Divorce is something that sends shockwaves through a family, and during the holidays the standard nightmare of being around in-laws and annoying cousins becomes ten times worse. This isn’t just a small issue considering that forty to fifty percent of marriages will end in a divorce, leaving half of America’s kids with this problem.
Arizona isn’t exempt from this epidemic standing at 10th on the leaderboards for divorced families, and on campus, twenty percent of the young adults are left in a split household.
The effects of divorces are felt all around our school, and senior Logan Rud knows firsthand how hard it can be to split your time especially around the holidays. Just earlier this year, Rud’s father moved up to Wisconsin with his step-family, destroying the annual tradition of splitting half of a holiday with one parent and half with the other. Instead, he travels and spends the whole week with his dad and step-family.
Although the traveling and cousins can get annoying spending time with family especially around the holidays brings back happy memories of days jam-packed with fun and vacations overflowing adventure. Rud’s dad is making the most of the time he has and is taking Rud and his step-family down to Florida for one of those memorable trips.
To a young child, two Christmases sounds like heaven, but when you get older and more mature, it keeps becoming more of a nuisance to travel between houses or having to fly hundreds of miles and then right back a few days later. Journalism and English teacher Damien Tippett has been teaching here at Perry for 11 years and knows how challenging it can be when you start becoming an adult and have to deal with divorced parents.
In his early high school years, Tippett’s parents separated, and he decided to live with his father in an apartment not far from his mom and sisters. It was always a chore for him traveling between two houses during the holidays. But when he started to get a family of his own the task of taking them between 3 or 4 houses a day becomes more tiresome, ”It is emotionally taxing when you have to do 3 holidays in one day,” and it’s just a “hassle.”
To those going through a divorce or have divorced parents, Tippett advises “It’s what you make of it, you have to go into it with a glass half full.”