Happy Divorce!(?)

I never know what to say when someone tells me they're getting divorced. "I'm so sorry to hear that," doesn't sound right; I assume my friend came to the decision for well-thought through reasons and this will help both parties move on with their lives in a more positive manner. "That's good news," hardly sounds appropriate, though; everything I have seen suggests that however needed divorce may be, there is inherent pain to the end of a once love- and joy-filled relationship.

Up front I should clarify that I have never been divorced; I am married, and every day I work toward making this partnership work rather than veering toward dissolution. My parents' divorce provided my only up-close and personal experience with the topic (the actual divorce spread over nearly six years, from the month I started the eighth grade to when I had just finished my first year of college). That experience has largely shaped my attitude toward divorce. I cannot speak for my parents' or siblings' experience with that divorce, so I won't.

Before my parents divorce, concluding a thirty year marriage that produced five children, my father had payed passing attention to me. I cannot charge that I ever experienced neglect or that my father abused me in some way. He, a child of the Great Depression, may not have been especially expressive or attentive, but I would never say my father ignored me, either. I remember having in-patient eye surgery when I was not-quite ten; while I was in the OR, he seemingly bought out a local toy store. The story makes me smile a little because I like to think that the shopping spree was him worrying about me, which seemed a rare occurrence. I also recall mornings he drove me to school (occasionally he assigned an employee of his to the task) and the times he let me ride with him on big farm machinery when I was fairly young, so I do have pleasant memories of being with my dad. On the whole, though, he did not stake out a significant part of my childhood. Dad went to work, and Mom raised us: that's just how it was.

My parents at 26 years, a happy moment

I also remember life in the house before my parents' divorce. Those memories get sadder as they get later. By the time I turned 10, my mother, who served as the emotional center for a household with three kids still at home, became depressed and took to her bed with migraines as she also began a career as an insomniac. This went on for a few years. It's hardly the stuff of a Dickens novel, but it doesn't exactly qualify as a Kirk Cameron Christmas either.

When my mother filed for divorce she set into motion a change for healthier family dynamics. My mom became visibly happier—not all at once, mind you. Slowly, steadily, she became happier, she coped better, and, to be blunt, she became a more engaged mother. As you might expect, the house became less toxic. Tension in the home lowered. I will not cast my father into the role of an ogre who had to be banished from the kingdom; I will say that two people who did not get along no longer breathed each others' air quite so often.

Dad may have hated getting divorced, but in the process he became a much more positive influence in my life. My father went from occasionally demonstrating interest in what I did—he always showed for command performances like the odd school play—to seeking out time with me. Almost every Friday he picked me up from the house where I lived with my mom and dropped me off Sunday evening. We had to learn to how to be around each other for entire weekends without buffers, but we adjusted quickly and well. I rather enjoyed living the weekends in Dad's world. I liked being around adults, so visiting his friends and having him explain things on the farm to me made for enjoyable time together. He did lots of active parenting things like teaching me social skills and how to put a tow bar safely on a ball hitch (I would explain pre-treating laundry and that you wait until clothes come out of the wash before adding the dryer sheet). As I got older, especially a decade later when I went off to graduate school, I learned that my father understood me better than I knew, which in turn helped me to see how I also understood him.

Someone once said to me plainly, "It sounds like you benefited from your parents' divorce." I did. My mother came out of a depression, and my father got involved: I had two actively engaged parents for the first time. Now, they got some parts of parenting through divorce wrong, but they also got a lot of it right. My mom, for instance, nurtured my father's relationship with me, encouraging him to see me and telling me I could call or see him whenever I liked; my dad worked to not undermine my mother to me—he failed at that no more than she did, and he really tried.

My parents' divorce also taught me some important lessons. Before my mother filed papers in court, I thought marriage an odd arrangement: it appeared you got into this relationship and stayed there for no clear reason, just getting up every day and going on because that's just what you do. After the divorce, I realized two important things: 1) a relationship should feed you, if it only drains you then you are missing out on the chance for happiness when our time alive is too precious to squander and 2) nobody will stay with you if you don't take the time and effort to feed the relationship. Genuinely, my parents' failed marriage reminds me that human connections take work and must also be worth our effort.

Several years ago, some fifteen years after my parents divorce, I heard a sermon that essentially vindicated divorce as necessary when the relationship has truly ended. Drawing from the notion of two flesh becoming one flesh through marriage, the Episcopal priest said (paraphrasing), "God's math is not our math; one plus one equals one." "With time," he continued, "some couples do not live as two being one, but two being two, with separate lives and concerns, not living for the one from two but for the one separated from the other one." As he explained, we have to accept divorce as the eventual state of a relationship that stopped working a while ago. That argument goes a long way to explaining my repulsion at the term "a broken home" to mean a home that has gone through divorce. The home—if we're going to use that metaphor—was "broken" because of a "broken" relationship; a divorce can be a way of helping the home and the people in it get better.

My largely positive experience with my parents' divorce surely contrasts with others'. My parents hardly resorted to the War of the Roses; I lived a financially comfortable and physically safe life during their divorce. That said, in my own, limited experience, divorce brought tears and turmoil and from that came relief, brighter days, and even a little wisdom.