Sometimes I think that as a wedding and marriage blog we don't spend enough time talking about divorce. Sometimes I think that if every other post were about divorce, it still wouldn't be enough time. Because marriages ending (and they all end, in death or divorce) is what we're promising to be in for when we say our vows. Because I don't think any of us have any business walking down the aisle, till we've had long, hard talks about divorce. Because so many of our lives were shaped by divorce. So today I'm proud to share a post with you about mourning for the dissolution of parents' marriage, and what we can learn from that.
Last year, my mother asked me to take her wedding albums away. She and my father have been divorced for a handful of years now, and she understandably does not want them around any longer. I have been putting it off for a lot of reasons. Practical considerations abound. And I am not sure I want them, either. But my younger sister, who still lives at home, screamed hell-fire when my mother suggested dumping them. That was perhaps not the most fair reaction to my mother, but I also feel hesitant to have her just throw them out. Because, of course, those photographs are completely loaded with the complicated feelings I have about my parents' divorce and the resulting confusion about the way I feel about marriage in general.
Mentioning this photo predicament in passing to my friends made me feel almost silly. Of course, it isn't that big of a deal on the surface: all the folks pictured are still my family. Whatever may have happened since then, the photos still represent my own beginnings.
But it really isn't about the photos. It’s about not knowing how to move on from all of the things you go through and learn about yourself when your parents get divorced. It is about how you can still get blindsided by the hurt even years later, and it's about how you are not quite sure how to trust in love, and it's about realizing that marriage scares you shitless, now that it's a real possibility. Those photos made me realize there is still something important missing from my healing. It took a while to put my finger on it, but I think that it has something to do with the fact that divorce is so, well... divorced from all of the rest of the way marriage is handled in our society.
At least in my family, marriage is not just about the couple, but about the whole community of people that surrounds them. And so the beginning of that relationship between not just two people, but their whole community, is usually a wedding: a big, ritualistic celebration that allows other people to participate in the creation of a brand new relationship. You invite this whole crowd of people—the families and the introducers and the cheerers on—to help you make a start. They fly in from out of town, and walk you down the aisle, and make the stuff, and buy the gifts, and fight the fights about silly wedding things, and you let them because you want them to be a part of it all.
In stark contrast, a divorce, when it comes down to it, is very exclusively about those two individual people: Two people deciding to break up, two people taking all of these actions to see that decision through, two people going through this ritualistic, legal maze to undo a relationship. The news is broken. The property is divided. The custody schedule is arranged. But other than that, all of the rest of the people affected by the relationship—all of the people who were there at the wedding, who did the introducing, and cheering on, and the kids that were produced—they are just bystanders. Continue reading A Funeral for My Parents’ Wedding
