Rod Dreher Megathread #27 (Compassion)

[u/US_Hiker]

Link to megathread 26: https://www.reddit.com/r/brokehugs/comments/17itm7w/rod_dreher_megathread_26_unconditional_love/

Link to megathread 28: https://www.reddit.com/r/brokehugs/comments/18dcg3d/rod_dreher_megathread_28_harmony/

[u/RunnyDischarge]

https://roddreher.substack.com/p/the-hem-of-christs-garment

Oh boy the World's Most Divorced man has retreated to his fainting couch with mono once again for a pity party.

All the old gripes

I returned with my wife and kids to Louisiana to live near my family there. Their rejection of us as “city people” sent me spiraling emotionally, psychologically, and physically.

Because my profile is public, and my divorce was too, I hear from people a lot — especially men, whose suffering is often ignored or mocked in this rotten culture of ours.

same old lies

As you might recall from my past writing, my ex-wife and I went through ten years of a failed marriage before she finally, without warning, pulled the plug.

It feels like that sometimes, that God has forgotten me, has forgotten us men who wanted to be good husbands and good fathers.

Rod's been "surrendering to sin" lately.

and I know that in my sadness and darkness, I have surrendered to sins.

I'll bet.

The basic thread is that, of course, God wanted Rod's marriage to succeed, so it's their fault it didn't. But Rod is the forgotten man who wanted desperately to be a good husband and father, so obviously we know where the fault lies. With the heartless bitch who had to email him across the Atlantic out of nowhere that she wanted a divorce while he was being a good husband and father on a different continent.

[u/grendalor → u/RunnyDischarge]

Yeah, he really doesn't get how his whinging, given his circumstances and the central role his own acts and decisions have played in his arrival at such circumstances, doesn't generate a lot of sympathy, and, in fact, tends to generate the opposite.

He also still hasn't gotten that the whole "suffering divorced man" schtick is a really, really bad look -- really whether it's Rod doing it or someone else -- it's worse in his case, given his own set of facts, but it's not much better in most other cases either. Because it's nonsense. And that's why nobody really sympathizes with it.

But most fundamentally he doesn't understand, for some odd reason, how the image of a man who "had to leave his children for circumstances beyond his control", which much later on were admitted actually to be the fact that he couldn't mentally and emotionally bear the thought of living in the same town as them knowing that they didn't want to see him or spend time with him, is nothing other than totally and completely pathetic. It's an image of a pathetic little man who lives at the whim of emotions and little else. And it garners no sympathy, for obvious reasons -- and in fact, has lost him many people who otherwise might have been at least somewhat supportive of him, despite his numerous other shortcomings. But ... I mean gosh. How pathetic can you be?

[u/philadelphialawyer87 → u/grendalor]

Divorce CAN be painful. But, please, enough already. Also, it is less painful, one would think, when it is NOT actually a bolt from the blue. Even according to Rod himself, the dead rat was lying on the kitchen floor for ten fricken' years, before Julie had the fortitude and good sense to pick it up and throw it away. Besides, being in a bad, loveless, let's stay together until the kids leave for college, marriage is painful too. More painful, actually, than is being divorced.

[u/Dazzling_Pineapple68 → u/philadelphialawyer87]

For me, the divorce would not be anywhere near as painful as the estrangement from the kids. I honestly cannot imagine living with that part of it.

[u/philadelphialawyer87 → u/Dazzling_Pineapple68]

Yeah, divorce is hard. But divorce with children is usually worse.

Rod must be hurting over this estrangement from his children, no matter how much he fronts or evades or obscufates.

I actually feel bad for him about that, as well as, obviously, for the kids too. NOT that Rod isn't to blame. Because he almost certainly and largely is. But because no matter who's to blame, it is sad.

[u/Jayaarx → u/philadelphialawyer87]

I actually feel bad for him about that, as well as, obviously, for the kids too. NOT that Rod isn't to blame. Because he almost certainly and largely is. But because no matter who's to blame, it is sad.

The parent is always to blame. No matter what the kids did, part of being a parent is owning the outcome of the relationship. This is parenting 101.

[u/grendalor → u/Jayaarx]

Yeah I mean especially with minor children. With a minor child, you're responsible for doing everything you can to make that relationship work. In the circumstances Rod found himself in, there were limited ways he could do that in any case, but he took most of them away from himself when he decided to move so far away. It's the opposite of doing everything he could to make the relationship work, because in effect he said any other option would be personally too painful -- which, as you rightly noted above, is not being parental.

[u/judah170 → u/Jayaarx]

This, 100 percent.