I have never liked the term broken home. Maybe it’s
because according to those who use it, I come from one, and the words hurt. What child wants the place they come from to
be called broken? My wish is that we
have language that honors everyone’s home, no matter how many parents and no
matter their married or divorced status. I think “home” is enough—no need to qualify it
as broken, repaired, or having always been in one lovely piece.
When I was little I pondered this term and what it
meant. As little kids do, I took it
literally, and the words evoked a tiny wooden house, falling apart in
disrepair. If there had once been a
picket fence, the paint had now peeled and there were holes where the posts had
fallen down. Truly broken. But because I had
the upbringing I did, where I was frequently informed about the strife of
others, I didn’t ask the obvious question:
Well if it’s broken, why don’t they just fix it? I understood there was a weightiness to the
term broken home. These were
dilapidated, falling apart homes that the parents just couldn’t fix. Not only broken, but unrepairable.
Then, it happened to me.
My home broke and I didn’t want anyone to know it. From the outside, it looked mostly the
same. On the inside, it was heavy with
its brokenness: the broken dream of a
family with two parents and two kids, and for me, the broken thing I had always
known as truth: that my parents loved each other. I no longer knew what was true about family and
I was newly burdened with what felt like a curse: living in an unrepairable home.
I wonder what it would have been like for me if after my
parents’ divorce I didn’t inherit that broken home. A changed home, yes. A grieving home for a time, yes. But a broken beyond repair home? That should never be bestowed upon any of us,
especially a child.
For the past five years I have worked with kids who were
legally severed from their parents—kids in the foster care system. They originally came from homes that someone
somewhere would call the most broken—with not just divorce, but drug use,
abuse, neglect, and transient-ness. And
I found that what these kids need and deserve is no different than what we all
need when speaking of the places we come from or the homes we have
created—honoring.
To me, honoring need not mean celebrating or condoning. It means witnessing and respecting. These days, I tend to get all riled up when
someone says a child came from a broken home.
On a good day, I’ll ask: What is a broken home? On another day, I’ll say: Me too.
I come from a broken home. I’ve
created a broken home. My daughters are
growing up in a broken home. Let me tell
you something about it. There is no dad
that lives there. There never has
been. The kitchen is pink and every pet
but the hamster is a female. The hamster
gets the title, man of the house. I don’t have a doormat that says Welcome to Our Broken Home because to me
it is not broken at all; it is the best little brick home, full of life and
love, no more broken than the little brick houses scattering the street with
the married people inside.
We are all broken, some of us a little and some of us a lot. We are all somewhere on our own journeys of
brokenness and repair. I never wanted
that broken home of my childhood, but I came to love the two homes that were
born from the brokenness. I never wanted
my own divorce, but I have come to be deeply grateful for the home that was
created in its wake. I think many of us
have this love and gratitude for the places we come from, even with their deep
flaws. After my divorce I always
imagined myself like a chick emerging from an egg—wobbly and disoriented, but
ready to walk into the new world. Maybe
that is the beauty of the broken home—like an egg, cracked into a bunch of
pieces, but also like an egg— a new life emerges.
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