I never understood couples who constantly break up and get back together. Even in high school, I knew better than to join back up with someone after we had split. I didn’t see the point. You already know what you’re getting, and you already know you don’t like it.
In one in a million instances, two people might find their way to each other, having learned something from the separation, and actually be happy this time around. The rest of them, though — the overwhelming majority — simply torment each other, annoy everyone else, break up again in a storm of drama, realize that no one else wants their crazy asses, and go right back to each other in a dysfunctional dance of foolishness.
It’s a dance I never wanted to see the kids leaping into, but I suppose it was almost inevitable. Children learn what they live. Their time with us was fleeting, a weekend here and there. What they lived, day in and day out, has been instability, chaos, maniacally shifting from feigned highs to crash-and-burn lows. Love is not pure and giving, they saw; it is selfish, doled out or withheld based on compliance. It is not steady and unwavering; it is switched on and off, fickle, used like a tool. How were they supposed to learn to seek healthy, happy relationships?
We’ve talked with the kids, of course, but words go into one ear and out the other. We are the oddity. Peace, contentment, and love must be deafeningly silent in the face of screaming, fighting, attention-demanding drama. We were blotted out by hysteria and frenzy, the cacophony of insanity and immaturity that they embrace as normal. Why wouldn’t they? It’s what they are used to. It’s home.
The kids deserved better role modeling, but they are also old enough to realize that something isn’t quite right with that pattern of behavior. It doesn’t take an advanced degree to understand that the actions and choices they have witnessed are not the products of healthy or balanced minds.
I am forced to take the same stance as I do with so much else in the kids’ lives: I pray for better for them. I want them to choose better for themselves. I have talked, guided, and encouraged all I can. They have to take it from here. May they take a deep, hard look at what they have lived, then decide they can do better — and I know they can — and run with that in their hearts, as far as they possibly can, as high as they can. I want them to want more for themselves and know that they deserve better. They always have.
Sweat & Sparkle 