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When the Culture War Is Fought in Your Front Yard
“God hates divorce. God loves divorced people.” Those are the words of a pastor I used to know.
I hate divorce, too. I hate, hate, hate it. For the record, my parents are married and have been for over 50 years. I have been married for 26 years as of a few days ago. My parents have had their issues, my wife and I have had ours. We were close to divorce about five years ago, but God intervened and rescued us from our arrogance. My mother’s parents were divorced when she was a toddler, her dad being a raging drunk who beat my grandmother. My wife’s parents were both married and divorced multiple times. Beyond that, divorce has never touched me in any real personal way.
Until this morning. My son, 13, just came up from his long slumber to say that his friend’s parents are getting a divorce. I guess they’ve been having trouble for some time, they’ve talked about divorce before, but my son says it’s for real this time: she has a lawyer.
Call me a girly man if you must, but I’ve got some tears in my eyes as I write this. I hate that my son has to bear some burden in order to support his friend (though I love him for doing so). I hate that his buddy has to go through this, the uncertainty, the worry that it is his fault, being torn between mom and dad.
I’m not sure what else to say other than, if you pray, perhaps you’ll pray for Isaac and his family.
Published in General
I would have done that anyway.
Will do. If you get the chance, assure the kid that he is definitely not to blame. Hopefully, he is old enough not to let either of them use him.
I wish your son and his friend well. Divorce is not a panacea, it should be entered into only if all alternatives have been tried. I am so sorry. Thank you for asking for prayers.
From the other side, when my sister and I were in college (I was away from home, she was commuting to university in town), we discussed our family. We agreed that mom was a witch, and we actually hoped Dad would get up the courage to divorce her. He never did. When she was in her last months, Sister (who was managing the estate and her care) said to me “Now I know what you went through for all those years”-I was the “identified patient” in the family. Sometimes divorce is a good thing.
For better or worse, children blame themselves for their parents’ divorce. For children ages 3-7 there is an excellent book, “It’s Not Your Fault Koko Bear.” I have given out over a 100 copies to parents to read to their kids. The book costs only $9.99. Order from Amazon at:
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To get “It’s Not Your Fault Koko Bear” go to:
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For better or worse, Comments 4 & 5 defaulted to the Kindle Edition. I prefer the dead wood edition.
My grandmother divorced her husband because he beat her. Now, I might add that she tied him to a bed and beat the living [expletive] out of him with a bat before she left. My mother never knew her biological father, and instead grew up with the man I always called grampa, but who had issues of his own, to the point that I think my mother never felt like she had a real dad.
Was gramma leaving her husband good? No, not to my mind. The knee jerk reaction to me saying that is “Well I suppose you think she should have stayed with him, just to avoid divorce?!?!” No, not at all. But it’s a matter of defining “good.” Good would have been for my biological grampa to get sober, to treasure his wife. Bad would have been for gramma to stay with him and subject my mother and her sister to all of that. Less bad is divorce. Much less, I grant you, but a far cry from the good.
Look, I don’t want to make presumptions about your mother. But maybe your dad just loved her.
Divorce generally occurs because one or both don’t do the things that are necessary to avoid divorce.
The title of the OP is a little confusing. What’s the culture war connection?
My parents divorced when I was 13. I am the oldest and suddenly had to take on “man of the house” roles for which I was not prepared (many because the divorce prompted in my mother a full blown nervous breakdown that left her incapable of doing anything for weeks, so I had to find her medical help – fortunately we had a friend who was a professor of medicine who could help – and take care of the house and my younger brother). I then had to help her figure out how to move to less expensive housing now that our financial situation was reduced. These are not things a 13 year old boy should have to deal with.
It was not fun, yet infinitely better than the experiences of many. There was no custody tug-of-war, and it was clear none of this was my fault (my father ran off with a younger woman from the church we had been attending, breaking up her family as well). Also, my parents did not fight (at least not in front of my brother and me), my father always paid promptly his spousal and child support, and he he did “normal” things with us boys several times a week (errands, visits to our grandmother’s nursing home, etc.). My brother and I never stayed at the new house that our father and his new wife set up, as that was full with her (younger) children. For me, the constancy of living full time with our mother was much better for than any type of shuttling back and forth in a “shared custody” arrangement might have been.
Age 13 is just when boys are figuring out how to be a man. Having the primary man in his life leave the man’s role as husband, and drastically alter his position as father at just that time is very hard on a boy.
I don’t want to click “like” on your comment, but I did to show appreciation for you telling your story. My dad was a stern man, and he was hard to live with (and still is hard to be around). But at least I had a dad in my home. I’m sorry you had to go through that.
We often talk about the culture war the way we talk about the war on terror, or whatever. It’s way over there, and what do I do to take part in it? Which side am I on? How do I fight? I suppose part of my title reflects the fact that I had just seen an episode of The Waltons in which the military comes and makes camp on Walton’s Mountain as they prepare to go to war.
At any rate, the battlefield in the culture wars is the family. As a dad, I figure I’m fighting the fight by ensuring my marriage is good, because as the marriage goes, so goes the family. And as the family goes, so goes the nation.
Make sense?
There really aren’t television shows anymore where kids can take a break from their own families and watch a loving, well-adjusted (if fictional) family. My parents had their own issues with drinking and fighting. I found refuge in the fictional families on Walton’s Mountain and the Minnesota prairie. It helped me weather the bad days and appreciate the good ones.
God bless the family.
God bless the nation.
I guess, but there are too many divorced conservatives and too many happily married seculars for me to match it up with the culture wars as I’ve understood the term up till now.
Well, look, I’ll get on my high horse for a moment. As I said: the battlefield in the culture wars is the family. A liberal couple can create a healthy, happy family. A conservative home create a broken, unhappy family. The war is fought in both homes. I contend that a liberal father does far more good by loving his kids’ mom even if he teaches them to be progressives, than the conservative father does if he runs off with a gal from church but teaches his kids to be conservatives. Again, as the family goes, so goes the nation.
OK, Spin, I’ll buy that.
In my almost 25 years as a private investigator, I mostly worked on murder cases. In almost 100% of those cases, the defendants came from single-parent (or single-grandparent) homes. The parent that was missing in every one of those cases was the father. And when I drilled down on the defendants’ histories, I almost inevitably found that at least one (usually both) biological parents also came from broken homes.
Not all boys who are raised without a father in the home end up in prison, of course. But the odds of that being the outcome are off the charts worse for boys who do grow up in that situation. It takes a father, or at minimum a great father figure, to teach a boy how to be a man. But you don’t have to go to prisons to see the fruits of our present (“a woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle”) culture. Just visit your nearest homeless camp. But watch your step. Those camps are serious hazmat sites.
Our culture, Western culture, is crumbling before our eyes. And it started with the demise of the nuclear family.
We don’t need the family when we have government to take care of us.
@thereticulator, I know exactly what you’re saying / meaning, and I agree 100% with that. But it’s so disgusting I can’t bring myself to click “like.”
Barbara Bush would have agreed with you.
Yes, but. There were plenty of Nazis who were wonderful to their own wives and children. I understand what you are saying, but am not sure it is totally correct. I will take a divorced conservative who believes in freedom over a progressive who is a good family man but wants to take our freedom away every single time.
Divorce is a tragedy, and progressives are obviously not Nazis, but will I vote for a good progressive family man over a divorced conservative? No way.
We are talking about running families, not running governments.
Understood, but you stated that a progressive who is a good family man is doing more to uphold the family and by extension, the nation, than a divorced conservative. That is not necessarily the case, at all.
Divorce is never a good but in some cases it is the least of several possible evils- continued physical/mental/verbal abuse of spouse or children, ongoing exposure to a self-destructive lifestyle, life with an adulterous husband/wife being the three examples that come readily to mind. For children of divorce there is an extensive variety of emotional damage that comes with the divorce and subsequent destruction of the family life as it had been. As Gary pointed out above, many children of divorce blame themselves for the destruction of their family lives. Or they completely demonize one of their parents and glorify the other, setting up a heroine/villain or hero/villainess paradigm to explain mom and dad to themselves in a way that is coherent to a child’s mind. Another possibility- the one I lived with in my head for years- is that one retains one’s love for the parent who caused the divorce (my father, through adultery) and at the same time harbors a murderous rage toward that parent. The result is an inner tension that becomes almost schizophrenic. It can take years to recover from any of these impacts of divorce on children and, no, younger children are not “more resilient” against nor adult children immune to them.
The laws have made divorce a very bad idea, especially for the party more able to support the family. Except for religious reasons, or possibly for military deployments, marriage is only a good idea if it lasts. Your spouse will get a good part of your retirement check if you were married when it was accruing.
If you don’t get married, just stay away from the government or church blessing, you can still live with the other person, have a family and everything else. If you split up, the law will still require you to support your children, and you should anyway.
To me having a family is a lifetime commitment. If the spouse chooses to treat it as less than that, they should not profit from it. I plan to stay married, but should death do us part, I’ll never marry again.
A relaltionship will work or not work depending on the personality of the people involved. When it stops working, it should be much less expensive and easier to extricate yourself. Thousands for lawyers (and I say this as a family lawyer) and a loss of a large portion of your retirement plan are not worth it. My advice is to make a commitment, and stick to it, but don’t involve the government (or announce your marriage to the public in a common law marriage state). Too many divorces I’ve seen involve one party just wanting to make off with the loot.
Charles Murray writes about this in Coming Apart — and notes that progressive elites don’t follow their own public advice on sex and marriage. In other words, they act like the conservative model they deride. As far as I’m concerned, it’s strong evidence that progressive elites use sexually libertine policies and associated family policies (like no-fault divorce) as tools for acquiring power. Strong families rise to the top of wrecked societies.
I don’t think we have to attribute it to their being inimical manipulators. It is more a matter of their sub-culture. Nobody they know voted for Nixon. Nobody they know has suffered the consequences.
I guess I’ll say it another way. Don’t talk to me about conservative values if you cannot get the most basic of family values right. I realize people get divorced for all sorts of reasons, but in the main it’s because one or both (usually both) fail to do what needs doing to keep the marriage together.
Well, I have never been divorced. Can I keep talking?