Clean Break

As much as we might like it, some things from the past refuse to cleave neatly from our lives. My friend L came out of a difficult and loveless marriage with two young children a few years ago.Her ex decided to move back to India leaving L and the kids to fend for themselves here in America. L believes the decision was motivated mainly by the fact he did not want to take responsibility for any of them. They had been married for five years at before the end came and had known each for a couple of years before their marriage.

Her ex has recently remarried and L has a steady boyfriend. It would seem dispersed fragments of everyone's lives have come together after a fashion and there might be peace and renewal yet. There is only one small snag. L has found out from a friend who knows both her and her ex, that he has not told his new wife about the kids he had with L. He has created an alternate reality of his past life with L. According to that narrative, those children don't exist. L's friend wants to know if she should speak up or let sleeping dogs lie. "What do you think I should do ?" L asked me as she struggled between outrage and resignation.

Her kids are too young to have an opinion in the matter and her boyfriend is comfortable with whatever her decision might be. Her family would prefer she moved on with her life and not confront her ex over the issue. They reason, it is only by random chance that she found out about this lie being perpetuated by her ex, so she has no obligation to do anything about it.

Both L and I have experienced the crumbling of marriage and have a keen sense of solidarity with women whose marriages are built on shaky foundations. I fully appreciate her quandary but am hard pressed to recommend a course of action. We both realize that finding out the truth now would be far less damaging for this woman than discovering twenty years later. Does L owe this woman the truth or does she hold her peace and allow her suffer the consequences in due season. She will probably have to end up making peace with her instinct for self preservation being stronger than that of sisterhood with another woman.

A Child's View

A few weeks ago J and I met with a friend, her kids and her boyfriend for dinner. Like me, the woman is desi but unlike me she has dated and continues to do so hoping that will in time, lead her to the right man. We both came out of arranged marriages that did not work out. Her position (and it is a fairly common one in the circumstances) is that not spending time together ahead of time was the reason that marriage did not work out. This time around, she will not be rushed or rush into things. 

The man has been part of her household for the last couple of years, the kids like him but do not want her to marry him. That makes things complicated for her because at some point, they have to take the logical next step with their relationship or end it. I was curious about J's take on what she saw - specially because she can relate to the woman and kids very directly. This is a lot different from seeing an American single mom and her household - there is an expectation that the cultural difference will account for the unfamiliar life style choices even if that were not true.

J said what she has said before "I want you to have a husband and me to have a daddy but I don't want you to date - a boyfriend would confuse me" I found it surprising how the same situation can lead kids to have entirely different ideas on how they would like to see things unfold. In a sense, our kids are being supportive of the direction we have chosen to take.

Since L, my friend has dated men in the past and continues to do so, her children want her to remain in that pattern and not disrupt it with a marriage. They have grown comfortable seeing their mother move in and out of relationships and have come to accept it as the natural order of their life. J on the other hand, has never seen me be in a relationship but wants to have a family. In her mind, that can happen only when I am married. Me having a boyfriend does not give her what she wants and she extends that to mean it is not what would serve me well either.

For The Kids

Reading about this scientific study that proves that staying married for the sake of the kids does not always result in the desired outcome for the children, is vindication for parents who have decided to go solo. Several years ago when my marriage turned into this cesspool of anger, conflict and bitterness, leaving with J seemed like the best option. We have had more than our fair share of challenges as direct consequence of that decision but J has not lacked peace and quiet in the house.

In high conflict households, children go about their lives with a sense of rudderlessness. They have no one to take direction from or look up to, no one who is always emotionally available to address their problems. Some marriages take a lot of work to keep them viable - when spouses need to invest disproportionately into their relationship, their ability to attend to the needs of the children suffers. Single parent households have no such distractions and this often works out to the child's advantange.

I have long believed that using children to glue a bad marriage is the worst way to go about the job. Children are not supposed to and cannot mend the relationship between their parents. By placing them in a position where that is the desired effect, parents burden them with the most onerous kind of responsibility. Instead, they should take ownership of their problems and resolve it independently of their children. Sometimes, the only solution might be to end the marriage and that could be the best thing to do - specially for the sake of the kids.

Old Benchmark

Divorce has made me stronger in more ways than I can count and for the most part, I am grateful for the opportunity (however difficult it has been) to become a more self-assured, independent and confident person than I had been before. But I envy any woman of my age, who has been married anywhere between ten to fifteen years, never needed to seek and find approval of her physical appearance from random men. She can relax, put on a few pounds were she so inclined, not worry about how she stacked up against twenty year olds who were also in the same meat market as herself.

As the years pass, I become increasingly unwilling to be viewed as commodity whose value is determined almost entirely by the packaging. I want to believe I am a lot more than that. I will freely admit being far more superficial back in the day - if a guy did not make my pulse race, he was not attractive enough to make the grade. Today, I am interested in a man's mind, his integrity and the generosity of his spirit - that to me is a sign of maturity.

That said, I have reached out to some who come quite imperfectly packaged if I believed they had the qualities that are important to me. Unfortunately, the standards have not changed reciprocally. For as long as I was in the singles market, seeking a potential match, more often than not, I have run into men who are not interested in me the person. They would have me compete will women ten or more years younger to get their attention based on external appearance only. My life experiences in that period of time and my hard earned emotional maturity don't count for anything at all. A girl in her twenties with dreams in her eyes that can all come true, a future extending to infinity where anything and everything is still possible will look nothing like a a woman who has been through what I have.

When I see pictures of myself from ten or more years ago, it could be an entirely different person - despite the fact that I have changed very little physically in all this time. The person inside has transformed to the point that the old and new me only vaguely resemble each other. I would have found the person I was then quite boring today but amazingly enough men even older than I would find her far more acceptable than the present me. If I were to apply the same standards of physical attractiveness that I had ten or more years ago, it would be impossible for me to consider the overwhelming men in the singles marketplace that are of my age group. Even knowing that rejection based on superficiality is an unpleasant feeling.