Though I have never been divorced myself, I have seen different variations of it from the outside. Whether that's referring to parents splitting when their child is young, separating soon after the wedding, or years into building a family, it has never looked easy. A similarity in all of these different scenarios though, would be the respect I have and the bravery I see in the woman who decided to start over.
As someone who has gone through breakups of my own, I understand the difficulty in walking away. I say this with the understanding as well, that the complexity and severity of the situation would only increase when the break up is legal; marital. The time elapsed together would only have been longer, the list of experiences shared and the traditions made would only have been bigger. Sometimes the hardest thing to do for yourself is knowing when to walk away, and I could not imagine the difficulty when the act of walking away includes splitting up assets and child custody.
Oftentimes parents decide to stay together ‘for the kids’, ‘for the family’, yet from the outside looking in, I have only seen that do more damage than anything. I have known too many classmates and distant friends with fighting parents who could never see eye to eye, fighting parents who inspired their kids to come to school and fight in similar ways. Children need loving parents, whether that is one parent or two, whether they are together or are co-parenting, children need loving parents who only show them how to love.
Every time I’ve heard of a woman going through a divorce, I have thought of her with nothing but respect. It is difficult to start over, yet it is even more difficult to make the decision to; to look down the two paths, the known and the unknown, and choose the one veiled in uncertainty.
My mothers best friend of nearly forty years, separated from her husband a year after their son was born. The decision she made was paired with the decision to be a single mother, and throughout my entire childhood, I only ever watched her thrive at it. The photos on their fridge of the camping trips and bakugan battles spoke volumes of the relationship they had; the support she provided him alone. Yet interestingly enough, she still felt she lacked something. There was still an empty space in her life, and not one she wanted filled by a husband; one she wanted filled by daughters.
Somehow, as a single mother who worked full time, she still found the time to treat my sister and I as her own. Some weekends she took us out for pool days, one October she took us to a harvest festival, and sometimes she came over with a straw hat tucked under her arm, ready to take turns playing FarmVille. She babysat us often, always prepared with jewelry decorating activities or video games we never got the chance to play.
She was the closest woman to me who had ever gone through a divorce, and she has surrounded me my whole life, yet I never seemed to look at her as a divorced woman. Not until, honestly, now. I had always seen her as Rachel, my moms best friend who came over early in the mornings before school on crazy hair days to make sure my sister and I had the craziest hair. Rachel, who made my hair a little too crazy in senior kindergarten, which resulted in bathroom sobs and a battle with the three pig tails on my head that the other girls pointed at, and laughed. My moms silly, caring, strong and brave best friend, who I have never looked at as anything less than. Rachel, who I have only ever known in her life after divorce, yet have never associated with the loss of a husband.
