Raising Marriageable Children

I remember watching the Godfather Movie series and imagining myself in the shoes of Kay, the wife of Michael, the last son of Don Corleone, who later became the Godfather of the Mafia family. They were all Catholics, and the catholic church had a doctrine on marriage that insisted that once a couple is married, they can never get a divorce except such is sanctioned by the Pope himself. When she filed for a divorce, she was absolutely in breach of the doctrine of the church, but she did it for the benefit of her children.

The children had been seeing the antics of their father, a man who ran a multi-billion-dollar crime empire, and they were beginning to behave like him. Their mother watched as the influence of their father threatened to ruin their lives, and she decided to save her children from the dark shadows of their father, who was quite powerful and domineering. Of course, the children's father refused to let her go, he used his power and influence to keep her in a marriage she did not want any longer.

She watched as he changed from the independent, street smart, American hero into the one of the Corleone crime family and she realized that the same determination with which he walked away from his father's values when he was a young man was the same determination with which he totally immersed himself in the role of the head of the same family when an outsider came with the assurance of a real and present danger that almost decimated the whole family.

She did everything to make him see that the path he had chosen was not only going to expose the family to danger, it was also going to turn him into something else entirely.

This was the basis of her fight. To keep her husband from the corruption of his family. To keep her children isolated from the corruption of their father's family. When she failed to achieve the first, she decided she must achieve the second at all costs.

When Michael refused to let her go, she got pregnant for him again, and then she terminated the pregnancy. She was too scared to tell her what she did, so she lied that she had a miscarriage

One day, while they were having a row and he started saying it was the miscarriage that damaged her emotionally, she told him the bold truth. "I aborted the baby, Michael. I cannot allow myself to bring another one of your precious Italian sons into this world so that he can be like you. I aborted the child! I knew you would never forgive me for that. I knew your children are precious to you, and you will never look at me the same way again, but I had to do it." That was the moment her husband decided to grant her request to be divorced from him.

Did she make the right decision? In my opinion, she did.

She was able to preserve herself and her other children from the influence of her husband as their father and their role model by insisting on a divorce. It is not in every case that staying together as parents helps the children in a marriage. Sometimes, in order to prevent the children from being damaged, the wise thing to do is to leave the marriage.

The second example I am sharing on the topic is a true-life story.

The couple had three children, two girls and one boy. Their mother was an emotionally abusive woman who did everything in her power to denigrate her husband in words an indeed. The husband was a journalist with Daily Times as a young man, and he was quite successful as a sports journalist. The wife was a journalist with one of the state-owned radio stations in Nigeria. They were Catholics, and they got married in the church with a mandate to stay together at all costs. This man then lost his job and everything he did to get another job worked out.

The wife became the breadwinner of the family, and the abuse of the wife towards the husband became very apparent. The verbal insults, denigration, mockery, and inhuman treatment. When the children were going off to the university, it was their mother that funded their education. When they started working, it was their mother who had a say with what they could and couldn’t do in life.

Whenever the father wants to say anything, the mother shuts him down. This was the modus operandi of that marriage until the children began to get married. The first daughter got married, and from the first day of the marriage, all she wanted to do was control the husband just the way her mother did. She never saw marriage in any other light, and she was unwilling to accept that her parents’ marriage was not how a marriage should be in its true nature. She insisted that her husband must be poor. She prayed for it. She did everything to sabotage his business just to keep him poor. She insisted that if a man had money, he would use it to engage in extra-marital affairs, therefore, it is safer if the woman was the one with the money than if the man had any money

The other children didn’t turn out better. The son was a wife abuser who didn’t want to end up like his father and therefore treated his wife like a second-class citizen because she didn’t want to be married to someone like his mother. The last child, who is female, embarrassed a suitor who forgot to pick up her calls at the steps of a courthouse where they were both prosecuting cases.

The children became prayer points for the mother after their father died. Their mother would book masses and light candles for them so that the Lord would guide them into joy and fulfilment, but the damage was within, and the mother was still the way she was even after their father died. She was still a towering influence, and the children never saw that they were the problems and needed to fix themselves first.

A divorce would have been of great help to the marriage, especially because of the children.

When the two children got married, they were presented as children from unbroken homes, and many believed that children from unbroken homes usually thrive in a marriage than those from broken homes.

This belief is erroneous. Children from happy marriages thrive in happy marriages. Children from flawed marriages become flawed. Parents should, therefore, pay attention to their children’s emotional state in the context of a marriage, and wise parents should isolate their children from their marital issues.

Parents who report their spouses to their children are the most foolish of all. They ruin the children’s life intentionally. Once you saddle teenagers with adult problems, you ruin their youth and color their reality with murky waters of your own making. Parents should avoid this at all costs.

I am not in any way advocating for Divorce; God forbid I do such. I had to make that clear statement so that those who are reading this would not come to that conclusion.

If a couple has no children, whatever dynamics they operate in within the context of their marriage is fine. When a couple begins to have children, they must both become very careful about what lifestyle and life choices they expose the children to.

Fathers who physically and emotionally abuse their wives in the presence of their children damage the children in many ways. Mothers who physically and emotionally abuse their husbands in the presence of their children also damage the children in many ways. Sometimes, it is when the children start having relationships that the damage becomes evident.

A wife who was very quiet and allowed herself to be treated like a rag by her husband would raise a daughter who sees men as oppressors and would be determined not to be treated the way her mother was treated by her father. A husband whose wife always cheated upon would raise sons who believe women can never be faithful and therefore would treat women with scorn all their lives.

Oftentimes, in counselling, you see men and women whose parents were abusive lapsing into a childish loop of their parent’s making. A man would say, I am trying everything not to end up like my father while a lady would say I am trying everything I can not to end up like my mother. Loops like this indicated a very faulty modeling by the parents while the children were growing up.

The ideal goal of parents in a marriage is to raise children who not only look forward to being like them in the future but also aim to be as loving, as caring, as responsible and as responsive as they were while raising them. Children are the best judges of their parent’s marriages both in theory and in in practical

When a person says I want my marriage to be like the marriage of my parents, take a critical look at the parent’s marriage and you can see if the picture that child had placed before himself or herself is the picture of the kind of marriage you can thrive in as the husband or wife of such a person.

It is important to keep our marriages. It is more important to keep our children from emotional damage as much as possible

-GSW-