Meester van Antwerpen (I) (attributed to):
Christus predikt over scheiden
[Christ preaches about divorce]
(1485 - 1491)

"Some experiences just come to pass …"

The data seems straightforward: birthdate/place, marriage, birthdates of children, death date/place. Almost nobody got divorced in the old old days. The church forbade it. Monarchs would occasionally seek a pope's dispensation and sometimes receive it, though even kings were expected to show some restraint. The third time anyone pleads ignorance after they married another first cousin, even a pope might lose patience and insist that such close relatives should try harder to get along. I think of divorce as a more modern phenomenon, but it's almost as old as marriage. Several of my ancestors carried on with something like informal plural marriages, never working very hard to hide their mistresses. This practice, though, was publicly frowned upon as unseemly. One was expected to keep their dalliances private, especially when with a commoner. Infidelity among the upper classes might have been common, but the details were rarely considered to be worthy of common knowledge.

I call my first divorce my Dismemberment because it pretty much tore my life apart. That rending asunder no man was supposed to inflict upon my marriage came to pass. After the UrbanPioneer period, we finally managed to purchase a house in a more decent neighborhood. This, of course, lengthened commutes and complicated well-practiced patterns. We'd always felt as though we were living beneath our station when we were pioneering, but much like my ancestors who lost their English and their European culture after being captured by Indians, we struggled to assimilate once we tried to re-enter where we'd assumed we'd always belonged. We might have been away too long. The years of unrelenting pioneering pressure blew our covenant apart.

I gave her that house we struggled so long to buy. I agreed to pay half my former before-tax salary in child support before taking a job that paid 20% less. I rented a tiny apartment in the Eastside Industrial Area, surrounded by light industrial warehouses and derelict homes, a click below even our UrbanPioneer digs. I became UncleDad, determined to keep on fulfilling my sacred parental responsibilities, except only on weekends. I took a job that took me out of town four or five days each week, so I suddenly was rarely around. I learned what loneliness felt like. I remarried but the new wife couldn't tolerate my kids. We split after she falsely accused me of infidelity and I realized that if I didn't deny the accusation, she could stop trying so hard and failing. I never told her that I'd lied so she could escape. She told me to imagine she'd died. I found an apartment near the second dismemberment and settled in to become an Entrepreneur.

Dismemberment shatters whatever holds relationships together. The Great Mystery should be inviolate, but isn't. Nothing's beyond corruption, though most might manage to tip-toe through without complete disruption. I'm no wiser for experiencing Dismemberment twice. My section of the Fambly tree features grafts that thankfully didn't result in step-children siblings. I'm grateful for small favors and regret every ounce of damage I delivered or was only accused of creating. I would sit in my lonely apartment listening to jazz on the radio, feeling a thousand miles away from myself. It took The Muse and a considerable distance before I felt as though I could trust myself again. When The Muse and I first met, I was prone to break into sobbing for no apparent reason. I might crawl into a back corner of a closet and cry there for several hours. I might wake up the next morning, face salt-caked, wondering what went wrong. I was unable to chase her off with my mourning behavior. My story progressed through discontinuous stretches without producing any discernable reason. Some experiences just come to pass, and so they come and then they pass.

©2024 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Tags: #Fambly, #PureSchmaltz