Readers join Katie Crouch in sharing their stories:
My parents divorced when I was in my mid-30s and they were about 60. It wasn’t a mutual thing; my Dad fell in love with another woman. But as I approach my mid-40s, I understand more and more how limited our time is on this planet and how spending it trapped in a relationship that isn’t working makes little sense.
However: this may sound bratty, but I refused to call my father’s new wife my “step-mother.” I even went so far as to correct people – especially him – when that term was used. I felt that at 35+ years old, I got to determine who was in my family. She was his wife and I liked her a great deal, but it seemed insulting to my mother, who was there for the actual difficult child-raising years, to call this woman who I met as an adult my step-mother. If my dad had married her when I was eight years old, and she’d driven me to Little League and taken me to the emergency room when I broke my arm, that would be a different story.
On the other hand, my younger brother and sister can’t throw out that term enough, and it bothers me. This came to a head because she passed away, and the “sorry your stepmother died” e-mails and Facebook messages started in earnest. You don’t correct the Facebook message about a woman who just died of cancer in her early 60s, and of course I feel sorry for my father and her children and grandchildren. But she still wasn’t my stepmother – I will never have one.
Another:
As an adult of 42 when my parents divorced, my biggest reaction was absolute shock. My parents had always been Ozzie and Harriet, Ward and June Cleaver, or Mr. and Mrs. Baxter. Turned out my Dad had a mistress for some 15 years, and she was getting restless.
The divorce went rather amicably under the circumstances. Even the division of the considerable assets went well after I stepped in and did it for them. However, my mother absolutely refused to meet or even be in the same room with the mistress, until the fateful day when my niece was christened. Mom was not going to miss that and she saw the mistress for the first time. Mom, like me, had always been overweight and had struggled with it all her life. She knew Dad had left her for a much younger woman. However, the mistress was significantly heavier, by over 100 pounds, and, after learning this key fact, mom was OK. Dad could leave for a younger woman, just not a thinner one.
Mom developed Alzheimer’s about two years after the divorce and eventually didn’t really remember she and Dad were divorced. She’d show up at his house (which was on the same street as hers) and chat with the mistress and Dad like they were all family, even have breakfast together. The mistress was very good about the whole thing and we went from having two of every holiday back to one with everybody together like nothing had happened except there were all these new people (more or less, as far as Mom was concerned, like they had always been there).
However, when I was a kid, I had the safety and security of a completely intact, loving family. It didn’t stop me from screwing up my life, mind you, but I still had a great childhood, something I don’t think would have been the case if the whole thing had happened when I was 12, not 42.
A brief intermission:
I can’t help thinking of the joke about the elderly couple (he 93, she 92) who go to see the divorce attorney.
“You’ve been married over seventy years, raised five children together, and now you want a divorce?” said the attorney.
“Well,” said the wife, “the first few years weren’t bad, but things went downhill after that and we haven’t been happy in decades.”
“But why now?” asked the attorney.
Answered the man, “We wanted to wait until all the kids were dead.”
Another reader’s story:
My parents divorced when I was in my late 20s. After my brother left for college, they looked at each other and asked, “Who are you?” They had been married just out of college/law school and plunged into having four kids in five years. They lost track of each other over the next 20 years and couldn’t remake what they once had, perhaps, before the hullabaloo of our family arrived.
I made it clear that my affections could be purchased by the highest bidder, but neither took me up on the offer. To their great credit, we have remained a close family, now with four spouses and eight grandchildren. My father’s second wife and her child were folded into the mix a few years after the divorce and not a beat was missed. It was a bit unnerving that my stepmother was, and is, a Republican and a Catholic. We are a tribe of agnostic/atheist Dems, but we have all come around a bit – and it made conversations at dinners and the end of docks much less monochromatic.
My mother was liberated by the divorce, traveling to Washington, D.C. for a time, then Johannesburg and Addis Ababa, where she taught ethics to local government officials, until finally ending up in Traverse City near the lake that gives her, and me, such solace and energy. She has never remarried.
My three siblings and I are all on our first spouses, each of us a decade or two into our relationships. I think watching our parents divorce when we were old enough to have a mature perspective – where it wasn’t ruining our lives or tearing apart our homes – is part of why we’re all still together. We have talked about the importance of keeping in touch with our wives and husbands, of keeping the relationship new, of not subsuming our marriages into kids.
But who knows? We’re all approaching the age when our parents split. We, too, may harbor the unhappiness that they felt and that could not be fixed, but I don’t feel it. Time will tell.
The Dish 