michel, Nantes, Paris. She pretended not to notice our boozy sheen and the whiff of Malibu and cokes and would proceed to tell us about the origin of bidets while we giggled ourselves silly. She was also from our home town. While the point of our trip was to improve our French, she also wanted us to see the world outside of our familiar malls, part-time jobs, and church youth groups.
By day we traipsed about hearing Madame and our French guides tell us about the chateaux and chapels we were seeing; by night we girls wandered about until 10 pm and screamed when the occasional French guy pinched our asses. If we had really been bad girls, I think Madame would have stopped us from our tame, dancing princesses routine in French bars. I think she knew it was the PG antics of a bunch of Midwestern, Lutheran, A-students. One night Madame told us that her husband was not the father of her young child. Her first husband, a European, had fathered the baby.
“He was the love of my life,” she said, with a drag off the long brown cigarette.
Eyes wide, I asked, “What about your husband now? Don’t you love him too?”
Madame explained that husband number two was a good man with a job, who treated her and her child well, but that he was a friend. She felt safe with him. Her first husband had been a compulsive gambler. And being married to a gambler was not going to work for her, especially with a baby. She gave no more details, and even I was not naive enough to think that the decision to divorce was as easy as she had made it sound. But it did sound like simple logic to move on when your partner was more of a liability than an asset.
As I finished the trip and throughout the rest of adolescence, the echo of her story stayed with me. It did not inoculate me against heartbreak. I had my own messy, unrealistic versions of love to act out on the people around me before I would figure out how to be in a real relationship.
My husband and I have been together for almost 20 years. We have young children, and we aim to share parental chores. The tedium and constant work of children, household upkeep, and work, can blunt the joy of family life. Some days the best we can expect is feeling like coworkers at the same menial job, one that often involves cleaning up feces (human or animal) and always involves doing dishes. Thinking of our life that way makes us laugh together, which reminds us that we love each other. There’s no tradition of happily married people in our immediate past, so we’re just making this all up as we go along.
We know all sorts of families — intact nuclear families, single parents, gay and lesbian parents, the amicably and not-so-amicably divorced. And we have known couples who stay together, probably “for the kids,” but shouldn’t.
Maybe it’s because of narratives I’ve heard over the years, like Madame K’s, and maybe it’s from having parents who were better off apart, but the best interests of children can sometimes mean an honest divorce. This sounds like basic common sense, but I have met so many people who are miserable together and keep having babies. These are the ones a marriage counselor would have to teach the way Annie Sullivan taught Helen Keller. Perhaps they are too evolved to snipe at each other in front of company (some can’t even manage this). But if I hang out with them long enough, the disrespect of one for the other becomes palpable. I’m reminded of the couple where the (unemployed) man harangued his (highly paid) wife about her “inedible” cooking, her “white trash” family, and her plebeian taste in music, all in front of us. I didn’t want to know what he felt free to say to her after the guests went home.
