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generation ex

'Just have another baby."

That was the advice a friend of mine - now divorced - once received from her mother. It had taken her a long time to speak openly about her marriage, which at that point had lasted ten years and yielded three children. She wanted her mother to know about her struggles. She couldn't carry them alone any longer and thought she might give her some good advice or, better yet, solace. But her mother responded in a way she hadn't anticipated - like the fifties-era wife she was. And that meant stalwartly, with duty as wife and mother first.

"You can't say no to a man!" another woman's 70-something mother told her, alarmed, when she complained about her husband's unwanted sexual advances, which felt like insults, because of the problems they were having in their marriage. "Besides," her mother added, "it only takes five minutes!"

The generational gap between mothers and daughters often widens over the issues of marriage, divorce and dating, especially when the span of years stretches over the Great Feminist Divide. Many women who came of age in the fifties entered marriages at a young age - a wedding ring was a form of graduation, a rite of passage to adulthood, more expected than a college degree. If they didn't, they would be branded spinsters.

"It's just what we all did," my mother explained to me, when I asked her about her youth and her decision to marry my father when she had just turned 21. My father was freshly 23. They had met when my mother was 17 at a "not out" party in Montreal, which was what they called a social event with women who had yet to be presented at the St. Andrew's Ball, a fancy affair which involved debutantes, dressed in white dresses, performing their curtseys in front of some lesser Royal. The following year, my mother took my father as her date to the ball.

In a scrapbook from her youth she showed me recently, she had pasted in pictures of her favourite movie stars - she was in love with Jimmy Stewart - as well as notes from my father and the wrappings of chocolate bars he liked to bring her for the evenings she worked night duty as part of her nursing training. She quit that education to marry, and by the time she was 32, she had five children. Next fall, they will have been married for 56 years.

The feminist movement didn't derail my mother's marriage the way it did for some.

"I completely changed in midstream and he didn't know what the hell to do about it," Norma Scarborough once said of her husband and her feminist awakening in the seventies after marrying in 1949 and being a stay-at-home mother of five. The late activist lived apart from her husband in the last twenty years of their marriage.

That my mother was unaffected by feminism didn't stop her from becoming a fascinating person and delightful character. She studied decorative arts and art history. She fly-fishes with my father in Scotland. They both downhill ski. She recently gave up tennis due to arthritic trouble in her rotator cuff, but only admitted defeat after trying to teach herself to play with the opposite arm.

That's the thing about being in a healthy union. You don't need to get divorced in order to be authentic, to be self-actualized.

I have come up against the generational differences in regard to marriage with my mother. She encouraged me to try harder to make my marriage work, even when it was beyond repair. Initially, she found it hard to accept my divorce, partly out of understandable concern for my three children. Some of her contemporaries have said they think the high divorce rate is a reflection of selfishness on the part of feminist-influenced women. (Some, too, have expressed envy that women of later generations can leave a toxic marriage because they have their own income.)

But some of the gap between us is simply because of the differences in our experience of marriage. I don't know what it's like to be in a marriage that is healthy and gives the participants room to grow. And she doesn't know what it's like to make the painful, difficult decision to leave one because you can't stay for reasons you have tried to deny for years.

We are foreign to one another in that way - in different bubbles of experience - even though we share DNA. And we have to tiptoe around these gulfs in generational expectations and in experience.

"You're not going to write about your own divorce," my mother gently admonished me in a shocked tone of voice when I first told her I was going to write a column about contemporary divorce culture.

"Well, yes," I replied. "Why not?"

If what it's about is an investigation of what lies beneath our decisions to marry and divorce, how could I not excavate my own feelings? And how could I expect others to tell me their stories if I wasn't willing to share my own?

"Oh," she said in small voice. I know she believes in the sanctity of marriage and, at the time, that sentiment even included one that had failed.

She understands now. "It's so interesting how women talk about the joy of being on their own," she told me several months ago when I was not in a romantic relationship.

But that doesn't stop her from offering advice that has a retro tinge.

"I think you need to come across as a bit more vulnerable," she said once when discussing the midlife dating scene.

"Vulnerable how?"

"That you need a man. Men want to be needed."

And even now that I'm happily in love, she counsels a certain demure way of being.

"Can't you sign more neatly?" she tut-tutted when I signed a copy of my new book for her. "Your signature is so big and messy," she said. " So loud."

"Yes, Mum," I replied. "I'll try my best."

Sarah Hampson's book on midlife post-divorce, Happily Ever After Marriage: There's Nothing Like Divorce to Clear the Mind, is in bookstores now.

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