Ok, I'm Elaine shoving Jerry: Get OUT! 

Did you know that? I sure as hell did not. If I had heard this (or been informed of the other numerous risks) before my husband and I got a divorce, you can bet your sweet litigation papers we would've paused at the flashing yellow light and looked both ways. We might have even rolled to a complete stop. Put the car in freaking reverse.

And, if that weren't enough to give you Voldemort-worthy chills, did you know that, "It is well documented that children are at significantly higher risk of abuse after their parent's divorce."? This from Elizabeth Marquardt's Between Two Worlds: The Inner lives of Children of Divorce. She writes, "More than seventy reputable studies document that an astonishing number—anywhere from one-third to one-half—of girls with divorced parents report having been molested or sexually abused as children, most often by their mother's boyfriends or stepfathers. A separate review of forty-two studies found that ‘the majority of children who were sexually abused...appeared to come from single-parent or reconstituted families.' Two leading researchers in the field conclude, ‘Living with a stepparent has turned out to be the most powerful predictor of severe child abuse yet.'"

One-third to one-half of girls from divorced parents report sexual abuse? This is a huge number. It's the kind of number that you just want to ignore because it's terrifying in the same way rape is terrifying. It shuts us down. It's numbing. And it begs the worrying question: Just how many girls out there don't report it? (I didn't)

Even as one of those girls myself...when I divorced years later, I had no idea of this risk for my brood, or the baby bunny rabbits of the other families involved, all of which are girls. I didn't know it was a universal, predictable post-divorce experience. No one talks about that.

Did you know about it when you divorced? Would it have given you pause?

Heck, most of us muggles are—like my husband and I were—either totally unaware of, or barely starting to glimpse the ruins of this heretofore invisible battlefield. Even if we grew up in divorced families ourselves, like I did. We were, we are, uninformed. And, in some cases, willfully so.

Why?

For starters, there's only been a generation, give or take, so severely rife with ruined unions. Where our grandparents were the Greatest Generation, the Baby Boomers—the parents of my Gen-X cohort—could be called the Greatest Divorced Generation. They're the ones on whom the "half of all marriages end in divorce" statistics are based. For that generation it was like a nuptial mass exodus—lemmings to a cliff.

I grew up in an era when nearly half of my cohort survived the rupture into split homes; learning to subsist in two different worlds. We didn't know to question it, to ask whether this might not be such a good thing. And because it was so accepted and understood as a part of life, us kids couldn't really talk about it—or even orient to it as an ordeal, let alone as a trauma. Yet now, in hindsight, the term "Baby Boomer" takes on a whole new meaning when seen through the lens of what science has shown us of the impacts of divorce on children.

(If you want a riveting expose' of the mechanics undergirding this sweeping experience of the Gen-X-ers, read the devastating new memoir, In Spite of Everything by Susan Gregory Thomas, in which she documents the evisceration of her own marriage. Having survived her parents' divorce as a child, she grew up compelled to avoid the same for her own children. Yet, in spite of everything, she ended up divorced.)

But to be fair, we muggles honestly didn't really realize what was happening during the last 40-ish years as marriage upon marriage toppled like pawns under the militant advance of an army consisting of the following brigades:

• The 50-state onslaught of no-fault divorce, a legal change that can unilaterally shrivel decades-long unions in a matter of days;
• Shifting and unrealistic cultural beliefs about what marriage is supposed to be, heralded by the siren call of Hollywood's sparkly, half-truth-riddled "happily ever after" myth;
• Unexamined and hostile reactions to affairs and infidelity that make sport team rivalry look like nursery school incidents with unruly puppies (and that make it all but impossible to be honest—with ourselves or our spouses—about our human needs for sexuality);
• A profound erosion of community support along with the related attrition of simple intimacy and communication skills;
• And, most disturbing, the Dementor's kiss—the skewed and dangerous reimagining of the good-old-American notion of "the pursuit of happiness." Individual happiness that supersedes the security and safety of family and loved ones is not as American as apple pie. But we have come to tell ourselves that, in fact, it is. This expectation of individual happiness has locked arms in pursuit of the so-called American Dream, and driven expectations for marriage to a rarified and nearly unachievable pinnacle of impossibility. The Dream has become The American Nightmare. And it may help explain everything from those lemming-leaping divorce rates, to unhappy marriages, to skyrocketing increases in depression and the general level of unhappiness and malaise of ourselves and country-mates.

Like carbon monoxide—the invisible killer—the dark spell of our divorce culture has wafted across our nation in an imperceptible quick-step; hustling in the battalions while we try to behave as if everything is normal. We go to work driving alone, take the kids to soccer practice, try to deal with the bewildering news of the world, come home, driving alone, fail to avoid another late-night-fight about who was supposed to do the dishes and who was supposed to read the bedtime story, laugh with a discomforting grimace about the hypnotic allure of Eat, Pray, Love (the epitome, by the way, of the Dementor's kiss I mentioned above), scramble to maintain the finances, deal with the ex and the damn custody schedule and the child-support payments, change the oil in the car, get the trash out, send the project in, late, again, and now do you seriously want me to tackle climate change, war, and the vanishing of the freaking bees?

Then, once in a very blue moon, we come up for air with a whimsical glass of wine (or whiskey) in hand and wonder, What the hell has my life come to? Is this really all there is?

Are we living like the Dursley's?