Divorce as healing

*Trigger warning.

The marriage was wind-blown and flood-prone from the start.

Happy though they were in thinking that tying the knot might iron out some of the creases that began early in the relationship, it was apparent that the noose resembled more a hangman’s than a Christmas ribbon.

Months and years go by and the tension builds. Their hours together grow longer by the minute. The couple can’t wait to sleep off the chill between them if only to rush to the office even on holidays. The farther the space between them, the more likely there would be peace.

The once blue skies and the flickers of light shimmering on leaves now tremble. Mornings don’t carry the same promise of a new day. They’ve entered the world of lies, the planet of callous obligation, the frosty rituals behind a life held hostage by a piece of paper and the blessings of a church.

The church. Sometimes they wonder: where is God in all the refrains of weeping, of gaslighting, of abuse?

Whatever they touched, including themselves, have turned to dust, if not black and blue. Sooner than one can say “enough is enough,” they can only match their breathing with their contempt for each other.

The heart beats slow and numb. The cries of children had become a warning. Gritting their teeth while in the throes of sleep was a sign. The marital bed had become a graveyard of now unwelcome memories. Instead of willing participants, they’ve become screaming spectators of a love marred and ravaged by indifference, on occasions even violence.

The possibility of another life, one divorced from each other, one liberated from abuse, comes as a strange joy, a sort of guilty pleasure in the dead of night. One thing of which they are certain: both have overstayed their welcome. Both have clung frantically to the likelihood that it could work, only to find out that the wager was no better than a fool’s argument.

One begins to complain of growing tired too easily, of exhaustion and fatigue, of pains here and there. Of nightmares, dark visions, apparitions of storms to come. It’s the genesis of a disease that is more induced by memory than it is medical.

Healing, therefore, comes with forgetting. And forgetting can only be possible with separation.

A last-ditch effort to mend the fractures took the form of dinning out with the family. The father on one side reading the papers, the mother at the other ordering the meals. Both were blind to each other’s presence.

The kids were delighted, but cautious. The silence could blow up any minute. And it did, as the little prophets of doom have predicted.

The children slept that night wondering when the rug will be pulled from under them. But the eldest of the brood knew the truth all along. She had seen and felt it from the start. Her father beating their mother with a full water bottle. Her mother weeping in a corner, bloody from head to toe.

It’s a tragic tale that often comes unannounced, save for the lingering suspicion that all is not well in the family.

Her mother began dating another man to make do with her last chance at happiness. Her father reading text messages from a strange young woman who calls him “darling”. One evening, underneath the cold breath of midnight, the eldest child rendezvoused with a kitchen knife in the bathroom, alone, and gasping for any semblance of love in the air.

Before slicing her wrist wide open, the thought of the likelihood that things might still go back to the way a marriage ought to be stopped her from her plans. By this time hope had become a curse, the anticipation of better days an affliction of the worst kind.

Little did she know that wastelands were never hospitable to life and love.

Days have turned into lead, the spaces between them into brick walls, the ground they were walking on into quicksand. The once anticipated waltzes under the moonlight have transformed into war dances. A crevice too large to mend had now drawn the line between husband and wife.

There was little one can do as the children all fell into the hole.

The thought of tearing down the sanctity of marriage crippled any chance at immediate separation. What would the family say? And what of the neighbors and friends? The couple’s priest or pastor would, in the likelihood of a split-up, give them a dressing down they won’t forget.

Surely, God, who had instituted the sacrament of marriage would be pissed. Worst of all, how can they even think of inflicting the thought of being a “broken family” on their children?

But the die is cast. It’s only a matter of time. The commonplace but largely faulty excuse of staying “for the sake of the children” can hardly hold water. The more the couple insisted on the pretense, the more the children stand as witnesses to the tension and hostility of a love that has gone sour.

The break eventually happens. Custody of the children becomes an issue.

Yet, despite society’s all-too-eager crime of frowning on a “broken” family, life for the couple and the children, now lived separately, moves on and begins to mend. Easier said than done, yes, but not impossible.

As all those who have gone through hell and back will tell you, it is not the family that was broken during divorce, but the cycle of indifference, gaslighting, and violence which have made the couple easy targets. The same cycle that has tortured the children for years.

Insisting on the sanctity of marriage and the sacredness of the wedding ritual is a dismissal of the sanctity of love, the same love that has brought the couple together in the first place.

The inviolability of the sacrament of marriage must come from that same love which, if in later years prove wanting, must bow to the intrinsic right of human beings to be happy.

And even if such arguments say that any divorce law may be subject to abuse, it is only proper for the couple to be freed from a marriage where love was never there in the first place.

Divorce, therefore, does not only become a road sign but a chance at healing. It leaves no room for the furtherance of hate.

In due course, we all have to decide for ourselves and our family — to stay or to leave. To decide that divorce isn’t much of a tragedy as it is a chance to discover one’s path to serenity.

To seek our happiness. To, perchance, one day reconcile with reality. To better light a candle than curse the darkness, as Eleonor Roosevelt said.

To live. To mend. Where a long, cold, yet peaceful night can also be its own reward.