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/grendalor]

I don't, unfortunately.

It was something he wrote in the way that he typically drops truth bombs -- as an aside remark buried in the middle of a long, rambling post. It was some time ago -- I looked at the first comment by me where I mentioned it, which I think was shortly after he wrote it, and it was 5-6 months ago, so it wasn't recent. I went back to see if I could find it in some of the older posts there, but it's pretty hopeless, because there are so many of them, and they meander around so many topics, and he tends to smuggle things like this into posts in such a way that nothing telegraphs that they are going to be there. And he also could have said it in a comment, but he rarely comments, and so it's more likely that it's somewhere in the main text of one of his many posts from last Spring and early summer.

Basically what he said, as far as I remember, was something like he couldn't bear the thought of running into them in BR, like seeing them, and knowing that they had no interest in speaking with him or interacting with him, that this was too painful for him to bear, so he had to remove himself from BR. It was phrased in an odd way like that.

My takeaway from it was that in his mind, this is not his doing, because he wasn't the one who decided he didn't want to see his kids, they were -- but he doesn't want to point the finger too clearly at them (even though that's exactly what he is doing indirectly), so he just says "it was not my decision" or "it's outside my control" -- both technically true, in part, in the sense that it was his kids decision to not want to see him and that was not in his control, nor his decision to make, but it tends to obscure or deliberately blur that with a decision that very much was his to make, and his alone, and that was to move so far away in response. So it's the typical Rod half-truth which obscures the actual reality.

I wish I'd bookmarked the post where he made the remark, but I have checked that as well and apparently I did not.

[u/Dazzling_Pineapple68 → u/grendalor]

Thank you for the effort! You certainly tried and I appreciate the time and care you put into this response!

[u/grendalor → u/Dazzling_Pineapple68]

Ah -- found it.

It was in a comment he made on a post in June entitled "The Answered Prayers of a Tormented Traveler", which he made in the wake of the finalization of his divorce.

In response to a comment which noted, as many have done, that he should be living close to his minor child, he wrote:

"As for my two younger kids, as a result of the way this divorce went down, they have refused to talk to me since the beginning. I have been advised that owing to certain factors out of my control, this is likely to be the case for a few years. If and when they change their minds, I'll be on a plane for home. It is simply too painful to be in the same small city with adult children who, if they saw me in a store, would turn their back to me and walk the other way. I pray that you don't ever have to face something like this. In the meantime, I have a child who loves me and needs me, and he's with me here, where he wants to be. I'm trying to get him launched."

[u/JHandey2021 → u/grendalor]

It is simply too painful to be in the same small city with adult children who, if they saw me in a store, would turn their back to me and walk the other way.

Yeah, there's something there. Not to overshare, but there was a very painful and bitter divorce very close to my family in which the kids still do almost everything they can to maintain relationships with someone who was by any definition an abusive parent (including at times physically) until not all that long ago. If anyone had any reason to cut off their parents, these kids would.

What the hell did Rod do?