File Under: Divorce, 70's Style

My parents divorced in January of 1970. For my younger reader(s), this is really no big whup. Who cares and who notices?

Au contraire, mes enfants. As I was still an impressionable child in 1970 rather than firmly mired in adult mores I can't say exactly why there was such a stigma attached to it. It's hard to imagine in these days that I was the only schoolchild in a class of 32 with divorced parents, yet it happened, and I experienced it.

Given adequate thought, I can conclude that at the very least it was considered a deep moral failing by many people, and not necessarily only by the very religious or conservative. I imagine there was something slightly sinister, off-key, or debauched about divorce - one can imagine in hazy backlight the figure of a divorcee viewed as glamorous and sophisticated - after all, Hollywood stars had been getting divorces and serially marrying for decades before then (see Taylor, Elizabeth and Burton, Richard).

Reality, proving itself to be Irony's charming bedfellow, was quite the opposite of oversized sunglasses, diamond necklaces and fur stoles. My parents were 30; their oldest child of four was nearly 12 and the youngest was 7. I think we were all very far away from a wee fur stole, yes?

As far as custody arrangements went, there was never a question that we would remain with my mother. Back then family court judges cared very little about a child's wishes and usually granted automatic custody to the mother. Would we have wanted to live with my father? I don't even know the answer to that question now, 36 years later, much less been able to answer it then. We were told that my father didn't want us to live with him permanently - that was guaranteed to sting fragile childish hearts and it made its intended impact. I don't doubt that it was the truth - my father was not a person who should have attempted parenthood and one of the main reasons he did was a result of the culture in which he was raised. It was just something you did as an adult, along with finding a good job, buying a house, and paying your taxes.

Anyway, almost overnight my life changed fundamentally. In fact, it changed so much and so radically in such a short period of time that many of the fallout effects weren't felt until I was an adult myself. To be 30 years old and still questioning the fine points of the demise of one's parent's marriage sounds like grist for the therapy mill, but on that snowy January day in 1970 my ideas about marriage and family changed irrevocably. My faith in the permanence of marital vows took a beating; my faith in my own future choice for a mate was cast in doubt; my trust in the constancy of men was whittled to nearly nothing.

We moved one state away from my father - in an area like the Northeast or the Southeast, that wouldn't have represented too great a hardship, but in the grand open spaces of the West, we lived a 10 hour drive away. Visits weren't made casually (air travel was still ruinously expensive then), nor, because of my father's work, very often.

Our cozy middle-class existence was shattered - we were now living in a single parent household. My mother worked, but as she'd never finished college and had been a housewife for 11 years the jobs open to her were few and ill paid. My father paid some child support but that didn't propel our lifestyle into any stratosphere or stop us from being latchkey kids.

I entered a world of hand-me-downs and charity offerings, of always having to rsvp no to slumber parties, of checking in constantly with my mother while we were at home and saying goodbye to family vacations (which we couldn't afford to take) plus a whole host of other intermittently embarrassing social situations in which it was incumbent upon me to produce two parents. Did I feel soul-crushing envy at other, whole families for whom these issues never arose? Of course! I spent many years simmering with resentment, class based and otherwise, towards anyone and everyone who had something I lacked.

Do I wish my parents would have stayed together although their world views and essential personalities differed so radically? Do I wish they could have somehow sucked up their differences and sacrificed their happiness to ensure mine?

It would be disingenous to write otherwise than that the selfish childish part of me (which persists long after childhood ends, I find) is more than happy to insist that since these two people brought me into the world their responsiblity for my happiness lingers far longer than it ought. Thankfully the adult side of me has a chance to chime in with its specialized knowledge of the complexity of relationships to put the kibosh on wishing what could never be.

I'll never be a person that can hear about a couple's divorce without feeling some sadness or some identification with the situation. Especially if kids are involved -I always imagine the shoes of other limited and confused tiny selves, how I once fit into them so neatly, and how terrifyingly difficult they are to outgrow.

I think my experience of divorce made me a person who couldn't enter into marriage easily or early. I was nearly 35 when I finally felt I could truly commit to another person. During my 20's and early 30's I viewed marriage as a prison, each participant a free bird locked in a gilded cage.

When I seriously contemplated marriage I discovered that for two people in sync, what it really was, what it really could be, was two best friends poised on the edge of a cliff, jumping off together hand in hand towards an unknown future.

And that was an image I could hold in my heart.