Elizabeth Marquandt has lately been posting about the adult children of divorce, here and here, and is even looking for examples of same to do the media circuit. I have no desire to discuss such a thing on TV, but her comments did get me thinking about my own experience. In particular it reminded me of how I was told that every child of divorce wishes that their parents would get back together; and I never once remember wishing that.
My reaction to my parents’ separation, when I was 14, was in fact oddly unemotional. This greatly annoyed my sister, who took it very hard. I still don’t remember it with a great deal of emotion. But now that I look back on it, it seems that my real expression of distress at the divorce came out through the house. I was unhappy that my father wanted my mother to sell it. By this time I was in college, so I didn’t live there, but still it bothered me.
As it turned out my mother bought out my father’s half and rented it out when she went to grad school. For the first seven years the tenants were my sister and her husband. But eventually they moved away, and my mother had the house renovated, stripped of all the built-in furniture my father made, and turned it into a blank rental house for the open market. I had moved to L.A. by this time and returned briefly to collect my valuables calmly enough. But during that period I had a number of dreams of being in and around the house and chased by dinosaurs. The emergence of these angry, primitive beasts, supposed to be extinct, was one of those symbols so obvious it’s as if my unconscious wanted to make sure I got the message.
That I should feel so much more about a building than about actual people perhaps affirms my sister’s view of me as cold-hearted. But, now that I think of it, it’s not so strange. My relationships with my family members didn’t actually change that much with the divorce; the marriage had long been a dead thing and I was used to relating to my parents separately, and anyway we were introverts who kept to ourselves a lot even when we lived together. And my parents, to their credit, made sure that we spent the rest of our teenage years with minimal disruption. But what I didn’t see, in my myopic adolescent way, was that even the corpse of the marriage was holding together something bigger and yet subtler. It was that family homestead, that center of gravity around which the rest of the world seems to arrange itself, and to which one naturally returns at certain times. The house was, I think, the image of us as a unit, the sum greater than the parts, which we never really lived up to but was nonetheless there. Now that it’s gone, one place seems much like another to me.
I don’t want to overdramatize my situation. I doubt that all this really harmed me. But I can see how, if this is repeated millions of times across the country, it can eat away at something important, something fundamentally human. All along I have often had dreams where my parents were together, not in the foreground or as the point of the dream, but in in the background, as something assumed. There is only one configuration of persons that was burned into my brain as The Family, and that will probably always be so.
I found Marquandt’s discussion via Eve and Lynn, who has some thoughts about divorce in her own family.
I do not know how relevant this is to your ponderings, but I grew up without something that so many of my friends did have, and that is an attachment to a place. I don’t have it. No house or city or other thing called “place” has a significant hold on my psyche, memory or self-definition. I do not have any longing for any particular place as “home.” Even my own little bungalow, much as I’m glad to have it, does not have me particularly attached to it. I’d just as soon leave it as not. It’s a place to park my life for the time being, that’s all.
I think the reason for this is that, in my childhood, my family moved a lot. My father was a pastor, and one consequence of that occupation is that you move from ministry to ministry, from place to place. I never spent more than a few years in any particular house or town.
I came to a deeper appreciation of this difference in my upbringing during college, when more than one classmate would become profoundly homesick for their own home, bedroom, wallpaper, curtains, etc. I never pined for those things. Instead, “home” came to be defined as wherever my parents were. My siblings and I always refered to “home” as wherever my parents were, even when we left the nest, and my parents kept moving. Even when they moved to a city that none of us had ever lived in, we still called their house “home.” “Home” has always been about WHO and not WHERE.
My mother just moved in January from the 5 bedroom house she lived in for only the past 6 years (and where she cared for my father until he lost his battle with cancer 3 years ago) to a 1 bedroom “cottage,” in a retirement village that has progressive care. She has signed on the dotted line and will live there until her own death. As she ages, and needs more and more care, she will be moved, within the village, to areas that provide more and more supervision and care. She made this commitment because she does not want her children burdened with the responsibility of caring for her as she ages.
Interestingly, this is the first place she has lived that I cannot think of as “home base” for myself. She has now become part of a very specialized community, and has chosen with great deliberation what “home” will mean for her. The most interesting thing about this choice is that she has chosen to become a part of a community. She has remarked about this a couple of times, herself. It’s very different, living deliberately in a community. Almost her whole life she shared her home with her husband, and now she lives among “peers.” “Home” for her is more about people, and really very little about any particular place.
Comment by Dash — June 4, 2005 @ 3:15 pm
One of the things that I find often suprises me is the disbelief expressed by others when I state that I consider myself to be relatively untroubled my parent’s divorce when I was 8 or so. Of course, it may all come out in therapy when I’m older but both me and my younger brother came out the other side pretty unscathed.
Comment by James — June 6, 2005 @ 5:39 am
[...] eous, Religion and sex — Camassia @ 4:08 pm Amba wrote a nice response to my post about my parents’ divorce, in which she reflects on what her own marriage means: Jacques an [...]
Pingback by Camassia — June 13, 2005 @ 4:08 pm