"The children deserve better"
Bob Ellis - Sydney Morning Herald - 1/8/97
The no fault divorce law has made marriage too easy-come easy-go, with disastrous results for children.
A while back I witnessed a divorce arrangement that was acceptable to all concerned. It was a rare experience. It went like this.
The marital home was not sold but kept. In it the two children, boy and girl, lived as they had all their lives, in the same neighbourhood, with the same playmates, attending the same school and swimming at the same beach. For four days a week the wife, who was doing a university course, lived in the house and looked after the children. For three days a week the husband, a film director, lived in the house and looked after the children.
Not far from the house, a suburb away, was a flat. Husband and wife lived alternatively in this and on the four days and three days pursued their other lives, the husband with his new girlfriend, the wife with her studies.
And thus it was the children were able to keep the thing most precious to children, their address and their sense of neighbourhood and parenthood. They were not made to travel miles across a city to eat at McDonald's and go to the zoo with a gloomy parent with only edgy things to say to them. They were at home. This was Mummy. This was Daddy. This was their address, where they came from, where they stayed. Where they slept each night in the same beds, knowing who they were.
This arrangement shows by its contrasts, I think, what awful things are done to children by divorce - disruption, dislocation, confusion, sadness, ache and guilt - did Mummy and daddy break up because of me? - and the yearning for how it was before. The address. The far off lost contentment of life as it was. Like ET, all children want to be home.
"We're only staying together because of the kids", was a common phrase in country towns when I was young in the '50's. I used to think such couples cowardly. I don't any more. I think they behaved correctly, some heroically. And I now suspect that the Murphy no fault divorce law was a noble experiment that has pretty well failed and id divorce is to occur at all it should on the one house model I speak of, or something pretty close to it, with ground rules that are fixed and firm.
A lot of lives are stuffed up by divorce and not too many improved. Children of divorce, dragged back and forth across the map, grow scared and neurotic, mistrust friendships and sexual contact, do badly at school, lose jobs and drink too much and fail in their marriages too - after wedding parties where 14 step-parents make speeches in turn. And they do not deserve to go through all of this, because a man sought a younger woman for his bed and met one at the office, or because a woman once sought to escape her caged and claustrophobic life and ease her soul of its intellectual frustrations. It isn't ,actually, fair.
My son had a friend, call him Mark, when he was little. mark's father left his mother for a younger woman when he was four. The little boy grieved, felt guilty, got through it. Then his father went back to his mother when he was five. He was overjoyed. His Daddy was back. It was going to be alright. Then when he was six his father left again, for the same younger woman. I saw that little boy alter in his soul after that second betrayal into someone with criminal tendencies. I do not believe his father had the right to do that to him. I do not believe the father's sexual satisfaction (or whatever it was) was important enough to distort another life, to embitter and criminalize it. make it a life (as he did not, but came close) that would end in gunfire at a filling station or a heroin overdose. I believe that fatherhood asks more than that.
Nor do I believe a mother has the right, as a court lately ruled to take her children thousands of miles from their father merely because her sexual satisfaction (or whatever it is) lies in Tasmania or California or Bechuanaland. To hell with her sexual satisfaction (or whatever it is). There are greater things at stake here.
Put it this way.
Forty three per cent of Australian children suffer through a process of parental divorce. Some do it twice. Many watch their mothers go successively to the bedroom with five or six male callers. Many attend their father's remarriage. Some are abused by new step parents. Many are punched and insulted by new step-brothers. All change address, many five or six times. Many change schools, two or three times. Many more live alone with a single, fraught, impoverished shrieking mother, and slowly learn to hate her.
It's a punishment they do not deserve when their only crime is being born. It's cruel and unusual punishment for a life they did not seek and could not help.
If divorce is to happen, there should be ground rules that include a right of grandparents (say) to seek the children's custody from the court. The children should stay in the one suburb and go to the same school whatever it costs. This is the one time they need close fiends and it's the one time they lose them. The court should understand that children's happiness lies not just in which parent keeps them, but the neighbourhood, the friendships, the streets and beaches they have come to know.
And so on. It's no accident, I think, that Ireland, which has very little divorce, is a happy society, and the US, which has a lot of divorce, is an unhappy society to the extent of 28,000 gun murders a year. It's no accident that more kids from broken homes commit suicide. It's no accident that kids who change address a lot (kids that are known as army brats , for instance) more often end up on the dole or in jail. It's no accident that kids from broken homes themselves divorce and the cycle starts again.
It's my belief that divorce is not a human right, it's a privilege. It's a licence to harm another human being irreparably. It's a method of destroying children's hope in the goodness of the world.
So, it shouldn't be entered into lightly. And neither - in the words of the Book of Common Prayer - should marriage. There should be two years' notice required by law of anyone wanting to marry and one year's proven co-habitation. Every high school should teach what marriage is - among other things an ongoing battle over how money is spent.
For lives are at stake here, young lives. Children are not just genetic baggage, they have rights. Among them I believe is the right not to be stuffed around and emotionally wrecked by the self-indulgence of their immature progenitors. They have a right, a human right, to their sense of identity, to a surname, playmates, friendships. They deserve better.
And if they do not get it, they might, with justification, tear society apart.
Bob Ellis is a speechwriter, playwright and film director.
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