Page 490 - WhyAsInY

Why (as in yaverbaum)
present a need for resolution and have a way of re-evoking on a small scale unresolved tensions from my days in the desert. To this day, it seems that the kids still feel that they have to balance carefully the time spent with us (which is further complicated by the fact that they all have responsibilities to in-laws), that they are somehow bound by the now moot Separation Agreement (they were never actually bound directly by anything, except by their love for their parents), and that they are constrained to keep separate and private the private lives of their folks.
The tensions that now obtain from time to time are nothing like those with which the children had to contend in the early days of the separation, and they are certainly nothing compared with what I had to contend with on a personal level. While I’ve indicated that the divorce was difficult for me in the early days, I haven’t really spelled out how I experienced the process, a process that engulfed me on two planes: the emotional and, in the absence of a better word, the “legal.”
I have already spent a fair amount of time talking about some of the fun and the positives, virtually all of which entailed my becoming closer with the children. I now turn to some negative experiences, most of which also entailed the children, directly or indirectly.
First, in the most abstract sense, divorce is separation, and here I do not refer to the physical or technical “legal” separation of the spouses. It is, as I have illustrated, a separation, a painful separation, from the chil- dren. But it is more. It is separation from the house and the home, and, in my case, it is separation from a community and a way of life. Putting aside the shock to the system entailed in adapting to life patterns unlike those to which I had become accustomed over a period of more than seventeen years, a new, unexpected shock was introduced by the separa- tion: Friends, or those who you thought were friends, find that their loyalties become, or are forced to become, divided. They choose up sides (or are compelled to), and, in this formation of teams, the woman is usu- ally the winner, at least numerically. This is not surprising, once analyzed, but it is not necessarily anticipated. At least, it wasn’t anticipated by me.
Two reasons come to mind: First, in the past at least, the social lives of couples were dominated by friends of the wife. She was usually the
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