My mother and step-father got divorced after almost 29 years of marriage. She was 79 and he was 81 years old! I had organised with the Sheriff of the Court to meet him at the retirement home where my mom was staying in order to be there when he presented the divorce summons. He told me that in his 44 years of delivering summons, he had never before had to issue one to a 79 year old lady. He added “I feel so heartbroken. To get divorced at this age is so, so sad.” I had to agree with him!
We had tried to
shield our children from most of the process but whilst having breakfast with
our 10 year old one morning she asked me “Are ouma and oupa going to get
divorced?” and I said “yes”. She then
said “Please promise me that you and daddy will
never get divorced”.
Over the years our
older two daughters have periodically asked us the same question, mainly when
one of their classmates’ parents were getting divorced. My instant reply had
always been “of course not. Your dad and
I will never get divorced!” and yet that morning I struggled with my
reply. The enormity of the promise
struck me. I thought “how can I promise
her something like that? I don’t know
what is going to happen in the future”.
What guarantee do I have that our marriage will last ‘till death do us
part’?
And then I thought
that if I can’t promise her that, everything we have taught her about God and
His goodness and His faithfulness means absolutely nothing. So I promised her that her dad and I would
never get divorced.
I phoned Steve later,
relayed the conversation to him and told him that we could never get
divorced. I jokingly added we could kill
each other but we could never, ever get divorced!
I then asked him
“how can I make a promise like that on your behalf?” He didn’t even hesitate, his immediate answer
was “I’ve got it covered! You promise her you won’t divorce me and I will
promise her the same thing and in that way we are responsible for our own
promises and those we can keep.” When he
got home that night she did indeed, make him promise her that he would never
divorce me.
Unbeknownst to me
she overheard me telling a friend about what had happened, and I in turn,
overheard her happily telling her older sister the next day “Mommy says she
will never divorce daddy. She says she
may kill him but she won’t divorce him!”
The dictionary
defines divorce as ‘a separation’ and
separate is defined as ‘to divide’.
This is exactly
what happens to children when their parents get divorced – their lives, their
minds, their hearts and their souls gets divided right down the middle, split
into two parts and a void is created between the two parts. It is as if the egg and the sperm that
created them is torn apart. Generally that
void is then rapidly filled with feelings of being unloved, feelings of unworthiness
and inferiority. The pain and grief of
the divorce can turn into bitterness, anger or self-pity or the need to
manipulate others. They can either be
driven to become overachievers in their need to be accepted or underachievers
in the misguided notion that ‘no-body cares anyway’.
The child also
often develops a terrible sense of guilt.
After all, if their parents once loved each other enough to get married
but now no longer care for each other, it must be the child’s fault that the relationship
has ended. Totally illogical? yes, but
then you are not a child. The child also
often starts to wonder whether this will happen to them? Will their parents also stop loving them one
day? Or get tired of them? Doubts and fears just flood in and instead of
concentrating on growing up and developing they have to deal with the process
of grieving because divorce is a death.
It is a death of a family growing up together and the death of a future
that was once dreamt of.
The life giving
news, however, is that God says “He will wipe every tear” and that nothing, not
death nor divorce “will be able to separate us from the love of God”. (Rev 21:4 & Rom 8:39)
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