A recent essay in the New York Times’ “Modern Love” column has sparked a flurry of think pieces, tweets, and reactions. Written by Cathi Hanauer (who founded the column with her husband), it was titled “The Case for Ending a Long, Mostly Good Marriage.”
The piece itself was predictably silly, self-absorbed, and shallow, another entry in the newly popular “actually, divorce is great” genre of chick lit. The gambit will be familiar and makes a certain sort of psychological sense: Turn the tragic into a cause for celebration. Shout your abortion! Throw a divorce party! Women have become expert at turning reality on its head. But while the article may have been banal, the reactions were not. Even New York Times readers responded negatively. Clearly, something had hit a nerve.
Having recently reread The Odyssey, my own thoughts ran immediately to Penelope, the faithful wife of Odysseus who waited twenty years for his return, raising his son, Telemachus, and caring for his father, Laertes. She manages the estate, outwits the pushy suitors, and looks after the home for which Odysseus so desperately longs. As he says, “Nothing is sweeter than your own country / And your own parents, not even living in a rich house— / Not if it’s far from family and home.”
After a brutal and lengthy war, Odysseus spends ten long years attempting to return to Ithaca. He confronts his own failings and the betrayal of others. He endures and suffers, but always the memory of home, of Penelope and Telemachus, carries him forward.
Imagine Odysseus if he had no home to return to, if he knew that Penelope had abandoned the estate and left him for another. Perhaps she was seeking “self-fulfillment” or swiping right on Hinge. Would he have survived? Would he have perished between Scylla and Charybdis, or lost himself entirely in the ministrations of Calypso?
Western civilization begins with a poem—a poem about coming home. Without home, we are lost, both individually and collectively. We need ties that bind, traditions and rituals, memories and roots.
It is no secret that our culture is marked by unprecedented levels of depression, catastrophically low birth rates, and skyrocketing levels of mental illness—especially among the young. People are lonely, anxious, and overwhelmed. They are adrift, unmoored from any stabilizing community. Technology and social media bear some of the blame, but the rot begins earlier—with the missing home. Cathi Hanauer’s piece is so grotesque and has elicited such a strong response because she exploded not only a marriage, but a home, and for such trivial reasons. Only briefly does she consider the ramifications of the divorce on her children, her parents, or her friends.
A broken marriage upends an entire community, and will shape all of them for the rest of their lives. Should Hanauer be lucky enough to have grandchildren, they too will be affected. Where will they celebrate Thanksgiving? Which of their many “homes” will host Christmas? And what becomes of the family’s unique rituals and traditions? Like the butterfly effect, the ripples of divorce are endless.
Decades of easy, no-fault divorce have paved the way for a culture of homelessness. The children of divorce, sold the lie that they’d be happier if their parents were happy, were shuffled from “home” to “home,” handed off from one parent to another, each with a different set of rules and habits, each with a new girlfriend or boyfriend, maybe new siblings. A rotating, ever-changing cast of characters.
But divorce culture is hardly the sole culprit. Even for those children lucky enough to have two married parents, both were likely to be working full-time, outside the home. Did these children sit down for a home-cooked meal? Did they eat dinner together around a table? Or were they scrolling through Instagram while gobbling takeout? Was Mom flying around the country while Dad was on his cell phone?
Then there are the designer babies, must-have accessories to be ordered and purchased on demand. These are children who will never know the woman whose womb was their first home, or the father whose sense of humor they share. They will always be fundamentally homeless, intentionally deprived of a mother or a father.
Part and parcel of the attack on the home and traditional family is the extraordinary rise of the transgender movement, which is at root a total rejection of the idea of home. What else is an ideology that claims you can literally ignore or remake your first and ultimate home—your own body? The gnostic rejection of the body is the final rejection of home, and it has produced a generation of mutilated, broken children.
How do we remake a culture that has forgotten or deliberately attacked the value of home and all that it means? How do we step back from the abyss of chaos and confusion, of despair and loneliness? How can we return to Ithaca?
As the aptly-named Homer makes clear, Penelope is no one’s fool and more than a match for her husband. She may have stayed “at home,” but she has been busy and productive. Once upon a time, this was a legitimate and highly honorable role in society. Call her a “housewife,” “homemaker,” or “stay-at-home mom.” Tending the home fires used to be essential work, not something to be squeezed in-between other more pressing commitments. And this work was generally the particular stronghold of women.
But we have spent decades now demeaning “housewives,” worshipping abortion, and choosing servitude to the GNP rather than tending our own home and family. Free, universal daycare is the cause of the moment. Women must be liberated from the home so they can climb the corporate ladder. Babies must be handed over to strangers so that comrades might work.
Left unspoken is the possibility that most women, if not all, might be happier and more “fulfilled” were they to raise their own children, at least in the early years, and create a loving home. Like it or not, most men and most women have different abilities, skills, and interests. And even when the mother is absent, it is usually another woman who steps into the void. It has often been noted that Winston Churchill’s nanny saved the free world.
But one way or another, the obvious can no longer be ignored. If no one is in charge of making and tending the home, there will be no home. Without someone whose primary “job” is looking after the house and the people in it, that home and its inhabitants will necessarily suffer. And so will the larger world in which they live. Loving and lovely homes, like functioning neighborhoods and nations, don’t just happen. They take an extraordinary amount of work and care, thought and planning.
The Odyssey is the story of a homecoming, and that story has been retold and reimagined for thousands of years. Our world is quite literally unthinkable without the poem—both as the grounding of all literature and as enduring truth. When I was growing up, there was no more popular movie than The Wizard of Oz. Dorothy knew, and reminds us all, that “there’s no place like home.” It matters more than wealth or power, status or success. Kansas or Ithaca, we all need a home to which we can return.
