Why I'm Scared of Divorce

My mom arrives through the back door, sets down her purse, and goes for the coffeemaker. “Uncle Dan is getting a divorce,” she says casually.

Um, what? Rewind.

I ponder the news for a split second. I’m not really surprised. Like the old saying goes, no one knows what goes on behind closed doors, but, still, hearing this is like a punch to the gut. Next month would have been 20 years of marriage for Uncle Dan and Aunt Tina. I still remember their wedding because I was in it.

I ask my mom how she knows this to be true. “He called me this morning,” she says. “He said Tina thinks he doesn’t love her anymore and that they wanted to stay together, you know, for the kids. But he’s tired of being angry. The kids don’t even know. They plan to tell them today.”

The kids. As a married mother myself, I immediately realize that my young cousins are at the center of this little earthquake.

I know statistics say that marriages – yours; mine; the neighbor’s across the street – have about a 50-50 shot of making it. We’ve heard this so much that it’s become conjecture. Nothing new here. But as a child who experienced the benefits of having a happily (for the most part) married mommy and daddy, I thought divorce was something that happened to other parents; other families.

But Father Time – and eventually becoming an adult-child of divorce – has a way of changing one’s perception of things.

I interpret the news of divorce differently now. When I hear that someone is divorcing – particularly someone close to me – my knee-jerk response is an aching that resonates on a primal level, followed by an emotional cocktail of fear, sadness, and uncertainty.

In a cruel twist of irony, my mother filed for divorce from my father a mere two months after I married my husband. They had been married for 34 years, and the split, though it needed to be done, was pure hell for us all. And that’s an understatement. Make no mistake, it still hurts like a bitch when your parents divorce and you’re 30, but the upside is that there are no custody battles or screaming matches/teeth-sucking/eye-rolling at visitation drop-offs. The downside, though, is that you’re protected from nothing because it’s perceived that you’re old enough to handle it.

Divorce can turn people – even good ones – into hot-tempered, irrational jackasses. And while it is true that time heals all wounds (you might forget overhearing what your dad said about your mom when you were, say, five), words become engrained in your psyche when you’re 30. Not enough time has passed for me to forget how my father forbade my husband and me to enter their home to help my mother retrieve her belongings – just to make things more difficult. Not enough time has passed for me to erase the memory of the vile voicemail messages my dad left for my mom. I don’t know if it ever will.

The end result is the cold, hard realization that divorce happens, and it someday could be coming to a marriage near you. Or me.

To be clear, I love my husband now more than ever, and I believe I married him for the right reasons. Our union, which I am confident was built on a solid foundation of acceptance, pure affection, and loyalty, is strong. I am happy, completely happy, and I cannot fathom the day when I would feel in my bones that walking away from it all is the better option. However. Can’t most spouses say the same about the beginning of their marriage? I’m fairly certain that, at one point, Uncle Dan and Aunt Tina did.

Sure there are those marriages that are doomed from the start, yes, but I’m not talking about those. I’m talking about the couples who went into it with their eyes wide open and with hearts bursting with love. All I am saying is, no marriage is immune from this thing called divorce. And once you accept divorce as not necessarily a liklihood, of course, but a mere possibility, you begin to wonder if even the smallest of fissures might eventually be the proverbial loose thread that unravels it all.

I’m just saying. And it’s not just divorce itself that frightens me. It’s the aftermath. I have long respected those couples who have summoned the resolve to stay put and stick it out. But I also know that it takes courage to strike out on your own for the betterment of your well-being – even if that means possibly facing financial instability, a shitload of what-ifs, and the prospect of knowing that you might end up alone.

I think about this every single time I see my 61-year-old mother. She never thought this would be her life. I can only hope my fate is different.

Courtney Conover is a mom of two (ages 1 and 3) and the wife of a former NFL offensive lineman. She has more Legos and NFL memorabilia lying around her home than she knows what to do with. She blogs at The Brown Girl with Long Hair and over-shares on Facebook.