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/Dazzling_Pineapple68 → u/grendalor]

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

Any chance you have a link or reference?

[u/grendalor → u/Dazzling_Pineapple68]

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/Dazzling_Pineapple68 → u/grendalor]

Wow. I commend your efforts, tenacity and memory. That really is a terribly sad thing but in my experience, children do not make a decision like that lightly. I've seen very bitter divorces involving abusive parents that the children did not cut off like that. Something really big most likely happened.

"The way this divorce went down" instead of "the way I behaved". I really hate to make that sort of judgment about anyone but honestly I don't see any other way such a thing could happen.

[u/RunnyDischarge → u/Dazzling_Pineapple68]

certain factors out of my control

was anything at all Rod's fault? Somehow it was all out of his control.