Generations

Something occurred to me earlier and I can’t seem to get it out of my head. The thing is, a lot of people in my generation grew up with our parents getting divorced. Some stayed single after that and some got remarried. Some dated and failed, some found the love they’d been seeking all along. I know that plenty of those people came from families that had split or divorced, but nowhere near the numbers we’re seeing today.

So what is life going to be like for our kids, and their kids, who will all grow up with grandparents who are separated, divorced, or remarried. When it’s our parents we usually can understand a little of why this may have happened, but when it’s our grandparents, if we’re not very close to them, we may never understand why. So here we’ll have countless young children growing up with it being commonplace and a non-issue that the families which preceded them are no more.

When I was a little kid, divorce was still a tragedy, ya know? My parents aren’t divorced, but they’ve been separated for over a decade officially, but really much longer than that. When I was a kid we stood in silence when one of our friends found out their parents were getting divorced. These days it’s not even on kids’ radars. It’s not a big deal.

And we say ‘sure, that’s a good thing – the kids shouldn’t have to suffer consequences of a divorce’ – but what we don’t realize is that they’re suffering it more! It is better for a child to know that his parents splitting up isn’t a good thing, isn’t supposed to be normal, isn’t the way things are supposed to be, than for him to think that love ends and trust cannot be regained and marriage is temporary. Marriage is supposed to be for keeps. People used to try harder. Now divorce is normal, a standard. People don’t try like they used to. And that hurts us. Not just our kids and our relationships. That hurts our society.