When American parental insecurity collides with the collective hyper obsession with child safety and stability, we end up doing things like carrying gallon bottles of Purel everywhere and disinfecting surfaces for our children to the point that it’s actually compromised their immune systems. Surely we should question the efficacy of equipping divorcing parents primarily with messages of their inadequacy and sending them off to live their newly-divorced lives. At the conclusion of the mandatory parenting class, I wanted some sort of summation, wanted to know what the take-away was from the list-reporting, but there was nothing offered. As we filed out, we were each given an 8-1/2 x 11 inch, light blue “Still Parents” certificate, similar to those I remember receiving in elementary school for participation in fund raisers or spelling bees. It was unclear to me what I should do with my certificate, or what anybody might do with such a certificate. For one thing, I didn’t ever want to think about the class again. I hadn’t learned anything new or helpful, and thanks to the video and Barbara’s remarks I now had a whole new collection of mental images from which to feed my already crushing guilt. People who say “divorce is too easy these days” have never gotten divorced. I’m not sure that I can say the parenting class itself made it any harder, but it did make it…dumber. It was a dumb class. Its primary message seemed to be that divorce is a really, really bad idea. And that may even be true, but it’s sort of like abortion and gay marriage: outlawing abortion doesn’t stop women from ending their pregnancies, it just makes it more dangerous; and disallowing gay marriage doesn’t keep people from being gay or from loving each other, it just makes both a lot more difficult and painful. I don’t think the “Still Parents” class changed anyone’s mind, but I am pretty sure it inflicted several additional dents in the psyches of already frightened and fragile people. It’s tempting to make the argument that these are adults and adults ought to be able to take the heat for the decisions they make, but it’s important to consider that children are ultimately subjected to that heat as well. We ought to question how the rhetoric used to enact and conduct mandatory parenting classes feeds a system that already harmfully stigmatizes children whose parents divorce. We still use the phrase “child of divorce.” My child is now “one of them,” and I find myself wondering, If I died, would he be called a “child of death”? Barbara Ehrenreich suggests that: …if divorce hasn’t reduced America’s youth to emotional cripples, then the efforts to restrict it undoubtedly will. First, there’s the effect all this antidivorce rhetoric is bound to have on the children of people already divorced—and we’re not talking about some offbeat minority…[T]hese children already face enough tricky interpersonal situations without having to cope with the public perception that they’re damaged goods. I too wish nobody ever needed to get divorced. I wish no child ever felt like drawing a sliced heart to represent his parents, and I wish my kid didn’t live so much out of a duffle bag, and I wish the black-haired woman and her husband’s situation allowed them to access the A Journal of Creative Nonfiction
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