Staying Together: For the Kids, the Friends, the Skyline

In a post called "Put Asunder," Camassia has some thoughts about the impact of divorce on its adult children (she is one), and on all of us collectively:

[W]hat I didn’t see, in my myopic adolescent way, was that even the corpse of the marriage was holding together something bigger and yet subtler. It was that family homestead, that center of gravity around which the rest of the world seems to arrange itself, and to which one naturally returns at certain times. The house was, I think, the image of us as a unit, the sum greater than the parts, which we never really lived up to but was nonetheless there. Now that it’s gone, one place seems much like another to me.

I don’t want to overdramatize my situation. I doubt that all this really harmed me. But I can see how, if this is repeated millions of times across the country, it can eat away at something important, something fundamentally human.

"That family homestead, that center of gravity" is so much what our parents, "Herm and Rengo" to their grandchildren (I'd like to do a post sometime on the weird names given to grandparents by their grandkids -- Boo and Bah and Bop-pop) are to our whole extended clan. You can see it here in this post of Sara's about the house on Fort Myers Beach, which is also about the magnetic center that the parents who have stayed together for 63 years are for all the rest of us, and to which we keep returning:

I fear that the house, the beach, H & R, are leaving somehow. . . . I love them (all of them) like nothing else. Like family, squared. I cant imagine my children (not yet born, obviously) not knowing them and loving them as passionately as I do. They (especially H & R) have taught me so much about life, consequence, chance, love, and conscientious thinking/dealings in life. And that house has breathed them in and out for all of these years, while the other houses have been sold, rented, etc. It feels like, for our family, letting go of the house is symbolic of letting go of a whole era of time for the Gottliebs, and one where H & R are the central characters. I guess I never want to let that go, I never want it to end.

Sara is the child of not one, but two divorces. So it's not to her own parents' generation, us restless, shapeshifting Baby Boomers, but to her grandparents that she looks for that anchor in the world. Maybe her generation will decide that creating that kind of rock is more important than always moving on in pursuit of "my authentic self." They are certainly hard to reconcile.

Jacques and I don't have kids, but the longer we have stayed together, the more I've had this weird sense of responsibility to keep on staying together for the sake of the other people in our lives who somehow count on us as a unit, a phenomenon. Friends we've been out of touch with for a few years have sighed with wonder and peace to find that we're still together. A lasting relationship between two people becomes like a feature of the landscape in the lives of their friends and family. Starting out as a promising sapling, it thickens like a tree, becoming ever more solid and stout and trustworthy. People can rest in its shade. Eventually, it comes to seem as permanent and mythic as a local mountain's silhouette against the sky. At times when the going got rough and I've fantasized about some other direction for "my life," I've realized that my life is not only my own any more. The need would have to be imperative for me to destroy what has become a landmark for others.

And I know that I am almost always disappointed when I hear about a breakup or a divorce -- even a celebrity tabloid divorce: Tom and Nicole, Brad and Jennifer. The only exception is pairings that are blatant mistakes from the get-go. Otherwise, I always want couples to last.

Humans long for something relatively unchanging -- or at least slowly changing -- in a world in constant, accelerating change. I wonder sometimes whether part of the appeal of Buddhism to so many contemporary Americans is their need to reconcile themselves to the new flux of marriages and relationships, as well as to rampant "development" (not to mention war and terrorism) and its destruction of places. How many of those sitting in zazen or Vipassana are children of divorce who, instead of feeling the divorce was wrong, try to believe that divorce is just one manifestation of the truth of impermanence and that they are wrong to want to hold on to their parents' marriage, or their own?

After 9/11, I wrote to my 35th college reunion report, "The darkness of the world now rushes in where the twinkling twin towers once stood. As if they were tall, indulgent parents standing guard who have died, we feel exposed." A friend whose mother just died wrote me that she was trying to learn how to live "without that rampart between me and death." One way or another, change will come; as the Buddha said, everything you love will change, be taken from you and destroyed. But do we have to rush into it, slashing our moorings as if to beat Death to it?

- amba

UPDATE: A day or so after writing this, it struck me: wait a minute, why would our hypothetical American Buddhist (admittedly a straw man or woman) meditate on the impermanence of the relationship, and not on the impermanence of dissatisfaction with the relationship? In fact, that's what you do when you commit yourself to stay with someone: you meditate on the impermanence of your dissatisfaction with the relationship. (Or as my mother once memorably put it in earthier parlance: "You sell yourself a bill of goods.")

Comments

[Tamar]

The hardest part is to hold onto "love" in the face of all that change and destruction. But that is what has always saved me throughout my turbulent life from childhood on. It is as if I have been bathed, baptized and drowned in divorce since I was very young, and yet each time I feel I straightened up and became even more strengthened by compassion and love - from some kind of unknown source within me - and especially from the kindness of strangers.

[Dave]

A related point, I think, is the importance of a stable, natural *place* (or places) in child development. The loss of the homestead, as the first two quotes suggest, can be traumatic. But in many parts of the country, that loss is as likely to be through the destruction of favorite woods and vacant lots from residential and commercial sprawl as through divorce. I've been uniquely fortunate in avoiding the worst of this (and my parents remain happily married, as well), but the clearcutting of a hundred-acre forest we used to walk through a lot as kids gives me an inkling of the sense of loss that people like my mother experience when trying to find traces of her girlhood haunts in south Jersey.

In this context, your remarks about Buddhism are very interesting. "Humans long for something relatively unchanging -- or at least slowly changing -- in a world in constant, accelerating change." This manifests itself in all kinds of ways, I think - especially in the growing appeal of "eternal verities" and rigid, literalist docrines within almost every religion. And though they may respond to it in opposite ways, conservatives no less than liberals prate the same dogma about the need for economic growth (actually metastasis) which lies at the root of so much of this chronic insecurity.

[amba]

Wonderful comments, both. Tamar, I think many readers will identify with your description of being "bathed, baptized, and drowned in divorce." Dave, thank you for adding the excellent point that far-right religious rigidity is likely the other pole of the same panic -- how to deal with too much change? Dive in, dissolve and drown, or try to freeze it to ice? Make change your god, or make change your devil?

Also, I totally agree with you that the "development" that destroys those overlooked patches of woods, and even sleepy back yards and weedy alleys both rips out the roots of a lot of adults (to which psychologist James Hillman attributes much of the epidemic of depression) and prevents the current generation of kids from ever putting down such roots -- they live in a world completely fabricated by corporations, fast and snack food, videogames and TV. (There's also the explosion in numbers of pedophile predators that makes it unsafe for kids to play unsupervised in such places.) I had an early experience of that kind of loss, growing up inside Chicago in a neighborhood that was a paradise of yards and alleys and unimproved parks, where we kids ran as wild as city kids could. Cottonwood and spiders and ailanthus, butterflies and thunderstorms were large parts of my childhood. A block from my house there was a fenced-in half block of what must have been original prairie, completely overgrown, with tall grasses and a few huge trees, owned by some rich guy who just left it alone. We kids would wriggle under the fence and lose ourselves in there. Sometime in the '60s, it was sold and cleared and they built an elementary school there. To give them a little credit, they designed the building around the old elm trees instead of cutting them down. But I dare say the piece of wild prairie was the better elementary school.

[Dave]

That's a poignant story, Amba - and I dug your conclusion. (Maybe it deserves a post of its own?)

[gruntled]

That is lovely. I like the image of others resting in the shade of a long, strong marriage. I bring couples with strong marriages to talk to my family class, so that the students can see what one looks like at different stages in the life course. Almost without exception, they write in their journals some version of "I want what they have."

[amba]

Do they know what they have to give up to have it?

[Charlie (Colorado)]

wait a minute, why would our hypothetical American Buddhist (admittedly a straw man or woman) meditate on the impermanence of the relationship, and not on the impermanence of dissatisfaction with the relationship?

Yes, why?

Remind me of this in a few days.