Love, Hawaiian Style

I posted a few weeks ago about a recent episode of Hawaii Five-O that featured Danny, a.k.a. Danno, learning that his parents are about to divorce and then talking about his own divorce with his young daughter.

The story line continued this week with Danny and daughter conspiring to get his parents to reconcile. What child of divorce hasn't fantasized that story line?  (Blame it on The Parent Trap if you want.)

As a total side note, not that I can picture Melanie Griffiths playing James Caan's wife, but wouldn't it have been kind of fun if they'd been able to get Danno's real life dad to play his on-screen dad? Just a thought.

Little People, Big Marriage Problems

The stars of "Little People, Big World" are attempting a trial separation. Putting your family through the rigors of reality TV has been a tough gig for more families than the Roloffs. Here's hoping they can work things out and find a way to keep this 26 year marriage together.

A friend in the neighborhood

I am convinced it is no coincidence that Mister Rogers--the sweater-wearing, singing, owner of a secret puppet wonderland--thrived on television during the late 60s and 70s. At a time when divorce rates were skyrocketing and children were reeling, who better to spend a little time with each day than someone who told you that you were special, that you were listened to, that your feelings mattered.

I was reminded of this recently as I watched the documentary "Mister Rogers and Me" on PBS.  In one of the opening bits, Wagner tells the story he recounts in his blog here, about Mister Rogers asking about his parents' divorce.  The story is just as any kid who grew up watching the show would imagine: Mister Rogers talking about something no one else wants to talk about with kids, giving the kid permission to express what he's feeling, and then letting it all end with a comforting and mood-changing song that says 'even in the midst of sad things, at least we still have each other.'

No wonder we all loved him.

Child of television divorce

I don't watch Parenthood, but this article caught my eye.  Apparently, one of the families on the show is going through a divorce and a recent episode captured the kids' perspective of being caught in the middle while mom and dad are going their separate ways.  The article is worth a read, whether you watch the show or not.

Divorce, Hawaiian style

Last week's episode of Hawaii Five-O featured a two-generation story of divorce. Melanie Griffith plays Danno's mom. (Which leads me to wonder, when did Melanie Griffith get old enough to play the mother of a police detective? How time flies.) Danno is expecting his parents to come for a visit, but his mother arrives alone and announces that she is leaving his father.

Later in the episode, Danno talks with his daughter and his mom about his own divorce and how hard it was to tell his daughter that he and her mother were not going to be married anymore. His daughter tells Danno that she remembers that night well and remembers that he then went into his own room and she could hear him crying.

The episode is an interesting twist on a familiar theme. Instead of a character's impending divorce dredging up memories of his parents' divorce, here the parents' impending divorce is bringing back a flood of memories and emotions about his own divorce -- and about his feelings of failure and disappointment as a father.

Speaking of sweet songs

I'm loving this season of American Idol. I had stopped watching, in part because the judges had become so snarky and childish, but with Keith Urban and Harry Connick, Jr. in the judges' seats this season I tuned in and now I'm hooked. Besides both being fantastic musicians who are being respectful, honest, and encouraging with the contestants, Keith has such a sweet manner and Harry is hilarious and not bad on the eyes.

So last week, they aired just a clip of a song by one of the young hopefuls Sam Woolf, an original that he said he wrote when his mother left.  I found the full song on his YouTube page. The lyrics are sometimes a little hard to follow in the performance, but the melody is very nice. If you're a fan, tune in to American Idol because he made the cut last week and will be back to perform another day.

Jon & Kate + 8 children of divorce

Diane Singer, one of my fellow bloggers at The Point has weighed in on the reality show that will apparently follow 8 new children of divorce:

Though I have seen only a few of the episodes, I find the news of the Gosselins' impending divorce a cause to grieve -- for these children and for this couple, who seem to think wealth and fame are more important than marriage and family. How I wish Jon and Kate would turn off the cameras, get into marriage counseling, and -- for the sake of their eight children -- act like adults rather than glory hounds.

Not the reality you wanted

Glenn Sacks, on why a reality TV show aimed at humiliating deadbeat dads is a bad idea:

"The worst part about Bad Dads is the way it publicly humiliates children of divorce by depicting their fathers as not loving or caring for them. These children did not volunteer to be humiliated on national television."

ACOD's on Oprah

Today's Oprah features adult children of divorce. A kind friend is TIVOing the episode for me. In the meantime, check out the online material at Oprah's web site.

More Oprah on divorce

Last Thursday's Oprah was a follow-up to the show from a week earlier on children of divorce.

The show opened with a mom of four girls whose heart had been touched by little Kris in the earlier episode, the young boy featured in the first segment. (Of course, the mom whose heart I really hoped would be touched by Kris's tears was his own; hopefully she saw the show and felt the weight of her little one's broken heart.) After viewing a video of Mom and then watching Gary Neuman interviewing the girls, almost the first question posed back in the studio was "OK, so what is Mom doing wrong?"

Can Mom improve? Sure. But I don't think that was the point. I think, once again, that the implication was that the girls would not be feeling so much pain over the divorce if Mom weren't making such a mess of things. And yet, once again, in this situation it was the noncustodial parent's rejection and indifference that was breaking the children's hearts.

You can read about the episode here. If you click through all the way to the end, you can even watch a Q&A session that Neuman held with the studio audience. In that session, he stated unequivocally that he does not believe divorce itself is traumatic to children, but that the isolation children feel afterward (because they are not allowed to express their emotions) is what causes the trauma.

And yet, the stories heard during these two episodes of how children react to the news of divorce would state otherwise. If the divorce itself were not traumatic, why would children cry, run to their rooms, and put up emotional walls at the news if this were not a traumatic event in the life of their family? It simply doesn't make sense. If the trauma correlated to how things were handled later, then these telling reactions shouldn't happen until later. Certainly the family dynamics post-divorce and the relationship between parent and child can soften and soothe this pain or exacerbate it, as the case may be; but let's not confuse that with the root issue.

Family TV

Remember those "choose-an-ending" books you read when you were a kid? Well, my book will not be one of those, but I do need a little assistance. I'm trying to figure out if there is a TV family that best epitomized what we all dreamed of as the "ideal" family. So, I've set up a very short survey that is designed to find out from you, my readers, who that is. You won't be added to a mailing list, I don't care about your income level or hobbies, and I don't even ask your age (although that's because I would have had to upgrade to a paid account to add an 11th question to my survey).

So, if you're game, click through here and take the survey!

Divorce on Oprah

Thanks to two dear friends, I caught a heart-wrenching episode of Oprah on children of divorce that aired last week. I was traveling last week when my friend Karen emailed to tell me that she had seen on the scrollbar running at the bottom of the Today show that Oprah was doing a show on children of divorce that afternoon. Then my friend Lori TIVO'd the show for me and let me watch at her house last night.

The children from the three families involved had heartbreaking stories. The first segment featured an 11 year old girl and her 7 year old brother. Mom had run off with a boyfriend when the kids were 7 and 3, and she had not seen her beautiful children in two years. The kids were both angry and very sad. The daughter wrote a letter to her mom that ended by saying "Sometimes I love you so much I can't hide it" and the son talked about saving his allowance to buy a ring for his mom, hoping it would induce her to stay, but then she didn't even want it. These two siblings had tried desperately hard to get their mom to stay, but felt like failures because mom had chosen to leave anyway. They wanted to hate her, but instead desperately longed for her love.

The second segment featured two brothers whose parents had a tumultuous and possibly violent marriage. Only one of the brothers talked, and he told of being hidden in the bathroom during fights, of the police showing up at their house, and eventually of the day when the "dream died," referring to his parents' marriage. Despite the fighting and disruption, the boys nodded enthusiastically when Oprah suggested that they had still wanted their parents to stay together.

The final segment told the story of a teenage girl who felt guilty for her parents' marriage breaking up. She had caught her mother kissing another man and had told her father about it. Faced with her mother's hypocrisy, this young girl began acting out, smoking cigarettes, and then weed, and finally becoming sexually promiscuous. She was obviously ashamed of the lifestyle she had chosen, but had enough personal insight to realize that she had gone down this path in an attempt to get her mother to care. In other words, "if she doesn't care about me when I'm good, maybe she'll care if I'm really bad." We've all seen this -- the kids who are so desperate for attention that even negative attention seems good. Sadly, in this case, not only was the negative attention not working, mom sat in judgment of her daughter instead of realizing that her own promiscuity had set her daughter on this path.

There are lots of things I could say about this episode of Oprah. The stories were difficult to watch and some of the principles that came out of it were good. Two things stood out to me, though, that I want to comment on.

First, in the segment with the little boy and girl at the beginning, M. Gary Neuman (the expert voice on the show for this episode) noted that the kids felt like failures and were blaming themselves for Mom not coming back to the family. He said this was a scenario in which you should break the rule about not speaking negatively about the other parent.

I think there's a difference between denigrating the other parent and speaking honestly to kids about a situation. I don't think Dad has to denigrate Mom in this case. All he has to say is, "This is not your fault, and unfortunately there is nothing you can do to make Mom come back to us. She has chosen to leave us, and it's very sad. I wish she would make a different choice, but she's made up her mind. I'm so very, very sorry and I love you very much." Saying it this way does not put Mom down, nor does it sugarcoat the horrible reality of the situation. What it does do is to tell the kids the truth, acknowledge the rightness of their sorrow, and assure them that they are very loved.

I don't think Neuman meant that Dad has to denigrate Mom, but I think there is a misperception that not saying anything negative means hiding the truth. When we refuse to acknowledge the truth with kids, we imply that their sorrow has no good cause. I think what parents want to avoid is displaying any bitterness or anger toward the other parent and casting aspersions on the other parent's character. Simply stating the facts in a loving and gentle tone lets the kids know that, yes, something terrible has happened and it's right to feel sad or angry or whatever the emotion is.

The other big thing that stood out to me in this episode was the underlying presumption that if the parents in these three families had only handled things correctly, the children would not be experiencing this heartache. Listen, the kids aren't heartbroken because Mom and Dad muffed up the way they broke the news to the kids. They're heartbroken because their family is gone, because Mom and Dad are no longer married.

This presumption is a pernicious one. If we buy into it, we can convince ourselves that if we just do things the right way, no one will get hurt by divorce and we can all go our merry ways without guilt. If we buy into it, we can pass judgment on these families who have unnecessarily damaged their children by not telling them the right things about the divorce. If we buy into it, we can assume that well-behaved children of divorce are doing just fine.

Trouble is, it's all a myth. There is no right way to tell kids about divorce so their hearts won't be broken. Divorce is a terrible and terribly sad thing, and it will make children terribly sad. If that bothers you as a parent, well, you should take that into consideration as you make the decision to divorce or stay together. There's also no judgment on families who have done this "wrong." Take the first example above. Those two little ones aren't so angry and sad because Dad hasn't done a good enough job of talking to them about the divorce. They're angry and sad because Mom abandoned them all. If we're going to blame anyone here, it should be Mom, not Dad. Finally, Elizabeth Marquardt has exploded the myth that the well-adjusted child of divorce is doing just fine. That one's not even on the table for discussion anymore.

Oprah is doing a follow up show next week. If I can find a gracious friend who will let me watch at her house (I don't have a TV anymore), I'll do another post after the follow up show.

The good divorce on TV

From Reuters comes news of a new comedy series for NBC about a 30-something divorcing couple with kids who continue to live in the same home.

"In the untitled project, which has received a script commitment from the network, the divorcing couple -- a college professor moonlighting as a controversial political blogger, and his wife, who works at a private school and volunteers at a juvenile prison -- don't have enough money to separate right away, so the husband continues to live under the same roof with his wife and their two children, ages 14 and 8."

Are you a football?

Elizabeth Marquardt talked about feeling like a football being tossed between two people, always in mid-air, floating between one parent's world and the other. If you're a kid with that story, you could be on the Today Show:

For a special series, “Through Innocent Eyes,” TODAY is looking for children between the ages of 8 and 18 to tell their story. If selected, we will give the children simple cameras for them to record their stories. They will be paired with NBC correspondents and producers, who will be their mentors. Their stories will be edited by NBC and air on TODAY.They will be selected for their ability to tell a compelling story. For example, one might be a Muslim refugee living with her family in middle America or a child with a military parent stationed in Iraq. Another might be a child of divorce moving back and forth between two households or a child of gay parents. One could be a child athlete or performing artist or live with a disabled family member.We’re looking for a variety of situations and lifestyles. We want to celebrate childhood, but not avoid the social issues of growing up poor, or disabled, displaced, or “different.”

My only question is exactly which category divorced children fall into. Surely not "different" in today's world!

Reality bites

Yuck! This is one reality TV show I will not be watching. Who comes up with this stuff--and why are they still employed?

How do you mend a broken heart? By getting angry, getting even and getting over it! Real people who have undergone traumatic divorces learn how to move on with their lives, on Ex-Wives Club, an empowering new reality series premiering MONDAY, MAY 28 (9:00-10:00 p.m., ET) on the ABC Television Network. The show is hosted by three women who know all about breaking up -- famed "exes" Angie Everhart, Shar Jackson and Marla Maples.

OK, that last sentence is actually kind of funny. The only one of those names I even recognize is The Donald's ex. Apparently, Shar Jackson is the significantly less famous ex-wife of K-Fed, who is himself only famous because of his other ex-wife. And I still can't figure out who Angie Everhart is supposed to be.

Commercials airing now show one woman pushing her ex's car out of an airplane and watching it implode on the desert floor. According to the web site, getting revenge is one of three ways the show is 'helping' people 'move on' after their divorces. And instead of Dr. Phil, we get some lady who wrote a book called Spiritual Divorce: Divorce as a Catalyst for an Extraordinary Life. As if.

Let's hope this one gets canceled after the obligatory three episodes, never to rear its ugly head again.

King of commitment

Did anyone see last night's finale of The King of Queens? I was busy multi-tasking and channel surfing, but I saw a few snippets here and there. Carrie and Doug have been having some marriage problems in the last few episodes and things came to a head in the finale. On the loading dock of the building where Carrie's dad's wedding reception is taking place, the king and his queen have a showdown.

Doug accuses Carrie of not being committed to their marriage, after finding out that she has kept an apartment in Manhattan that he thought she had given up. He asks when she has ever gone out on a limb for him. Carrie says, "I married you, didn't I? What do you call that?"; to which Doug replies, "Um, hitting the jackpot!"

Then he follows it up with a really touching and insightful speech. He tells his wife that a couple doesn't go out on a limb for each other when they get married. Couples getting married think that everything is going to work out great; they're in love. Then, ten years go by and--in the case of Doug and Carrie--she realizes that he's not getting any thinner, and he realizes that she's not getting any nicer. That, Doug says, is when they have to go out on a limb for each other...to stay together even when things don't appear to have worked out perfectly.

In real life, actors Kevin James and Leah Remini who play Doug and Carrie have each been married just a few years. But the actor who plays Carrie's father is Jerry Stiller, father of actor Ben Stiller, and husband of 53 years to actress Anne Meara.

The other Bono

From Dawn Eden's blog:

I remember liking the fact that Chastity's parents sang "I Got You Babe" together with her in tow. There was something about that image of a supportive family that I longed for, as my mother and father were having marital problems at that time. As it happened, I was six months ahead of Chastity in the divorced-parents department as well.

Read the whole post, complete with pictures and video, here. (Scroll down to Tuesday, May 8.)

Partridge parting

Actor Danny Bonaduce, the red-headed kid from The Partridge Family, announced that his wife is seeking a divorce. The Bonaduces were married 16 years and have two kids.

From the Washington Post:
"There's no fight. Nobody's mad at anybody at my house," he said.
"It's been months of `You know, I think we'd be happier apart. I'm not happy, Danny.' But thing is, she has been friendly, and helpful," Bonaduce said.

I guess she forgot the words to the most famous Patridge Family song,
Come On Get Happy.

The day I got very, very old...

...was the day that Blister in the Sun became mainstream enough to be background music for a Wendy's commercial. Violent Femmes as muzak? Say it ain't so!

Playing it too safe

I was vegging in front of the television last night with a couple of magazines and couldn't be bothered to change the channel when Extra! came on. Hollywood fluff can be amusing, so on it stayed. Then, I heard this little gem. Jim Carrey was being interviewed, specifically about his relationship with gal-pal Jenny McCarthy.

Jim: We're never getting married.

Reporter [disappointed and shocked]: Never??

Jim: Never...BUT, the good news is, we're never getting divorced [looks smug]

Well, now there's a life philosophy for you: You can't lose if you don't risk. Hint to Jim--neither can you win. Let's imagine how this philosophy would work out if others jumped on the Jim Carrey 'Fraidy Wagon.

Tony Bennett: I'm never singing a live concert...but, the good news is, I'll never get booed.

The Gipper: I'm never running for President...but, the good news is, I'll never lose a Presidential election.

Stephen King: I'm never submitting my novel to a publisher...but, the good news is, I'll never get a rejection notice. (Okay, this one almost happened; thanks to Tabitha for saving Carrie from the garbage can, literally.)

Wilbur Wright: I'm never pushing this thing off a sand dune...but, the good news is, I'll never crash an airplane.

Christopher Columbus: I'm never setting sail...but, the good news is, I won't be ridiculed when I fall off the end of the flat world.

Greatness takes a willingness to dare, to risk, to step out and stand for something. Faint heart ne'er won fair maid, and all that. Yes, there's a risk that you'll lose it all--but it's only a risk; the actual good news is, you might grab the brass ring and take home the prize. Sigh, where have all the heroes gone?