After divorce, I read a lot about the effects of divorce.  One of the things I had noted before divorce is when I saw a news story about kids who had been victimized in some way, it seemed like they always came from a divorced household.  Maybe I was more sensitive to it, but after divorce, I seemed to see the ill effects of it in every story of a person’s victimhood.  I resolved to not let those things happen to my kids.

The one kind of victimhood that really lept out at me was how kids from divorced households seemed to fall victim to predators of all stripe.  Kids gone missing?  They were always from single parent households.  I read this article in Texas Monthly and it turned my stomach.  Boys who were susceptible to contacts with other particularly adult males, had gone missing and then the truth about their deaths became known.  Divorce opens kids up to a lot of contacts that intact households do not have.

In December 1970 two teenagers disappeared from the Heights neighborhood, in Houston. Then another and another and another. As the number of missing kids grew, no one realized that the most prolific serial killer the country had ever seen—along with his teenage accomplices—was living comfortably among them. Or that the mystery of what happened to so many of his victims would haunt the city to this day.

What are the odds that my kids would fall victim to something like this?  I don’t know.  I didn’t leave this area, even when job prospects are poor, because I was not going to let my kids be victims.  I need to be here to watch over them.

Read the whole horrible article here.

Click here to view the embedded video.

They now have fun play acting it out.

All the time.

“Hey Dad”

“What”

“WAZZUPPPP”

She did.  She pulled up the site and then said, “What now?”  I told her to play some video.  She played one video, one line of it and hit pause.  It was one long sentence, a run on sentence about Marxists, Communists, Muslim Brotherhood, and more right wingtard touchpoints.  She looked at me, aghast.  I cracked up.  She said that I was using this opportunity to have fun at her expense.  I said it was funny that she heard one sentence and her head exploded.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Nicole Kidman stars as a mother who loses a child.  She grieves.  The trailer brought tears to my eyes.  I was reminded of something I learned when I first divorced.  Kids don’t know how to grieve.  It takes time to learn that.  Grieving should be the last lesson you learn in life, not the first.  They are forced to grieve the loss of a family, the loss of a parent when they don’t know how to grieve.

I reflected on my childhood, and how we had a Hammond organ, and if we wanted to play an instrument, we could play that.  We purchased it because an older sibling wanted to play and my parents were interested in grooming people to play in church.  I wanted to play anything other than a clunky organ.  My neighbors had a piano, and my friend was required to practice 30 minutes a day.  He hated it, but I would have jumped at the chance to play piano.

JMan wants to drop piano now, and I want him to learn more.  He is in the sixth grade and I know that musical knowledge will be something that enriches his life for all of his years, while the knowledge of how to play a computer game will not.  He doesn’t really understand that.

I sometimes think that the kids are addicted to the internet.  I was really frustrated and I said that perhaps we should cut back computer time during the week.  The kids reacted in a way that I did not anticipate.  Over dinner, we discussed the issue rationally, without giving in to emotion.  I was very surprised that the kids listed arguments, examined my arguments, rebutted them.  They tag teamed me.  One would rebut an argument of mine, and while I was responding to that the other one would step in with a counter argument for me.

I had the realization that if this is the way that they responded to things, that they were doing pretty good after all.  There was a calm deliberateness about them that I thought spoke of maturity.  And isn’t that what we want from our children?

I have been referring to Blitz as ‘un petit chat noir’, dragging the words out.  We were sitting around the family room and Bookzilla gave translations into Spanish for ‘a little black cat’ and ‘a fat gray cat’, which is what Sylvia is.  I used Google Translator to dial up French, German and Italian.  JMan liked the German translation for Sylvia, ‘eine dicke graue Katze’.  The fun was  winding down and I threw out, “I wonder what the Canadian for little black cat is.”  and Bookzilla replied in a trice.

“A little black cat, eh.”

Two years ago, they were both in ski classes.  I would ski with one of them for a while between classes and then go off by myself during their classes.  Bookzilla is stronger now than before, and at 5’9″, she needs to add more muscle to own her frame.

Standing at the top of the mountain is a wonderful feeling and I want the kids to learn to expect that from life sometimes.

I’m now divorced with two kids, Bookzilla and JMan, and I strive everyday to do whatever I need to do to help them not get burdened by the divorce.  It has been eight years.  JMan was three when we split up and has never known a time that he wasn’t shuttling back and forth between houses.  Bookzilla is 14, and she remembers that time, but I wonder what is going on inside her head sometimes.  If she has issues, she doesn’t talk about them (what teenager does?).

I saw an article on The Daily Beast about a woman who had lost her son to the effects of a drug habit.  She is a blogger who writes about attachment parenting.  Reading between the lines, she and the boy’s father are not married.  I wonder how much that had to do with her son’s life and choices?

Katie Granju’s parenting blog was beloved by readers. But when her teenage son died of a drug overdose, many were shocked—and then she chose to grieve online.

Grieving sucks, and if you need to grieve on line, then do it.

There is a movement afoot to normalize divorce.  There is a book, “The Good Divorce”, that preaches it.  Divorce is a state of marriage.  I don’t agree.

We have an idea of romantic marriage and there is a veritable industry that has sprung up around that idea.  But it is the one contract that people enter into without fully considering all of the ramifications of it.  The contract is started without a thought about how to end it.

Our schools should be teaching relationship skills, so that young people have a better sense of who they are and do a better job of picking life partners.

This  morning, he was asking for a t-shirt.  I got yesterday’s laundry out of the dryer and he started to paw through it looking for a t-shirt.  I told him that he had that pack of black shirts.  I continued folding laundry and I could hear him opening the pack in his bedroom.  It seemed to take a while, but then I heard him running around in joyful, whooping, happy celebration.  He liked the shirts.  I had just finished the folding the last item when he finally got back to help out.  ”I wanted to help.”  I could only laugh.