Divorce is Decisive But Doesn't Have To Be Divisive

She opened her sleepy young eyes, having been woken with a start, the house was quiet, it was very late, that she knew, but she felt scared, then she noticed there were lights on in the dining room and living room, then she heard them trying to keep their voices low, but she could still hear them and it was this fast talking that made her very nervous, she had heard it before and she hoped it didn't end up as it always did, With yelling and screaming. But then it started like a low roll of thunder, she could her he mother start in on her father, "Oh you prefer her to me do you, you want her to fuck you more than me do you,?" Well good go, you can have her, be my guest, you fucking bastard."

The little girl rolled her head into her pillow and screamed at the top of her lungs out of fear and frustration, "STOOOOOPPPP IT, OH GOD MAKE THEM JUST STOP!!!!"...........But it didn't stop, it just kept getting loader, and now the two of them were yelling at each other. She crept out of bed, quietly tip toed down the short connecting hall and peered around the corner of the wall that housed the fireplace. There was her father bent over the stereo, with her mother putting her hand up between his legs she must have done something, because her father turned around and pushed her, and she fell to the floor. He looked up from where his still screaming wife lay to find his 6yo daughter staring back at them, he crossed the living room floor towards her, taking her by the hand, not saying a word, putting her back in bed. The house was quiet after that.....................except for the faint crying of her mother. I am 62 and remember it like it were yesterday, the feeling hasn't gone, the fear conjured up is still palpable. It was a turning point in my life, I'll never forget it.. But to be honest, I've forgotten most of what came next...............................................

Divorce became like a plague in the 70's, thru the 80's and 90's. My parents generation, having lived thru their own parents often horrific, dysfunctional marriages, no longer had societal dictates or strictures to force them to stay together. The children of the 70's were some of the first to witness the end and fall of the institute of marriage. We use to say, "The institution of marriage?, well who wants to stay in an institution" We laughed our way thru some of the most damaging and dysfunctional days of our young lives.

I'm not a proponent of staying together just for the sake of marriage I don't believe if people are in a bad marriages, they should stay together, not even that divorce is bad. But a bad marriage and worse, a badly handled divorce are two of the most damaging situations to grow up in. Both situations are usually the result of a lack of commitment to a common cause, an inability to communicate and emotional immaturity.

There are approximately 4 stages of marriage. The meet/attraction phase, the trickster/falling in love phase, the reality phase and the choice phase.

The meet/attraction phase, usually makes us blind to what the person is really like, we often can't see clearly nor want to. We meet someone, they seem nice, we have nothing better going on, we're looking for someone, we just go along without real thought to what we are doing.

The trickster/falling in love phase, is when sex gets involved, if the sex is good, we are usually at this point deciding what the bridal party will wear, and where will we honeymoon, and how much should we spend on the wedding. It's so intense we can't think straight.

The reality stage, is when we get hit upside the head and suddenly we have bills, and the first of a few kids comes along and we are both working and there are house payments, car payments groceries to buy, midnight feedings, diapers to change, in laws to deal with, we hadn't thought about how many people we were actually inviting into our life, that we weren't going to be having sex with, so there is no upside to the downside. This is the point when we start to doubt what it was that made looking at getting married so amazing?

Then there is the Choice phase, this is the phase were we look at what we have created and must decide what is most important, the family unit or our singlehood. We are stressed all the time, we are just going thru the motions, sleep, kids, work, house cleaning, repeat. Suddenly it doesn't all seem so glamorous and what happened to that amazing sex that was happening every other day, if it happens once a week, we're lucky.

These are all the steps and phases, in my experience to be aware of. There is also the baggage, of our own personal experience thru our own parents marital experience, we enter into marriage, with expectations and if these expectations aren't discussed before hand we can find ourselves in very difficult water.

In the end there are people involved in a marriage, not just the husband and wife, but also the children. In our journey in and out of marriage we can often forget all in the family unit are affected by the lead up to the break up as well as the break up it self, and the after math the dissolution of the marriage brings.

As many phases as there are of getting into a marriage there are likely even more to get out of one.

There's the build up of the break down, the break down, the separation, and finally the Divorce. A divorce doesn't just happen it takes, usually years to come about. If there is emotional unrest in the home this disrupts the children, often on a developmental level, if a baby comes into an unhappy home their brain develops differently than perhaps the eldest child who was born into a happier environment, and the longer this goes on the deeper the damage, emotionally and developmentally. If parents have deep feelings of resentment, and show this resentment to the children this causes unprecedented relational damage with one or both parents . Children's feelings of inadequacy, lack of self worth, self esteem issues arise, and abandonment issues too in later life, can arise in children raised in this toxic environment.

If we are struggling in our marriage, and do in the end decide to divorce, it is helpful to remember our partner did not set to make us unhappy, our happiness is up to us. The other big issue in my estimation is our children are innocents in the break down of a marriage, we owe them a peaceful life, unfettered with emotional drama. Having children was a conscious choice on our part, we owe them the emotional, financial, physical and spiritual support because of that choice. The ones to suffer most thru a bad marriage and or a bad divorce are our children. They didn't ask for the life we give them, but it is our responsibility to give them the life they deserve.

Geri