Involuntarily Disabled

I had planned on making my way east on or before Thanksgiving, but my trip has been delayed. I’m still busy making preparations, and hope to leave soon. I've also been busy helping a family that has helped me. My wife and I spent a lot of time volunteering at a hippotherapy center while planning our family. It was beautiful to watch the joy these children experienced while their bodies were being helped. In hippotherapy, physical therapists use a horse’s gait to treat all sorts of medical conditions, including cerebral palsy, learning disabilities, impaired mobility, etc. It broke our hearts hearing the stories of frustrated parents, who would have given anything for their sons and daughters to be fully healed. It warmed our hearts, however, how much they loved their imperfect children, who were nevertheless perfect to them. And so my wife and I were so grateful when our daughters were born with ten fingers and ten toes and as they progressed from crawling to walking to talking. We pictured ourselves growing old together in the same giving spirit as the older horses used in hippotherapy. Over the years, one of the physical therapists at the center and her family became our good friends. While out on her horse the other day, the horse spooked as workers were clearing brush nearby. It reared up and did a back flip over on her. Four surgeries followed within the week and she will be in the hospital for another three months. It will take about a year for a full recovery. I’m sitting at her dining room table now writing this. Two nights before the accident, her family and I ate dinner and talked about my difficult divorce they've been helping me through. Nothing is the same in their home right now. Mommy is living somewhere else, the hospital. Daddy is functioning as a single parent. Their two beautiful children ‘visit" Mommy every so often. The kids don’t understand what is going on and they want everything back the way it was. They had Thanksgiving with one parent and not the other. They’ll wake up Christmas morning with one parent and not the other. The list goes on. These kids are lucky though. A helicopter picked up their Mommy and brought her broken body to the hospital. A trauma surgeon was waiting to examine and fix her. Friends and family sprang into action, taking care of the family at the hospital and at home. When the sun sets on this story in a year or so, the surgeon will have fixed the broken body, friends and family will have helped them endure, they will all heal from their physical and emotional wounds, and life will return to what will be a new normal. My friend’s husband remarked to me how great it would be if my family had gotten the same kind of united support a year ago his was getting now. I started imagining what our life would have looked like during this past year if a helicopter had picked up our broken marriage and brought it to a waiting trauma surgeon. What if friends and family had then sprung into action; all of them caring for all four of us during this difficult time? What if the family court system my wife flung us into had turned us away and told us they first wanted to help us fix our marriage before they would deal with a divorce? Unfortunately, none of this happened precisely because our society simply doesn't much value the life of a marriage. And when friends and families swoop in to help, most help us learn how to divide, not reunite, or encourage us to get over it and move on whether we’re ready or able to or not. Sadly, like my friend’s physical injuries, I’m convinced my marriage’s emotional injuries could have been fixed, that my wife and I could have healed, and in a year or so, about now, our life could have returned to a new normal, with a marriage even stronger than it was before. Unilateral divorce has also involuntarily disabled my daughters. The undeniable fact is that children suffer when a marriage doesn't get the life saving treatment it needs. And while they will still have the opportunity to accomplish many things over the course of their lives, they have forever been stripped of the enormous benefits that an intact family provides and will forever be at risk for the number of problems faced by children of divorce. Involuntarily disabled for life because our friends, families, communities and legal system did nothing to stop and help.