Going Home, Part 2
I currently live in Charlotte, NC.
But I was born and raised in Columbus, GA.
My wife and I visited Columbus this weekend to celebrate my brother’s 30th birthday and to attend the Teen Advisors 20 year Reunion/Celebration thing.
Being back home is always hard as we usually only have a small span of time that’s usually spent visiting everyone under the sun. Don’t get me wrong, I love my friends and I love my family but needing an appointment book for visiting your hometown just isn’t very fun.
This weekend was actually harder than usual.
I have a friend from my hometown that I don’t see or talk to as much as I’d like. But a couple times a year, we like to get together to discuss life, relationships, religion and, most importantly, film.
However, Sunday morning I was able to meet up with my friend for a far too brief get-together and as we talked he chronicled the tragic demise of his only 3-year-old marriage.
I was at that wedding. I’ve still got the CD they distributed as a favor.
I had heard through the grapevine of their troubles earlier in the summer and was really left with the emptiness of whether I could have done more to help my friend.
I used to be somewhat, I don’t know, lenient in my view of divorce. It was an acceptable evil, I had decided. My relationship with my own wife, a child of divorced parents, has eroded my former view to the point that it’s harder for me to be as sympathetic to the issue as I once had been. Her parents’ divorce is an event that has rippled out beyond the time and place of its occurrence to touch everyone, myself included, by its ramifications, both emotional and otherwise.
I had a friend, a great friend, when I lived in Los Angeles several years ago. We had developed a fast and strong friendship in the 6 short months I lived there. He was a 30 year old single guy whose parents had divorced when he was 3 years old. He told me that, if he was honest, almost every life decision he’d made had been out of an attempt to avoid what had happened to his parents. His elder siblings were in strange places in life in an attempt to recover the identity they subconsciously had had broken through their parents’ actions.
And yet, here I am 5 years later sitting with my friend in a Dunkin Donuts listening to his story. It should be mentioned that I, truthfully, don’t judge my friend at all. In fact, during his story, I stopped him when he seemed apprehensive about sharing to let him know that he shouldn’t fear any condemnation from me, I was simply concerned for his well-being. If anything I’m saddened.
Some of the best advice I have ever received is to “be hard on yourself, but easy on others”. This allows me to acknowledge that while I do feel like divorce is a terrible thing that has long-lasting consequences … it’s simply not my place to do anything but love my friend and provide a compassionate ear. What it also encourages me to do is look at the relationships in my life, specifically to my wife, and insure it’s as strong as it can be and needs constant attention.
Pray for my friend. Pray for all of us.
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