Women feel awkward and isolated

Isabel said that for her children she works to keep a friendly relationship with her ex-husband A COUPLE of months ago, Susan Gregory Thomas, a writer in Brooklyn, was at a friend’s 40th birthday party when she was approached by a woman familiar to her “from the whole Park Slope mommy culture .”
“So you’re Susie Thomas,” the woman practically shrieked upon introduction. “You’re famous.” Taken aback, Ms. Thomas asked what she meant.
The woman swiftly backpedaled. “Oh, you just come up in these conversations all the time,” she said.
“I was like, just give me the hemlock,” Ms. Thomas, 42, recalled.
Though she wasn’t entirely surprised. Ever since her divorce three years ago, Ms. Thomas said, she has been antisocial, “nervous about what people would say.”
After all, she had gone from Park Slope matron, complete with involved husband (“We had cracked the code of Gen X peer parenthood”) and gut-renovated brownstone, to “a Red Hook divorcée,” she said, remarried with a new baby and two children-of-divorce barely out of preschool. “All of a sudden, this community I’d lived in for 13 years became this spare and mean savannah,” she said.
It was as if, she said, everyone she knew felt bad for her but no one wanted to be near her, either. Even though adultery was not part of the equation, Ms. Thomas said, “I feel like I have a giant letter A on my front and back.”
That a woman who has been divorced should feel such awkwardness and isolation seems more part of a Todd Haynes set piece than a scene from “families come in all shapes and sizes” New York, circa 2011. But divorce statistics, which have followed a steady downward slope since their 1980 peak, reveal another interesting trend: According to a 2010 study by the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia, only 11 percent of college-educated Americans divorce within the first 10 years today, compared with almost 37 percent for the rest of the population.
For this cross section of American families — in the suburban playgrounds of Seattle, the breastfeeding-friendly coffee shops of Berkeley, Calif., and the stroller-trodden streets of the Upper West Side — divorce, especially for mothers with young children underfoot, has become relatively scarce since its “Ice Storm” heyday.
For every cohort since 1980, a greater proportion are reaching their 10th and 15th anniversaries, said Stephanie Coontz, author of “Marriage, a History.”
Teresa DiFalco, a 41-year-old mother of two from a suburb of Portland, Ore., recalled being shocked when her husband wanted to split up three years ago.
“I had this sense of: ‘You’re kidding me. We have children. It’s not allowed,’ ” she said. Divorce was not a part of her children’s landscape, Ms. DiFalco said. Her son had just one acquaintance whose parents were divorced, her daughter none.
Similarly, Molly Monet, a professor of Spanish at Mount Holyoke College who separated from her husband in 2007, said she felt out of sync, “like the ultimate bad mom.”
“Now my children were from a ‘broken home,’ ” she said. “My first response was, Is this going to devastate the kids?”
Andrew Cherlin, a sociology professor at Johns Hopkins University, said: “The shift in attitudes and behavior is very real. Among upper-middle-class Americans, the divorce rate is going down, and they’re becoming more conservative toward divorce.”
Dr. Cherlin, author of “The Marriage-Go-Round: The State of Marriage and Family in America Today,” attributes the swing to multiple factors, among them, a generational makeover.
It’s as if the children of Manhattan and Roslyn, N.Y., and Bethesda, Md., reflected on their parents’ sloppy divorces and said, “Not me.” For Ms. Thomas, whose parents separated when she was 12, “Divorce had pretty much defined everything in my life.” In her divorce memoir, “In Spite of Everything,” to be published this summer, Ms. Thomas recalls telling her ex-husband many times during their 16-year marriage, “Whatever happens, we’re never going to get divorced.”
From / The New York Times .