Three years ago, while camping with my family, I was chatting to the seven-year old girl who was camping next to us. She asked me what had happened to my three children’s birth mothers and so I told her their stories – explaining that Thulani’s birth mom had been too sick and poor to look after him and so had left him at a bus station where she knew other people would find him and be able to love him, and that Zizi and Masi’s birth mom had died 5 days after Masi had been born, and so I was given the privilege of becoming their real mom.
After hearing these stories, she was silent and then responded with words I will never forget: “Ek het a storie wat nog erger as dit is…” (I have a story which is even worse than that).
She then proceeded to tell me about her parents’ divorce – how they had fought for such a long time, that her mother had been so cross that she had hit her father with her handbag, and how now they lived in separate houses and weren’t married anymore…
The Psalmists use a word at a point like this: Selah (roughly translated as “Pause and think about that a bit”).
…I really don’t know why I asked the question, but I asked her which was better for her: her parents fighting all the time but all of them being together, or her parents living in separate places and the fighting stopping… I have never felt more stupid than I did when I saw the expression on her face…as if either of those two choices were ones which she would have made! What an absolutely horrible choice/comparison to put in front of a child…
And yet so many parents do that to their children. They make adult decisions to get married, they make adult decisions to have children and, when the going gets tough, they expect their children to deal with the consequences as if they were adults, presenting them with those two options…
“you know mommy and daddy have been fighting a lot lately…well, we have decided that it would be better if we didn’t live in the same house any more”…and the kids are meant to make sense of that? Feel better now that the fighting is over – with this as the solution? What kind of choice is that to give a child? To leave them with a life story that feels even worse in their imaginations than being abandoned or losing a parent?
(* When reading a lament/rant by me, please be aware that I hold so much compassion for people and am ranting more at the general pattern and the spirit of this world than the individuals who have gone through really painful relational breakdowns and whose hearts are breaking because of they know how this will affect their children and still think this is the best decision – or don’t think it’s the best decision and are wanting to fight for their marriage, but the (good) fight is one-sided. I am lamenting for the millions of children going through this, not ranting against the individual parents).
From the Outer Limb 