It was the scariest day of my life when in seventh grade, my parents sat my two older brothers and me down to explain that they no longer loved each other the way they once did; they were getting divorced, and my dad would be moving out within the month.  The picture remains vivid in my memory; my father completely overcome with grief and shame to the point where he couldn’t communicate to us what was happening because his tears spoke so loudly over him.  I just sat there staring at the floor, glancing up every now and then to see the fear in my mother’s eyes and the communion of tears around the room.  I looked to my brothers for some model of reaction to follow, but I couldn’t wear their masks.  A sudden feeling of isolation grabbed me.  My oldest brother Andy let out his emotions immediately while my other brother Joe remained cold and unaffected.  I was frightened more than anything because I knew that everything comfortable to me would soon be challenged by a new definition of family that I had seen, but never truly experienced.

    I cannot even begin to explain the feelings of confusion, abandonment, and hesitant anger that sat there with me that afternoon, and that still follow me to this day.  I say hesitant anger because I wasn’t even sure if I had the right to be angry – after all, my parents had never been divorced before.  I was 13 years old, and not exactly equipped to navigate my grown-up feelings quite yet.  Before my parents even broke the news to us, I knew divorce was a real possibility simply due to the fact that I had friends whose parents were divorced, or separated, or just not together.  I was somehow used to parents not being together, as American culture had conditioned me to expect.

    Growing up in a Catholic family in St. Paul, Minnesota, and attending a Catholic grade school when I was younger, I thought most of my friends’ families all seemed normal just like mine; their parents lived in the same house with their children, all their fathers worked, as did most of their mothers, and the kids with divorced parents were few and far between.  After fourth grade, however, I left St. Luke’s grammar school because I wanted a change of scenery – also because my parents were open to the idea – and entered into the public school system.  As I began to make friends, I quickly realized that most of them had two phone numbers, and two addresses, and as I would soon find out, their parents were not together.  It took me a long time to figure out when and where my friends could be found – at their mom’s or at their dad’s – but I got used to it after time.  Soon it was no longer abnormal for me to ask my friend Adam whether he would be spending the weekend at his dad’s house or if he would be at his mom’s.  This was normal.  I never knew, however, why his dad didn’t live with his mom.  I never asked my friend Steve why his parents got divorced, or my friend Jess why his parents didn’t get married.  I didn’t think it was any of my business, and it was so commonplace among the kids I knew that I didn’t give it much thought at the time…until of course it happened to me.

    Although my parents’ divorce was by no means anything that I had anticipated, separation was all around me, and I had always wondered how it would feel to have my parents living in two different places.  Where would I go for holidays?  Who would I live with?  Where would my brothers live?  Did it even really matter?  I mean after all, I’d be just like the rest of my friends – they seemed normal.  This was a major part of my initial reaction, to think that I’d fit in better with my friends, but what I didn’t know about were the strange feelings of anger, loneliness, and uncertainty that I would struggle with all my might to suppress.  I was too immature to battle the constant uprisings of hate, isolation, and fear within myself, so I had to conceal these from others and from myself.  My defense was to paint a layer of humor over every negative thought that entered my mind.  I had a volcano of unfamiliar emotions rumbling deep inside of me, just waiting to erupt at any minute, while the people around me were entirely oblivious because of the disguise I always wore.  But I couldn’t survive this way forever.

    It made me wonder whether marriage was even something that could be considered sacred anymore-- people were throwing it away like the bad leftovers with freezer burn.

    For quite some time afterwards, whenever anyone would ask me how I felt about my parents’ divorce, I would give them all the same answer every time; ‘fine…I feel fine.’  I was a liar; I knew that I was furious, and I hated my patents for getting divorced.  I blamed them for losing each other.  I never blamed myself, or my brothers, mostly because my parents told us never to think that way, but also because I knew that that was the easy way out.  But it wasn’t just one person or one event that led to my parents’ divorce, or any of the other divorced parents that I knew.  There may have been and immediate cause, but there were preliminary causes as well.  To find the cause, the real cause, I knew I would have to examine more than just my family.  I began to question the culture around me – the American culture that I was raised in – and I wondered if the culture I knew as a child was the culture I came to know as an adolescent.  I wondered what the family archetype was, what a family was supposed to look like.  Was “normal” the singe parent household I was getting used to, or was I the family I had known when I was younger?  Or was it even something else?
 
    At about the same time I began to question the reasons for my parents’ divorce, I also began to notice that the issue of divorce was starting to show its face in places I had never seen it before.  I remember meeting more and more people, especially in high school, whose parents were not together, and this gave me a certain reassurance that I wasn’t alone.  I attended a Catholic high school after spending my junior high days at a public school, and I had not yet experienced Catholic education from the standpoint of a kid with divorced parents.  The last time I had been under the tutelage of Catholic educators, all the parents around me were married – including mine – and I new nothing about divorce.  Now, however, I was the kid whose parents lived in different places, only this time I wasn’t the only one.  My friend Tony had parents who had never gotten married, and my friend George, who I had gone to school with at St. Luke’s since kindergarten, experienced the divorce of his parents when we were sophomores.

    I remember seeing divorce come up more on T.V. show such as “Frasier” and “E.R.”, and the idea of single parents slowly became more socially acceptable.  In Hollywood and professional sports as well, couples were constantly getting divorced and remarried and divorced and remarried again – it never seemed to end.  It made me wonder whether marriage was even something that could be considered sacred anymore – people were throwing it away like bad leftovers with freezer-burn.  I knew that not all separated parents parted on bad terms, mine hadn’t, but all too often I saw the details of battered wives and messy custody battles unfolding selfishly on the nightly news.  I saw it all happening, but I didn’t entirely understand how such a trend had been fashioned.  The changing face of the American family was everywhere I looked, but the causes were much more elusive.

    I soon realized that the strong American sentiment toward the promotion of the individual was a likely suspect in my search for a cause.  It was the nineties, on the verge of a new millennium, and American ideals were leaning further and further away from the archetype of family I had grown up with.  Not to say that the American Family had disappeared, this was hardly the case, but rather a greater support and acceptance was given to single parents than had been ever before.  It seemed that America was saying it was ok to be a single parent, but there was a catch, success.  Especially with the soaring U.S. economy in the late 1990s, carried by the multitude of tech stocks, the country as a whole was enjoying its greatest performance in decades.  The federal government actually experienced surplus for the first time in over 50 years, and many people saw this as a sign of change.  Financial independence carried this change into the American family where mom, dad, and three kids all living together was replaced by mom and the kids living apart from dad.

    As I went through high school and became more mature, not only mentally but spiritually and emotionally as well, I was able to talk with my parents about their divorce much more openly.  I finally was able to take my long bottled emotions down from their dusty shelves, and reveal them to my parents and myself as well.  I came to understand, although not entirely, the reasons for my parents’ divorce.  I was curious, however, whether or not this trend of the single parent was attributable to the culture around me, and if my parents’ divorce had been influenced by this change.  The emphasis on individuality that I observed around me was not entirely new in this culture – it had actually been around for some time – but it had just recently become popular.  It had become popular in the sense that the single parent was easier to find.  Divorce went from unspeakable to every one out of two marriages.  My parents can be blamed for the immediate cause of their divorce, but American culture certainly was a contributing factor in conditioning this outcome.  We are a product of the environment in which we live, and our social ties to one another are no exception.

    I am not sure if this movement away from the traditional sense of family should be considered good or bad, or neither, or both.  Separation of parents is good in situations of domestic abuse and violence, but bad in situations where mistrust and resentment replace love and commitment.  The influence wielded by our society on the way we live our lives is much more powerful than I once thought; what may seem foreign to us at one point can become customary to us at another.  The family that I used to know is long gone, but the family that I know now is perhaps more supportive that ever.  I know that I still have the same parents and brothers that I always did, only in a little different light – a light that shines on many places across our culture.  When the change of family hit me, I was fearful of what was to come, but now that I’ve been through it, I feel that I am stronger and more prepared for change.  I have experienced change of a cultural norm from a personal standpoint, and I have plotted my course around that change.  The definition of the American family has expanded to include a diversity of structures and formulations that were once very uncommon in our culture.  Now that I understand how my parents are accountable fore their separation, yet at the same time subjects of American culture, I realize that the changing face of the American family is certainly a sign of the times.