The only girl in my sixth grade whose parents were divorced was my friend Caren B.  This was back in the 1960s, when unlike today, divorce still held a whiff of taint and sorrow.  Caren’s biological father was no longer in the picture, but her stepfather—a detective with the police force—possessed a certain dangerous and disturbing glamour.  A couple of years later, Caren got into some trouble with drugs.  I happened to overhear another girl’s mother say pityingly, “Well, what can you expect?  She’s from a broken home.”  Broken home.  The phrase caught in my mind and stuck.  It sounded so ominous, so sad, and so final.  Something irrevocable, that could not be fixed or made right again.  Children that came from a broken home were thought to suffer—deeply—from the consequences.  So were their mothers.
Now let’s fast forward twenty-five or thirty years.  No longer is divorce considered a tragic failing; divorce is something that just didn’t work out, like an apartment where the walls were too thin and all the rooms were dark, so you moved out and on.  Initially, there was something wonderfully liberating about that shift in our view, something bracing, even invigorating.   But by now, it seems the cultural pendulum has swung just a bit too far in the other direction.  Because even though divorce is so commonplace, so statistically normal (one out of every two marriages in America will end in it) that it doesn’t even raise an eyebrow, there are some people for whom divorce is never going to be normal.  Those people are the children who lived through it.  And I should know, because I’m one of them.
When my parents divorced thirty-five years ago, the event was so emotionally wrenching, so damaging that it took a decade for me to recover.  And although I can honestly say that my parents’ lives were better off for their being divorced, I do not think my own is.  There will always be that sense of loss, that ache that comes from having parents who are not married to each other.  I felt this at no time more keenly perhaps than when planning my own wedding.  I invited both of my parents, and because my father had remarried, I invited his new wife as well.  “Are you sure you want me to come?” she kept asking me over and over.  “Please, tell me what you really want.”  After this went on for a bit I became annoyed, sensing that perhaps she didn’t feel comfortable attending, but was trying to shift the onus of that emotional responsibility on to me. “What I really want,” I told her finally, “is for my father and mother never to have gotten divorced, and for them to come to my wedding together.”
Instead, my father came on the arm of another woman, while my mother did her best to avoid all contact with them.  Never mind that it was my wedding day; I felt transported right back to those first awful weeks and months after their divorce, which happened during my senior year in high school.   When graduation day rolled around, my newly estranged parents sat on opposite sides of the auditorium, while I turned my head back and forth to watch each of them, as if they were contestants in a tennis match.  My father wouldn’t even join my mother and me for dinner afterwards, let alone entertain us with a witty one liner like the ex-spouses we’ve been watching for years on TV.
Although it has been many years since my parents divorced, the residual pain of that separation today has profoundly shaped the way I regard my own marriage.  Yes, I adore my husband, but nonetheless, marriage is something I work at, each and every day that I am in it.  Divorce doesn’t feel like an option to me, maybe because I feel that I survived it once, but won’t a second time.  And then there are my two children. Having been through a divorce as a daughter, I can’t bear the thought of inflicting it as a mother.  And I know several women with divorced parents of their own who feel the same way.  
One woman whose parents divorced way back when says she postponed getting married until she could deal with the idea that there were no guarantees.  My own reaction, at least on the surface, was just the opposite.  I wanted, in the worst way, to be married, despite how utterly uncool and anti-feminist such an idea was at the time.  It was as if I was determined to give myself the stable family and I had always longed for, the one my own parents had failed to provide.  Living together, which my husband and I had done before we married wasn’t sufficient.  It had to be the real thing: white dress, gold ring, bouquet of intoxicatingly fragrant gardenias in my arms, a triple-tiered wedding cake covered in pale butter cream frosting and topped by an elaborate bow made of a satin-like candy. 
But really, my intense desire to be married or another woman’s fear of it are in fact, the obverse sides of the same coin.  It’s a coin that was forged in a hell we both understand: having parents who wouldn’t or couldn’t stay together.  Because divorce is hell.  Anyone who has been there can tell you that.   So whenever I observe the ways in which divorce is so casually regarded, I experience this unsettling sense of dislocation.  It’s as if the reality I have known and the one I am seeing so glibly portrayed around me are eternally at odds with each other. What if incest suddenly became acceptable, and was even turned into a subject for sit coms, the way divorce often is?  Nothing more than another new plot point?  Would we watch, on a weekly basis, the hilarious complications that might ensue in a family where dad was bedding one of the daughters or Mom, the sons? Well, thank God we aren’t there yet.  And I wouldn’t dream of saying that divorce is anywhere near as damaging as incest—though at least people still have the perspective to understand that it is damaging.   Whereas the damage caused by divorce seems to me often overlooked or ignored.  Because even when divorce is necessary, it still isn’t casual, or funny, and it will never, ever be or feel normal.  So maybe it’s time we stopped pretending that it is.