More than a year later, I still have regrets about my son's wedding. Oh, all went well, even though it poured rain. The bride was lovely, the groom (I thought) was handsome; everyone knew where to go and what to do; no one flubbed his lines. It was a happy day for the couple.
But I regret that I wasn't standing next to my son's father, beaming with unmitigated pride and happiness. Because of our divorce five years ago we sat apart; I with my new husband, he with his new wife. Don't misunderstand me. I'm glad I'm no longer married to my children's father; I'm thrilled I found a new husband. My ex surely feels he took a positive step too. Had we stayed together even longer than the 30 years we were married and put up a united front at our son's wedding, it would have been a perverse sham. The title of John Updike's collection of short stories about the dissolution of an old marriage describes our situation perfectly: Too Far To Go.
Still, nothing dredges up the pain of divorce for parents like the wedding of one of their children. Perhaps my pain was deserved punishment for our failure, but such parental separateness seems to throw the celebration of a new union in the family out of kilter. It creates a disquieting and ironic undertone, almost an omen, at a child's wedding.
While my ex-husband and I are civil to each other, our divorce did cause awkwardness, especially at the bridal dinner the night before the wedding. We gave the dinner together; he paid for the meal while I covered the flowers and invitations. I planned the menu and arranged the 30 or so guests at the three round tables. Everyone was polite and jolly, but arranging the seating, especially of my ex and I, veterans of a failed marriage, and our new spouses, was delicate. Typical repressed WASPs, we welcomed each other with curt nods and monosyllabic greetings and then stayed far apart during the evening. Next day my ex and I were no better; we exchanged hellos once, and we certainly didn't dance at the reception. I wondered if my ex-husband was sad, too. I wondered if he felt the same void I did at our son's wedding.
Parents who sit apart at an offspring's wedding symbolize the larger issue of the breakdown of the family that is plaguing this country. The symbols are there at holidays, birthdays, graduations, such religious ceremonies as first communions and bar mitzvahs -- all those special days that comprise important milestones of a young person's life and that assume celebration and family togetherness. When the family is in pieces, the spontaneous pleasure of the occasion is often diminished and the event becomes something to get through instead of celebrate. Everyone, especially the young, is robbed.
The divorce rate has slowly and steadily been going up since the 1960s, and by the 1980s only half of the marriages that took place were projected to stay intact. The number of strained weddings and other family occasions must be going up too. Certainly many of the weddings I've been to lately have been fractured affairs like my son's, outwardly festive, but with an undercurrent of tension. I assume that many other parents in similar situations have felt as torn as I.
Or am I just being old-fashioned and mawkish? Is it more hip to shrug off these feelings of sadness and failure? How sophisticated must the divided couple at a child's wedding be? Maybe the times call for indifference to the past on the part of the parents and of their children. Maybe emotional coolness is a required corollary to the breakdown of the family, a defense mechanism that we've acquired in the latter part of this century -- a mechanism that helps us not to show, perhaps not to feel, if we've become really good at it, the hurt and the guilt.
I suppose this is why many divorced people hate the big holidays so, even if they have remarried and created a new nest. It's not just the crass commercialism of Christmas, for instance, that we dread. It's that we must feign gaiety and conviviality, and everyone involved -- above all, the children, whether they're 7 or 27 -- knows it. Of course, if an intact marriage is miserable, the children suffer from that too. But the gatherings of reconstituted families, of stepchildren and assorted stepparents, can be strained and serve as a reminder of the initial failure and loss. As for sharing the children on holidays, my son has told me that he and his wife aren't going to spend their time going from her parents to my house to his father's. "We're going to alternate," he says, quite firmly. "Otherwise it's not a holiday for us."
We're a funny culture, increasingly tough when it comes to in-your-face language, music, clothes or conduct, but still with a wistful faith in the sanctity of big occasions and their implicit family togetherness, even when the family isn't together. Family weddings involving parents who are torn asunder represent a dichotomy between the fresh vows to be together until death do us part versus the failure to do so. They smack ironically of idealism on one hand and practical realism on the other.
There are no solutions to this. Life does go on, and the passing of time after a breakup makes the big occasions easier to bear. With luck, the reassembled family makes new, happy memories of its own in time. However, I can't help but notice that a large segment of the 20-something generation is waiting a long time to marry and, it would seem, picking and choosing more carefully, although the birth control pill and mass entrances of women in the work force have as much to do with the postponement of marriage as wariness by the children whose parents were divorced.
In the meantime, I learned something at my son's wedding: I'm not so hip.