Divorce (3 of 3)

We have looked at the role woman has played historically in the matter of divorce and how that role might affect the moral grounds for divorce or legal separation in our own age. But equally important as the role woman plays in the grounds for divorce is the one she plays when that divorce actually takes place.

Following a divorce the various roles that any one woman plays may change drastically, probably more dramatically for the woman than for the man. Many evangelical churches today still emphasize that a woman should not go to work, but should stay home. For a woman from this background to suddenly be shunted into the marketplace, where perhaps she does not even want to be, can be a threatening change of life-style. Mothers suddenly find that for at least five days out of seven they are now both mother and father. Broken plumbing and overdue bills may become their tasks for the first time. One woman found calling a doctor for her sick child an almost traumatic experience. “Do I dare call him without first calling my husband?” she said to me.

At the same time that women’s roles have expanded, so to speak, social supports may decrease as mutual friends try to remain neutral and as social occasions geared toward couples do not suddenly change to accommodate those newly divorced. Singles’ groups for those who are now separated from their spouses may be filled with “losers” or those “on the make” sexually, and even the local church suddenly may appear to be more couple oriented than it seemed before. Anchors are lost, and changing roles are inevitable.

For most women who get divorces or legal separations, the biggest role change is that they must go out and get a job in order to support themselves. While at this time a woman may need to develop her social life, by necessity she finds the bulk of her time taken up in the marketplace. For an untrained woman in particular this is a difficult prospect. She may discover that she can only get a low-paying, boring job, where her work status is equal to that of a recent high-school graduate. Or, worse still, she may become the victim of age discrimination. First she may have lost her marriage to a younger woman; now she may feel that even her job is in jeopardy, because she is too old. Women who never felt old in their lives may feel as if they aged overnight.

For a woman who finds herself in this position, additional job training may help, and perhaps the advice of good friends will provide answers for some of the practical problems that arise in the home. In this area the Body of Christ should function, for the local church has a responsibility to those who are helpless in its midst. The Bible cites widows and orphans, but the newly bereaved or divorced, those without natural families, those located far from their families, such as students, and others who are temporarily helpless or at least vulnerable are to be the church’s special object of comfort and assistance.

Prevention, however, is perhaps one of the best cures. A woman always needs training in some marketable skill. No husband should so shelter his wife that she can’t handle money and make intelligent decisions regarding such issues as insurance, house payments, and taxes. Certainly one should not anticipate divorce, but widows face these same problems. Out of every two people in a marriage, one will be single as a result of the spouse’s death. More often than not that one person is the wife. In the emotional upheaval of a divorce or death a woman feels more comfortable if she can already drive, handle the business of the home, and if necessary go out and get a job.

Even roles that are commonly thought of as female change in their scope during a divorce. The most outstanding change in this category is raising children, whether or not the woman becomes the custodial parent. If a woman has to work, she will spend less time with her children and may feel guilty about that. This guilt becomes particularly unfair if a male-dominated clergy teaches her that her place is in the home, while her husband, who in spite of the fact that he supported that church view, now blithely goes off into the sunset with his new love. Whatever the reason for her guilt (for indeed the woman, too, may be the offender in the marriage and may neglect her children for another man), it may cause her to spend excessive amounts of money on her children “to make up for what they’re going through.”

Regarding the “quality of time” idea, much criticism has been offered to women who work. It has been rightly argued that some women use the notion “the quality not the quantity, of time you spend with a child counts” as an excuse to do their own thing and neglect their children. Having acknowledged that possibility, let’s realize that many women do not have a choice about how much time they spend with their children.

Moreover, I know of any number of women who, while they are home all the time, rarely do anything of value for or with their children. Many women who work spend smaller yet more valuable portions of time nurturing their children. From an overall perspective, whether she is married or single, a woman who works outside the home, has a good social life, and spends time with her children, doing things which they all enjoy, is more effective than the guilt-ridden mother who spends all her time with them but feels resentful and unhappy.

It goes without saying that the woman who not only stays home with her children but also wants to will exert a positive influence on those children. If this is not her attitude, however, the children will probably do better if their mother is out of the home some of the time and then fulfilled and contented when she is home with them.

Whatever the role changes that occur because of divorce and regardless of whose fault it is, loneliness is probably the outstanding emotional outgrowth. While both the husband and the wife probably feel lonely, the woman may experience it on a deeper level, especially if she has been in a dependent role. Sleeping alone, eating alone, and waking up in the middle of the night to find no one there all can be deeply painful experiences for a woman who has never really been alone before. As one woman put it: “I used to wake up and reach out to touch him, and he wasn’t there.”

When a woman feels guilt and rejection in the middle of loneliness, the pain becomes even more acute. There is often guilt over whether more could have been done to save the marriage. Unfortunately, too often those who did little to save a marriage feel the least guilty, and those who struggled hard to make it work now tend to think perhaps they could have worked a little harder after all. Feelings of rejection, too, gnaw away at many as they feel that if somehow they had been better persons this wouldn’t have happened. Women who are busy at home with children seem particularly vulnerable to this feeling of inadequacy, especially if their husbands have gone off with other women, “out of the blue,’’ so to speak.

Many women in divorce wonder if they have lost their attractiveness. A middle-aged, older woman may be more prone to this fear, since for her childbearing is no longer possible, menopause is at hand, and her very feeling of femininity may feel threatened, At the same time her male counterpart may go out with younger women in order to boost his male ego. However he will in general tend to be less vulnerable to growing old, since for him age may merely mean graying hair that will make him look more distinguished than old.

Professional counseling often helps a woman involved in a divorce, and it should not be shunned as though it implied failure, either spiritually or psychologically. But apart from or in addition to counseling, very simple, practical things may help.

Any divorce produces and precipitates a myriad of psychological tapes. The regrets of the past and the “what ifs” of the future can torture an already distraught mind. “Why didn’t I pay more attention to how I looked, now that I see him with that new, young woman?” “What if I can’t support myself and the children, especially if he takes off and neglects his child support?’’ “Why did God let this happen? Doesn’t He love me anymore?” “I can’t make it alone; I just can’t go on. . . .”

Then there are the tapes of memory: “that first time we met . . .” or “the first kiss,” “the first time we made love,” “the first baby,” “the first house.” There may be bitterness: “After all I’ve done for him . . .”; “I’ve given him the best years of my life.”

The answer to dealing with these old tapes is not analysis, not even, in general, “getting it all out.” At this point counseling can actually hinder a woman’s progress, if the sessions center around dredging up the past and commiserating about the future. The key to getting beyond all the emotional chaos lies in knowing that one can have power over one’s emotions and then acting on that knowledge, cutting the tapes. We live in a time when it is popular to feel that one has little control over one’s emotions. ‘‘It’s just the way I am” has become a favorite cop-out, as though I could never change the “way I am.” Even our morality is tinged with this bondage to feelings: If it feels good it’s right. In truth our feelings form very unreliable gauges of morality, and “letting it all hang out” can be a very painful way to go through life. We can cut old tapes by a simple act of the will. It may take practice to make it work, since we formed a habit of running the old tapes, much to our own distress and that of those around us.

Cutting old tapes does not mean we should go to an extreme and never talk about our feelings. To do so would be to go back a hundred years and unlearn all the positive things about the human personality we have discovered from the study of human emotions. Cutting tapes means we don’t dwell on these negative feelings and occurrences of the past; rather we simply cut them and go on. For me cutting tapes carries with it the image of turning off a tape recorder. A patient of mine had another image: that of literally cutting a piece of tape with a pair of scissors. Once when she had a bad week, she came into my office and said: “My scissors broke this week.” Still used to her lifelong pattern of playing old tapes, like the rest of us, at times she found the very simplicity of just cutting the old tapes difficult.

After one has cut the tapes, however, she must refocus, or those old tapes will come back like a flood. To focus means to act as well as to think in a positive direction. One woman going through a divorce found herself first staying at home, then in bed. Such a simple task as going to the grocery store was agony, but she had to make that effort if she wanted to pull herself out of her depression, She cut the old, despairing tapes and got out of bed. With the help of some professional counseling, she became a whole person once again. Another woman developed some talent in art, which had lain dormant for years but now became an absorbing hobby. Art was a focus for her, and it made her less vulnerable to the old tapes. Still another woman began going to a weekly Bible-study class, where she was helped spiritually and found some very good friends. Other women become hospital volunteers, work with abused children, go back to school, start businesses, or work part-time for someone else. In whatever way she does it, however, any woman who goes through a divorce and comes out whole must somewhere in the process learn to cut the tapes and refocus. Cut the tapes and in essence go on.

The concepts of cut and refocus are really very biblical. Philippians 3:13, 14 (TLB) reads: “. . . Forgetting the past [cutting the tapes] and looking forward to [focusing on] what lies ahead, I strain to reach the end of the race and receive the prize for which God is calling us up to heaven because of what Christ Jesus did for us.” “Forgetting” and “looking forward,” cutting the old tapes and refocusing: Therein lies half the battle in having peace of mind in the middle of a divorce.

In the middle of all the changes and emotional turmoil of a divorce, perhaps the deepest hurt for the Christian woman is the feeling that she is spiritually alone. Her friends are committed to marriage, and some in her church look down on her for being divorced or even blame her because of some ancient prejudice that assumes when a marriage breaks up it is the woman’s fault. The stigma remains, tends to extend to the guiltless as well as the guilty, and presumes to know which is which, even when the evidence is shaky. In some groups a woman’s participation in church activities is even restricted; for instance taking part in the communion service may be denied her, even though the Bible clearly teaches that the communion table is the Lord’s table and that the prerequisite for any Christian’s participation is for him or her to examine himself—and then so eat!

Amy Carmichael hits at the core of God’s requirement of Christian love when she says:

God forgive us for the strange coldness of so much of our love. The calculating love of Christians is the shame of the church and the astonishment of angels. By Thine agony and bloody sweat; by Thy cross and passion; by Thy precious death and burial; by the glorious resurrection and ascension; and by the coming of the Holy Ghost, from the sin of coldness, Good Lord, deliver us.