Get Over It

You know what sucks stinks?  Being outside the mainstream.  I don't mean that like Steve Jobs or Bill Gates.  I mean like the retired elderly and (wait for it),  the divorced.  These folks don't fit in with the the pulse of our daily lives.  The retired elderly aren't in our workplace, so we no longer share "what's happening at the office" with them.  A lot of them are homebound, so we have to go out of our way to see them.  Many of them don't go out and have new experiences, and lots of them talk more about the distant past than about today.  In short, it takes an effort to interact with them and sometimes it's uncomfortable for us.  The problem is that they,  like the rest of us, need human contact and social interaction to survive and thrive.  They are also our parents and grandparents, the relatives who raised us, loved us, and nurtured us when we were growing up, and who we loved.  Not only are our retired elderly really interesting people (how many folks do you know who can tell first hand stories about World War II, the Korean War, life without TV, air conditioning and internet, icemen, home milk deliveries....You get the picture), but we owe them a lot.  That doesn't mean most people make the effort to fit them into the rhythm of their lives.  Actually, most people don't.
So, what about the divorced?  When these people were part of a married couple, they were part of our regular social lives.  We invited them out to dinner, we went to each other's houses, our children all played together, we vacationed and attended plays, movies and concerts together.  Then, one day, the couple decided to divorce.  Just like that, the people we really liked were excluded from our regular social lives.  They became different, not gradually like the elderly, but suddenly.  They continued to live in our neighborhood, but our children no longer played with theirs.  We stopped inviting them to socialize with us, to eat at our homes, to go places together.  Suddenly, they were no longer like us.  Divorce made them different.  How do we interact with only half of a couple?  A table for three seems kind of odd, and who buys three tickets to the theater (I do, but that's another story)?  We feel funny sharing "couple stories" with them, and we're uncomfortable listening to their dating stories.  We no longer know where they fit in the structure of our lives.  So, we treat them, in many ways, like the elderly.  We exclude them.  At a time when these people really need social interaction, when they really need positive human contact to help them through a painful emotional period in their lives, when they really need the people who care about them, we shun them.  Maybe what we need to do is examine the reason for our discomfort, deal with it, and find a way to integrate these people who are important to us into our lives.  I'm sure they'd thank us for it - here in the Trenches.