New Normal
“Your father might be coming tonight.”
That settled two things. Since my parents filed for divorce a few weeks ago, I was wondering if what I’d seen about divorce on TV and in movies was accurate. (Not the parents-trying-to-outdo-each-other-in-competing-for-affection thing. I’m too old for that. Sadly.) One of the first signs a marriage was really over, according to pop culture, was that parents started referring to each other only in relation to their children. “I talked to your mother” or “I don’t know, your father said that he’d be here”.
Pop culture got that right, it seems.
The other thing that it settled was that it’s happening. My parents are ending almost three decades of marriage. Once you stop thinking of your partner as an individual and start thinking of them as the other biological parent of your children, that’s it, right?
I’m apathetic about it, probably because it’s been in the works for over a year. The first time my Dad moved out in the fall of 2010, I was upset. Very upset. Then he moved back in and I was happy. Then he moved out again and I was less upset than the first time. Then moved back in and I was less happy. Then moved out again and I didn’t really care anymore.
It’s kinda like that graph your D.A.R.E. teacher drew on the board for you, where you get really high the first time you do drugs, then crash really low, then you don’t get as high the next time and maybe you crash lower the next time or maybe you don’t, but there’s a new normal that’s lower than your old normal.
My brother, back from London, invited his British friends who live in New York back to our Connecticut home for a Thanksgiving dinner on Wednesday night. Since we traditionally spend Thanksgiving day with my Dad’s side of the family, I assumed that this would be Mom’s thing.
When my Dad showed up, my brother set another place at the table. We all got our plates and sat down, Dad last. Upon taking his seat next to his soon-to-be-ex-wife, he said “We’re going to teach you all how to get divorced.”
Fortunately, he did not mean that he was going to give us a step-by-step tutorial on their divorce process, which is what I first thought. He meant that he was going to prove that two people in the middle of a divorce could get along, at least for one night in the presence of relative strangers.
And they did. Dinner was really fun, after the 10 seconds of awkward silence that followed my Dad’s opener.
My D.A.R.E. teacher was wrong about a lot of things. Maybe he was wrong about the graph too. Maybe the new normal doesn’t have to be low.
