Divorcing parents pay you to come by and tell their kids that their parents are splitting up. You get a thousand bucks a kid. Today you’re doing the MacDougals. Two kids.
“Listen up,” you tell them while driving. You always break the news in your Cutlass. “Your parents are getting a divorce. Your mom fell in love with some guy she works with.”
They want to know what about their dad.
“He hasn’t met anybody yet, far as I know.”
They want to know why.
“He seems to still be in love with your mom. Seems like he expected it to last forever. The whole thing’s kind of knocked him on his ass so go easy on him.”
You’re driving them by the river. Life keeps flowing. That’s the message of that river. They get it.
“Why’s Mom doing this to Dad?” Bobby MacDougal asks.
“When you’re older you’re going to realize that you have to make a lot of decisions in life, and you regret all of them just a little bit. Some you regret more than others. You can’t go back and reverse everything, so you have to pick the decisions you regret the most and try and make a change.”
Debbie MacDougal asks, “So Mom regrets marrying Dad the most?”
You slam on the brakes behind the car in front of you. The kids are startled. Life can end at the drop of a dime. That’s the message with stopping short like that.
“Don’t try to read your parents’ minds,” you tell them. “Just let them overcompensate with presents and stuff. Here are some iPads.”
You throw the iPads into the back seat and they lose their shit.
“See, being children of divorce ain’t so bad right?”
They’ll be lost in their iPad screens. Drive them into a heavy, chaotic traffic jam, one with a burning car by the side of the road. Things might feel okay right now, but life is a slow crawl through chaos and suffering, is the message with driving into a chaotic traffic jam with a burning car by the side of the road like that.
Happy You Explain Divorces To Kids Day!
