When my parents divorced when I was 32—already married for nearly a decade and with two children of my own—I remember thinking, Great. Now, I’m a statistic. My marriage is doomed.
I’m pretty sure any child of the 1970s or 1980s will understand my concern. After all, we grew up hearing about the tragedy of divorce and how all these children’s lives would now be tainted. Children of divorce, we were told, were more likely to experience just about every societal horror: from underage drinking to promiscuity to murder sprees, it seemed. But the one statistic I worried about most (after all, I was already of legal drinking age and not exactly tempted by promiscuity or murderous rampages) was the one we heard the most: that children of divorce were more likely to end up divorced themselves.
Of course, eight years after my parents divorce, my husband and I are still quite married. And while those statistics probably were never meant for adult children of divorce, they have become increasingly dubious to me—especially as I’ve looked around and noticed just how many of my friends from “broken” homes have managed to pull off marriage and family life—for better or for worse.
In fact, in her latest book, MOMumental: Adventures in the Messy Art of Raising a Family, Jennifer Grant, whose father left her family when she was 10, takes those statistics right to task, showing readers that no matter what “type” of family we come from, all of us can create wonderful, healthy and loving—if often “messy”— marriages and families.
So, what do you think about those marriage fears o’ mine?
It’s fascinating (and sad) that you, at 32, felt “tainted” by your parents’ divorce.
That underscores the way our very muscles absorb and take on the messages we hear over and over again, perhaps especially when we are children.
It’s critical that we speak with care to children about any real loss, wound, disability, or grief that is a part of their lives. We want to acknowledge the pain of these things and support kids in appropriate ways, but we should never pathologize them or stamp them as abnormal or destined to fail on the basis of the difficult life experiences they encounter.
I know I had to fight the messages I had always heard about people like me who were from “broken homes” even to get engaged as a college student and take the risk of getting married as a 21-year-old.
But how do people who’ve heard this message—that they’re abnormal or destined to fail—for so long counteract this?
My best answer (based on, oh, 30 some years of experience) is: It’s not easy, but we must learn to let go of them and replace these negative messages with positive ones, ones that are true. We can’t make our injuries or wounded-ness our identity. The messages we tell ourselves and that we put on “repeat” in our heads affect us. If those messages are, “I can’t make marriage work” or “I’m broken,” it’s likely we’ll live up to them.
Abiding in God’s love and holding to the promises that God has made to us can be a wonderful escape hatch from feeling cursed or trapped by those old, negative recordings.
Acknowledging, naming, and lamenting our wounds is key as well. Whether that’s in prayer, to friends, or in the safe space of a therapist’s office, doing so frees us of the burden of carrying these longings, disappointments, negative messages on our own.
Is there a good way you’ve learned to replace those messages as you’ve raised your own family?
I’ve found memorizing and repeating Bible verses is essential. I love: “I will restore health to you and heal you of your wounds” (Jer. 30:17), and “The Lord heals the brokenhearted and binds up their wounds” (Ps. 147:3).
No one would say that letting go is easy, but to live in freedom, we must be on the journey of doing so.
Is there any way being a child of divorce helped shape your current family?
Even in her hardest times and in her struggles as a single mom, my mother’s strength, optimism, and faith affected me in profound ways. One of my favorite memories is coming down in the mornings as a child and always finding her sitting on the couch journaling and reading her Bible. It was clear to me that the source of her strength was God. I think her example of faithfulness was one I’ve absorbed into my very core, and I can’t even articulate all the ways it’s affected me.
So what’s some of the best wisdom you can share for raising a “messy” but terrific family today—no matter what background you come from?
I encourage us parents to step back from the noise of our culture and take a long look at the way we interact with our kids and the messages we give them.
We need to consider the example we’re setting for our kids. If they see us always tapping away on our phones instead of truly engaging with and listening to the people around us, of course they’ll learn to do the same. In order to thrive, kids need what children have always needed. They need to eat nutritious foods. They need to spend time moving and playing outdoors. And they need to be authentically connected to their parents and their friends.
Somehow we’ve made family life so complicated. We believe our kids need a lot of gadgets. Or that they need to be on six different sports teams or be the best violinist in the school orchestra or to speak Mandarin by the time they’re 7. Really, though, those things can keep them away from one of the simple joys of family life: just being together.
Heaven has been depicted on the big screen before, but never quite like this – as the most beautiful landscape you’ve ever seen, but every blade of grass is so hard it actually hurts your feet to walk on them, and a single leaf so heavy you can’t lift it.
Such is the creative depiction of heaven by C. S. Lewis in The Great Divorce–great fodder for a filmmaker with a rich imagination and a love for the work. And now it appears that the story has found just that.
Stay-at-home parenting is harder than I thought. Maybe it's the fact that my child was colicky for the first six months of his life, and that even at eight months old, he—and, consequently, I—have yet to sleep through the night. Maybe it's my own fault for setting unrealistic expectations for what sort of stay-at-home mom I would be: the kind who preserves her own produce, makes her own laundry soap, and still has time to put on makeup every morning. They do exist. Or so the blogosphere says.
For the last eight months I have wrestled with disappointment in myself for failing to be the peppy, positive, endlessly energetic mom I had hoped. Instead, I have spent much of my mothering career to date feeling sad, frustrated, and irritable.
Apparently I am not alone. A new Gallup poll found that stay-at-home moms are more likely than moms who are employed outside the home to feel negative emotions such as worry, sadness, stress and anger on a daily basis, as well as to have been diagnosed with clinical depression. Although the gap between the two groups of women is only 5 to 10 percentage points wide in most of these categories, the fact remains that as a group, stay-at-home moms are emotionally worse off than employed moms.
Sharon Lerner (author of The War on Moms: On Life in a Family-Unfriendly Nation) dug into the contributing factors behind the Gallup data in a recent Slate article. Lerner credits financial strain and lack of appreciation as the two leading causes for the negative emotions of stay-at-home moms. She also references census data released in 2009 to show that today's stay-at-home moms are more likely to be poorer, less educated, younger, Latina, and foreign-born than other moms.
In other words, the average stay-at-home mom is more likely to be a woman who stays home because she needs to, not because she wants to. Given the context, Lerner argues, the increased levels of negative emotions and depression among stay-at-home moms are understandable.
Ironically, Lerner's article made this stay-at-home mom feel more depressed than ever. I'm part of the relatively small group of stay-at-home moms who have willingly opted out of the workforce. I'm not Latina or foreign-born. I'm not under significant financial strain. I have a master's degree. And I have a strong network of family and friends telling me that the parenting I do is appreciated. And yet, I would be the first to admit that my emotional well-being has suffered since I became a stay-at-home mom.
The way I see it, there are two possible explanations for this. Either I am an incredibly wimpy mother, or there is another, overarching factor contributing to the difficulty of being a stay-at-home mom that Lerner doesn't fully address. Given the fact that in the past eight months I have undergone sleep deprivation levels that Amnesty International would deem torturous, I'm going to rule out that first possibility. Which leads me to conclude that Lerner undervalues what is perhaps the one factor that makes being a stay-at-home mom the most difficult: the sheer challenge of parenting all day, every day. The constant sacrifice of body and soul to another being. The unrelenting subjugation of your desires to another's needs. The fact that sometimes you can't even go to the bathroom when you want to.
To be fair, Lerner mentions the "emotionally grueling, physically exhausting, tedious, and isolating" nature of caring for kids in conjunction with her reference to Ann Romney's highly publicized defense of her own career as a stay-at-home mom. But she doesn't give it much attention. I think it deserves more.
Honesty about the difficulties of stay-at-home parenting is particularly important in an internet atmosphere of idealistic mommy bloggers whose posts feature far more parenting triumphs than challenges. Bloggers like Glennon Melton of Momesary are few and far between. Her post "2011 Lesson #2: Don't Carpe Diem," which addresses the difficulties of parenting, went viral in January 2012. The deluge of attention Melton received (over 2,000 comments, offers from advertisers, reality TV producers, and publishers) makes me think that women are hungry for this kind of honesty, and that they aren't finding enough of it.
Ultimately, though, honesty may make all of us sad, angry, stressed-out moms feel less alone, but it won't necessarily make the work of spending every waking moment with our children more palatable. I need to know that there's a reason for pursuing a career that doesn't allow me to leave my work at the office at the end of the day just as badly as moms who work outside the home need to feel like their unique set of struggles has a purpose. As a Christian who is deeply invested in becoming more Christlike, I can connect the parenting struggles I face as a stay-at-home mom to the ongoing work of sanctification that God is doing in my life.
Being a stay-at-home parent is hard work, whether you choose to do it or you are forced into it by circumstances beyond your control. We can't change that. But we can give ourselves the grace to feel angry and sad and worried without judgment as we go about our daily work. More important, we can remind each other of the fact that God can use the frustrating, dehumanizing aspects of being home with our kids full time to mold us in to more loving, more patient, more compassionate, more Christlike women.
Although this character-building mindset doesn't erase the difficulties of being a stay-at-home mom, it does imbue them with a quiet, sustaining hope. Most days, that's enough for me.
Ellen Morgan Peltz lives in Defiance, Ohio, where her husband serves as a pastor and she works as a stay-at-home mom and a freelance grant writer.
Beloved Pictures announced Monday that it has secured film rights to the story, and that David L. Cunningham (To End All Wars, Seeker: The Dark Is Rising) will direct. Cunningham, 38, is a Christian and the son of Youth With a Mission co-founders Loren and Darlene Cunningham.
The Great Divorce tells the story of one man’s journey–on a bus!–from the post-apocalyptic wasteland of a grey town to the outskirts of heaven.
“We are tremendously excited to bring one of Lewis’s most profound stories to the screen,” said Beloved Pictures CEO Michael Ludlum. “We believe that this story, much like the Chronicles of Narnia, will resonate with a global audience.”
Beloved is currently seeking investors for the film, which may begin filming sometime in 2010. A release date has not yet been determined.
