I wanted to take the time to thank all of you who have read
all or some of my blogs entries, it has been a pleasure to be able to write all
these weeks. For my last entry, I’m going to write about divorce. Now
obviously, no one gets married planning to get divorced, and if you do, there’s
probably something wrong with you. Divorce can be a really long drawn out
process, and it is pretty painful as well. I don’t know how painful it is for
spouses, but I can speak from the perspective of a child with divorced parents.
I understand that sometimes things just don’t work out and
divorce is the only solution. Other cases in which the result is divorce are
probably caused by one or both spouses not willing to work things out and there’s
a wide variety of causes. Divorce may seem good in the beginning, especially in
the eyes of the spouses, but one must take into consideration the fact that a
divorce has an impact not just on the couple, but on the children, the extended
family, and anyone else involved. It can be a lot more damaging than people
think. I know it was difficult for my mother, she had a hard time trusting in
men. Even though I was young when it happened, it started to have an impact on
me as I grew older. I soon realized that I didn’t have a close connection with
my father’s side of the family as I never really saw or interacted with them. To
this day I’m still not very close with them, though I’d like to be. I know for
a fact that having a father in the house would’ve changed the family dynamic in
a significant way.
A good friend of mine who was divorced recently has said
that it has been positive for both her and her kids. It was really tough at
first with her kids being so young and unable to understand why “daddy had to
live somewhere else.” Sometimes her kids would tell her they hated her, even
though she was trying her best to support them and take care of them on her
own. But there seems to be a sense of normalcy in their lives. I know in her
case it wasn’t a question of which parent the kids would live with, but that is
a huge question in a lot of divorces, as well as how much time they’d spend
with one parent or the other. One thing that I am grateful for knowing what I know
is that my mom never said anything negative about my father and that’s the way
it should be. Parents shouldn’t try to convince their children that they were
the “good parent” by tearing down their former spouse. Both are human beings
with struggles and flaws, there’s no need to cause the rift between the family
to get any bigger.
