Second Chances

Posted by Sappho on June 3rd, 2005 filed in Daily Life, Marriage, Memory

“Call Jean on Friday,” my sister advised me when I talked to her last weekend. “It’s her first birthday without Dad.” She means, of course, Jean my stepmother (“brown Jean,” in the color nicknames we used when younger to distinguish her from my sister Jean).

During the week, two other things happened, which bring my mind to thoughts of divorce, and the ways lives are, or aren’t, built up again afterwards. The first was a separation, of someone I know – a marriage which seems to be heading toward its end. It is, from all I’ve heard, a miserable marriage on both sides, the sort where you want to shoot it to put it out of its misery – but there are two small children. Maybe even the children will be better off without these two together, for theirs is a high conflict marriage, and not a quietly unhappy one. But it remains to be seen whether they’ll be able to make the best of their second chances.

The second is a thread over at Family Scholars which combines some of Elizabeth Marquardt’s favorite themes: the effect of divorce on children, the problems of divorce happy talk, etc. She’s front paged a comment on the problem of being asked whether you’d want your parents to get back together years later, now after there are already step and half relatives (would you wish your half siblings unborn?). And the commenter follows up:

To follow up on that: the pro-divorce arguments that emphasize the wonderfulness of getting extra parents and siblings only serve to compound the child’s feelings that they are wrong for wishing their parents had stayed together.

I know the kind of argument she means: someone will describe a child on some occasion, maybe a ball game, or maybe a graduation, and – look, see how happy the child is, surrounded by parents and stepparents! Divorce just meant more people to love the child. It almost sounds as if the writer expects children of happily married parents to run to their parents and beg them to divorce, so they can get more stepparents to love.

What they mean to say is something else. A marriage broke down. Maybe it was bad enough that even the children welcomed the divorce – it happens. Or maybe it caught the children by surprise – children aren’t, after all, altruists who are finely attuned to the happiness of their parents’ marriage – if the parents have enough self-control not to be openly hateful to each other, that may be enough for the kids. Either way, there comes a point when it’s over, and the best you can do is make the most of your second chances.

It’s hard to know, when you’re watching from the sidelines, whether that point has been reached. OK, a couple is separated – might good counseling still put that marriage back together again? Should you still be encouraging them to save the marriage, for the sake of the kids? Or is it time to call it a day, and work on a tolerable child custody arrangement?

It’s been more than thirty years since my parents’ divorce, and we now know how those second chances worked out. We know that Dad’s second marriage lasted. We know that Jean took care of him during seven years of cancer, and most of us were there, those final weeks, and saw how she looked after him, at the end. We know that Mom went on to get her Ph.D. – as a single mother of seven children, yet – and I have on file a letter my grandfather sent, late in his life, sharing with us Mom’s curriculum vitae (which she had showed him when looking for a job), and writing to us about how proud he was of her, and how good we should feel about having such a mother. And we know where we are now, our jobs and our marriages and our children. I think that, over all, I can say that we all have made the best of our second chances.

And I plan to make that birthday call, on lunch break today.