Divorce Parenting Part Deux

Of course I was aiming to push a few hot buttons in my post last week advocating divorce for conscientious parenting. However the more I’ve thought about it the more I think it makes sense, unfortunately, for many, many households.

I remember my own parents shrieking at each other while my sister and I sat on the side-door stairs praying the neighbors wouldn’t hear them. Yet those blow ups were unusual. In general my parents related to each other like office workers with adjacent cubicles. I know they worshipped us like prize-winning puppies, bragging incessantly to anyone within a ten-mile radius about our latest glowing report cards. Yet the only time I ever remember seeing them kiss was in a picture from their wedding album. By the time I was a teenager I spent as much time away from home as I could because no matter how hot and sunny it was outside, inside was a perpetual frigid gloom. By the time I was sixteen and my mother was about to graduate Yale law school (she went back at 35 when my little sister started high school.) they finally decided to divorce.

So many couples stay together “for the sake of the kids” as if the kids are so insensitive that they cannot divine that there is little love left between the two people the kids love the most. How can that climate of lies possibly be good for children? What kind of relationship are you modeling for them? That parenting is a soul-deadening sacrifice and loving relationships are actually lifetimes of subterfuge? How could children raised in such an environment ever hope to grow up to build an honest, loving relationship of their own? I’m convinced that my sister and I fought like a brother and sister “War of the Roses” because that was the only type of male/female relationship we’d ever known firsthand.

At least for now, my kids adore each other. Until recently Ava was convinced she would marry her baby brother and Chet pines for her desperately when she’s away at a sleepover.

Obviously the best-case scenario would be a loving couple loving their kids. If you’ve got it, you and your kids are lucky and blessed. Speaking of best-case scenarios, another one of mine would be a HuffingtonPost reader gifting me a 2006 Ferrari Scaglietti. I’m not holding my breath. “Best cases” don’t come around so often. You make your dinner with what you find in the fridge.