The Big D and I don't mean Dallas

A very good friend of mine is having a really crappy time right now. He is currently going through a divorce from his second wife. His first wife is using this as an opportunity to re-open custody agreements that were put in place when she was found to be an unfit mother of their daughter. I was over at his place last night talking about the court case and going through all the motions that had been served to him. All the paper makes me feel weak. Makes me want to hide from it, and I am not even the one in the line of fire.

Tracey and I both have several other friends whom are going through separations and divorces. It seems to me that in my sphere of influence there is a large number of divorced couples. It is sort of common wisdom that divorce rates are rising and that %50 of all marriages end in divorce. I did a little checking and found that in actuality less and less people are choosing to get married in todays society. The ones that do get married are more likely statistically to stay together. I found a neat little divorce calculator here

http://www.divorce360.com/content/divorcecalculator.aspx

I am a child of divorce and know first hand the kind of pain and issues that can echo through a family for decades to come. Try planning christmas dinner around several different sets of mommys and daddys. I was adamant that I was never going to get divorced, even if this meant not getting married. When Tracey and I first talked about getting married we really worked over this issue. We both approach it from a stand point that it CAN happen to us and we have to work hard at our relationship to prevent it. The one thing that we are very good at is communication. We certainly aren't happy with each other all the time, however, we don't allow things to sit and rot. Tracey believes in dealing with issues right now dammit. I have learned the wisdom in this. I come from a long line of placators, procrastinators and pretenders that everything is allright.

I don't have any answers here (who does???). All I can do is send my support out to all of the broken families out there. I hope that we can all find some kind of healing and move on.