second chances

Growing up in my household divorce was always a dirty word. It was what happened in the distant regions of my family. This was something that went down within the ranks of the large clan of cousins I grew up knowing so little about, but not in our world. Yet there’s an infrequently recounted tale of my sister as a child making my parents promise to never get divorced. Sometimes I don’t know if adults realize really how much children gobble up ways and means from their example. I know that I learned and in part had to unlearn certain key things about interactions with others, conflict resolution, ways to sustain a relationship, manners in which to deal with difficulty, and on and on. I don’t know if one can prevent having influence.

But divorce did happen in my immediate family. My brother’s first marriage didn’t last long and brought with it a child who quickly became neglected by key members of my family and his ex-wife was quickly on the chopping block from all of the photo albums and in conversation. I believe the divorce was ultimately a good idea for all, but I wouldn’t say the same of the reaction. Ever since I was a kid I could see through to some of the grayer regions of life on this planet. Growing up on so much mainstream culture, the presumptions grew and grew about the ways things are as opposed to the way things are not. Movies and television inadvertently taught a guide to me for how things would pan out.

My brother’s situation and so many others real and fictionalized showed me endless bitterness and vile disregard between people who once shared love or at least words of love or at least a toothpaste tube. So, as the years went on and distance, heartache, and disappointment began interfering with dreams and schemes my wife and I had conjured at some idealist time in our past, the word divorce started to come up. I said it. Then she said it. Then we didn’t say it at all, but instead let the big ol’ elephant speak for us. It became such a tug-of-war of wills, hopes, dreams, and ultimately very differing ideals and expectations that the ties eventually had to break fully.

But the fear of bitterness and being like those others that had long come before really affected the situation. There’s really no guide for something whose oft-used companion phrase amicable doesn’t quite do justice. Two people in such a situation can’t really jump right into something else without awkwardness and other heightened emotions. Or comfortably be roommates. Or be friends without benefits. So, out comes the eraser. The quick fix is gently but noticeably erasing one another out of the other’s life. It seems to become about finding other places to orbit, changing the routine, starting over along some other path, because that train has sure as hell run out of track.

What then, though? Questions galore fill the mind. Where to go next? What’s on the bucket list? You know the one, the addendum to the real one, the one that would never have happened in that prior lifetime. As good, bad, or somewhere in between things may have been, was that the single opportunity that’s going to come down the pike this lifetime?