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October 15, 2004
Lorie and I
walked to high school every morning for four years, but of all of the
mornings we walked and talked, one morning stands out. As usual, I
knocked at her front door, and we walked together back toward the
sidewalk. This morning, however, she was noticeably quiet and
serious.
“I guess I can
finally tell everyone,” she started. I began imagining all the
possible announcements she could make to explain the pain in her voice
and the hurt in her expression. “My parents are getting divorced.”
Divorced?
Impossible! Neither of us knew anyone who lived in a home with a
divorced parent. In the 60s, divorce was frowned upon. And it was
rare.
Leave it to
another smaller child to describe with poignancy the arrival of
divorce and single-parenting in modern American culture. In Anne
LaMott’s All New People, Nanny, a brave young girl, observes
with remarkable clarity that suddenly she is living in “1963, the year
the fifties ended, and the fathers in our town were leaving…. It was
our collective great fear, that our fathers would leave us, start new
families with younger and prettier children; we had seen it happen
before.”
No-fault
divorce. Initially heralded in as an enlightened approach to deal
with unhappy and hopeless marriages, divorce has overtaken the modern
world. The Internet gives easy access to websites calling out: No
Fault Divorce Made Easy. In Arizona “rapidlaw.net” hustles the
unhappy: “Easy & Fast to Divorce. Great Prices - Start Here!”
Adults are free
to come and go without recrimination, making and breaking bonds of
“unconditional love.” Yet, as we grownups speed out of our marriages
and into happier waters, we leave pain and suffering in our wake.
David Poponoe in his book, Life Without Father, explains:
The decline of
fatherhood is one of the most basic, unexpected and extraordinary
trends of our time. Its dimensions can be captured in a single
statistic: In just three decades, between 1960 and 1990, the
percentage of children living apart from their biological fathers more
than doubled, from 17 percent to 36 percent. By the turn of the
century, nearly 50 percent of American children may be going to sleep
each evening without being able to say good night to their dads.
No one predicted this
trend; few researchers or government agencies have monitored it; and
it is not widely discussed, even today. But the decline of fatherhood
is a major force behind many of the most disturbing problems that
plague American society: crime; premature sexuality and out-of-wedlock
births to teenagers; deteriorating educational achievement;
depression, substance abuse and alienation among adolescents; and the
growing number of women and children in poverty.
Little did we
expect in the 60s that no-fault divorce would be only the beginning.
Today, our willingness to abandon marital vows has evolved into an
aversion to marital vows in the first place…and to a movement to
redefine marriage to mean anything but.
While counselor
Joann Condie doesn’t recommend women stay in abusive marriages, she
warns that the pain of divorce is significant. “It’s interesting to
me as a marriage therapist,” she tells Citizenlink, “to find out that
divorce is hurtful to the children even if they are adult children.”
Charles Colson,
founder of Prison Fellowship, asks the obvious question. “If the
effects of family breakdown are indisputably calamitous, why are we so
intent on accelerating the breakdown? Whether it’s the refusal to
treat two-parent families as normative in textbooks, an increasing
problem, or the deconstruction of marriage inherent in the campaign
for same-sex ‘marriage,’ the effect is the same.” Marriages
fracture…and children suffer.
Children
suffer…yes. And for so many children the common unhappiness flowing
from the breakdown of marriage is the absence of their
father…daddy…poppa.
Poppa? A
fortress of strength we all long to hug…he’s gone the way of a
marriage abandoned, a temporary fortress built of sand. The current
debate over marriage is controlled by adults: legislators, gay
activists, psychologists, all of them championing their special path
to adult happiness inside…and out…of traditional marriage. But where
are the voices of our children?
In all the
debate about marriage, there is a tragic absence of attention to the
most significant problem facing us today. There is no greater
question disserving our attention as we talk about marriage than the
question coming from our children…where’s Poppa?
Copyright © 2004 Jane Jimenez
The Power of a Father
June 18, 2004
Me Jane, You Tarzan
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