whose family? which values? unconventional families and the church

Note: this is the first in a series of posts. The focus here is on divorced mothers.

March 14, 2016 by Rebecca Bratten Weiss

The decisive moment was when I found the letters. I’d gotten used to whiskey bottles under the bed and coke baggies in the filing cabinet; I’d gotten used to him vanishing for days; and somehow I had accepted the disappearance of thousands of dollars from our business account. I too had made an art of self-destruction, once, and now I assumed he too would reclaim himself, after the birth of our child. The prospect of having a baby had changed everything for me, and though I was no longer emotionally invested in the marriage, I was determined to stick it out and make a decent family life. Before the money disappeared, I’d been looking at farms for sale.

The letters were all along the lines of “I know we should stop but I can’t.” The writer of the letters was a woman I knew, a single mother and former crack addict whom I’d helped out in the past. When confronted, he explained that it was nothing – just poetry. She’d asked him to teach her how to write poetry.

“In that case, you didn’t teach her very well,” I said, because sarcasm is my superpower.

During my separation period, and through my divorce, I lived with two friends in a log cabin in the middle of a field. We were running a community theatre company as well as working our respective jobs, so my son’s first year was spent in an atmosphere of Renaissance costumes, dramatic makeup, and amateur divas. My friends helped me with my son, and tolerated my volatile moods. I gardened, and we cooked, and threw bonfire parties. It was a time for regaining a sense of self, and awareness of the limitations in vision that had led me to make a series of idiotic choices. My divorce, however, was a choice I didn’t regret. Oscar Wilde’s facetious statement that “divorces are made in heaven” sometimes came to mind. Of course, this sort of thinking is frowned upon in Catholic circles, where it is customary to speak of divorce as a “terrible evil.”

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/suspendedinherjar/2016/03/whose-family-which-values-unconventional-families-and-the-church/