by Tristan Taylor

Created on: November 10, 2009

For a long time, my stock answer to this question was 'yes', but you know how things go in this life as you get older. Everything that you used to think was completely black and white starts to turn an awful shade of gray, and if you want to know the truth, I hate that. I really do. I used to think that people who went around saying that this or that was a "gray area" were evil; now I'm concerned that I'm evil. It may not be that everything is really gray anyway, the more I think about it. It may just be that when things don't go like they should in this world, that everything just gets turned gray and there just isn't much you can do about it.

Ideally, marriage is designed to be between two people who are mature, completely ready for the responsibilities of adult life, ready to sacrifice, ready to compromise when necessary. The problem is that our country isn't exactly churning these kinds of adults out. For the past few decades, most of us American kids have been babied, pampered and spoiled. Then we get into a relationship with someone else just about as mature as we are and we start having kids. Then we realize that we and our spouse both have a few hundred bad habits and character flaws and we decide that we just can't live any longer with this person we've been sleeping in the same bed with for the past few years.

The problem with all of this is that too many of us don't figure out how pathetic we and our first marriages are until we have already had children. By this time, we have these wonderful little innocent faces peering at us with faces full of sorrow wanting to know why mommy and daddy don't love each other any more. More than that is the fear in our children's eyes. Life to a child makes sense and feels safe when their mother and father are a team. They know they can expect guidance and protection from dad. They know they can expect devotion and unconditional love from mom. But when mom and dad start to fight and eventually decide to break up, it creates an incredible fear in children. What's next? Will I be safe? How much time will I miss seeing daddy and mommy, now that I have been split between the two of them? Who are these people mommy and daddy are seeing now? Can I trust them? Do they like me? Can they love me like mommy and daddy can? Kids have great instincts, you see. They know who they really belong to and they know how things are supposed to work. When things don't go like they are supposed to it really hurts kids. It hurts them badly.

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