Turns out my parents got divorced when I was eight years old, but they didn’t stop living together. Every once in a while I kind of heard something about them being divorced, but I didn’t really take it that way. They all had two parents, and so did I, so what else was there to be happy about?
As I got much older and got married myself, I learned from my wife that my mother and father had divorced without his knowledge. When I was little, they had a big fight about Dad’s loan. He didn’t tell my mother that he had taken it out for my father’s treatment, and he couldn’t pay it back on his own. We were living poorly then, money was tight, there was nothing to pay off the loan, and people from the bank were calling and could claim the apartment, so mom filed for divorce. Dad was against it, but in order not to lose the apartment and not to put us at risk, he agreed to the divorce.
Over the years, he paid off the loan and sorted everything out, and Mom had long forgiven his lies, but to get married again, either there was no desire or time. And I had lived with them for so many years and didn’t even pay attention, and had no idea that Mom’s passport indicated that she and Dad were divorced.
My wife asked my mother why she did not want to sign again, since she is together with my father anyway, and she said she just did not want to mess with the paperwork. Besides, they are already used to this kind of “common-law marriage”.
That’s what I thought… But really, is there any point in marriage as such? There is nothing forbidding to live together, or to raise a child together, but at least in this way the problems and mistakes will affect one person, and not the whole family.
