Since I announced that I was getting divorced, the questions have been … yes, besides relentless … focused predominantly on how our child is handling the situation. I used to dismiss people by saying he’s doing fine, he’s happier now that the conflict is no longer in his face every day and he is learning to develop separate relationships with each of us without the conflict over who is bringing him up more correctly. What I realize now, however, is as much as it matters how he is coping with the situation, it matters oh so much more how we are eliminating the fallout in such a way that all this ultimately becomes is another defining moment in his life
It has come at a time that I finally realize that this is it, that I am finally going to hit one of the biggest defining moments of my own life because, on the anniversary of announcing that I want a divorce, I finally know I am going to get one. I also know the climax came when certain defining moments in my life clashed with an almighty din with those in the life of my husband … defining moments based solely on the marital status of our own parents.
The child psychologist reiterates regularly through the couples counsellor that our child is holding out hope that his parents will get back together again; that we will once more live together as a family under the same roof. Not only does that give me a tremendous amount of hope that he has been relatively untarnished by this – after all what child would want that if his memories included witnessing on more than one occasion the glint on the Global knife as it was brandished, between tomato slicing, in the direction of his father – but it makes me realize that this is one of his first rights of passage, one of many in his life that will define his personality … and, let’s face it, we don’t get strength from the good ones.
The fundamental issue that arose when the divorce came up was, like I mentioned, our defining moments based on how our parents dealt with their respective marriages and the hopes we ourselves had as children … our very own rights of passage journeys that have made us who we are today and defined how we have dealt with what has been happening recently. For my husband, he has been fighting for the very thing he lacked growing up – a traditional family. For me, who had the traditional family, I have been fighting for freedom from the restrictions that creates. My husband has been trying to keep us together to break the pattern that was created in his life and I have been fighting against staying together for the sake of the child … simply because my rights of passage journey – my defining moment – was growing up holding out hope that my parents would split up, desperate for them to not stay together for the sake of the children, desperate for them to take responsibility for their own fucked up relationship and desperate to not feel guilty for keeping them together when it was quite obvious that they should have been apart.
It’s the very thing that will prevent us ever restoring this relationship. A couple can clash on a huge number of issues bringing up a child but when something at the very core clashes so convincingly you know that there’s just no fighting it any more.
