D-I-V-O-R-C-E

When I was about fifteen, I spent the summer with my dad in Wisconsin. He traveled a lot for his job, and took me along on several of his trips. It was nice to exercise my newly acquired driving skills on the wide, long roads of Wisconsin when it was my turn to drive, and it was good to get to know my dad and see his life.

One subject I generally avoided talking about with my dad was The Divorce. I already had my version of the narrative, and in that story he was the villain, which made it an uncomfortable topic. It had occurred to me, though, that he was likely not the villain in his version of the narrative, so I was curious to see how that story went. Tentatively, I asked him on one of those long road trips about his thoughts on The Divorce.

He seemed hesitant to say too much. "Marriage is complicated," he told me. "Sometimes divorce is inevitable."

In my adolescent self-righteous view of the world, I couldn't understand why divorce would ever be inevitable. It was a Bad Thing, and hence only Bad People would choose to do it. "It's avoidable if you put some effort into it," I muttered, or perhaps only thought, because I'm passive-aggressive that way.

"You'll understand when you get married," he assured me.

That annoyed me. I assumed he was telling me that I would make the same mistakes he did, that my marriage(s) would inevitably end in divorce.

I was wrong. He avoided explaining in detail his reasons for divorcing my mother because he didn't want to make her the villain. Not that she is the villain in his version of the story--because she's not--but he recognized that to a fifteen-year-old who only saw black and white, it would seem that that was his intention. Rather than say anything that could be perceived as badmouthing my mom, then, he avoided the question by telling me I'd understand when I was older.

As you can tell, I managed to misperceive his intentions anyway. I'm talented like that.

I just finished reading Between Two Worlds: The Inner Lives of Children of Divorce by Elizabeth Marquardt. This book reports Marquardt's study of 1500 adults between the ages of 18 and 35 who, like herself, grew up as children of divorced parents. The focus of her argument is that, even among those who grow up in "good divorces" and end up being successful adults, children whose parents divorce are forced to deal with all sorts of inner conflict and emotional stress that they are not prepared to deal with, and this experience scars them permanently.

I have an ambivalent relationship with this book. In the first place, I'm not unbiased on the issue in any sense. On the one hand, my parents are divorced and I don't want to portray either of them in a negative light or make them (or anyone else) feel like they are to blame for whatever problems I have. Then on the other hand, I am in a marriage which is statistically even more likely to end in divorce than most, and I don't want to send the message to my wife, my children, or anyone else that I take divorce or its consequences lightly or that I'm looking for a way to justify it. So I'm caught between wanting to tell Elizabeth Marquardt that she's making a big deal of nothing, that, hey, look at me, my parents divorced but I'm okay, and wanting to applaud her for recognizing that divorce is a horrible, ugly thing that I would never ever want to inflict on my children.

In the second place, my biases aside (or as aside as they'll ever be), Marquardt's valid points are weakened by her faulty logic. For instance, she points out that children of divorce are forced to grow up too quickly because they have to worry about their parents and they have to reconcile two opposing worlds that it should be the parents' responsibility to reconcile. I identify with this sentiment: I spent far too much of my youth concerning myself with my mother's emotional wellbeing; I had to decide who, between my parents, was right or wrong, bad or good, and I often made overly simplistic decisions because I wasn't mature enough to understand adult things like love and sex and finances and religion; outwardly I was the perfect young man, wise and obedient, but the apparent wisdom came from being forced to understand things I wasn't ready to understand and the apparent obedience came from my fear of further complicating anyone's life by being disobedient. As Svoid pointed out when I was discussing this with him, though, Marquardt is assuming that forcing children to grow up quickly is a bad thing, and it's not necessarily. I value the independence I developed as a result of knowing I couldn't completely depend on my parents, and I value my ability to see the world from different perspectives that I developed in my attempt to love and understand two parents who seemed so radically opposed.

Throughout the book Marquardt talks about negative effects of divorce on children, some of which I identified with and others I did not. She follows a pattern of first citing a statistic from her study, such as "more than half of young adults from divorced families, compared to just a fifth of people from intact families agree, 'What my mother said was true and what my father said was true were often two different things'"; then she elaborates on specific examples from the people she interviewed; then she makes some kind of generalized, conclusive statement like "As children of divorce, we tried to adapt to our parents' different worlds. We confronted their different truths and felt it was up to us to make sense of the contradictions." Well yes, that's true of "more than half" of us, but what about the rest? In almost every case she talks about a portion of children of divorce--usually ranging from a third to two thirds--as if they represent all children of divorce. I suspect that she's completely ignoring a significant portion of the 1500 people she surveyed who identified with none of the negative effects she asked them about, who were basically happy children regardless of their parents' marital status. The fact that forty percent of children of divorce feel like they were a different person with each of their parents does not mean that I felt that way, any more than the fact that ninety-five percent (pulling a number out of thin air but it's probably fairly accurate) of mixed-orientation marriages end in divorce means that mine will. Statistics ultimately are useful only in talking about large groups of people, not individuals.

I think if I had read this book ten years ago when I saw myself--and wanted everyone else to see me--as a victim, I would have loved it. Marquardt is the voice of every angsty, pissed-off child of divorce who is dying to say, "Hey, look at me! My life sucks!" And really, I can see the purpose in validating that feeling, especially for a group of people who so often as children felt we had to ignore our feelings in favor of our parents' feelings. But, as the wise Weed said last night, "All families are wack." Everybody has parts of his or her childhood that sucked and parts that didn't suck. Perhaps there are specific ways of sucking that many children of divorce share in common, but dwelling on those only serves us to a limited extent.

To be fair to Marquardt, her purpose is not only to gripe. She says explicitly that she does not intend to make divorced parents feel bad for divorcing, nor to say that divorce is always a bad thing. She recognizes that for some people divorce is the best option, but she wants parents in salvageable marriages to realize that divorce will affect their children. She wants to discredit what she sees as a common misperception, that there is no difference between growing up in a "good divorce" and growing up in a unified family.

When it comes down to it, I believe there are marriages that should end in divorce. Some marriages, I would go so far as to say, should have never happened in the first place. It's not my job or my right, though, to decide who should work to save their marriage and who should not. The only marriage I'm responsible for is my own. I don't think people who divorce are horrible parents, nor do I resent my parents for divorcing. I don't need to resent or judge anybody in order to agree, as they apply to me, with Marquardt's closing lines:

[It's] not enough to love our children. As hard as I know it can be, we parents must also do our best to love and forgive each other, every day. We do this so that our children can have what so many of us did not have--a mother and father at home, stability and wholeness as well as love. We do this so that we can sustain unbroken families that last a lifetime, not just for the sake of our own happiness, but for theirs.