Dancing at a Funeral
Divorce is sometimes necessary, always a tragedy.
The video begins in a living room. Frankie Muniz, the Malcolm in the Middle star who is now a NASCAR driver, is recorded dancing with his wife Paige to We the Kings’ “Check Yes Juliet.” The caption on the screen says, “Who says you can’t stay friends with your baby momma?” For those tempted to think this is an anniversary post or some heartfelt expression of love and devotion, you’d be wrong. This video was the way the Muniz family chose to announce to the world that they were ending their marriage after ten years together.
But the video gets worse. Their five-year-old son, Mauz, runs into the frame, and, excited like all five-year-olds at a dance party, he begins bouncing up and down between them. If you forget about the context for a second, it’s such a sweet video, one that all of us can relate to: the moment when playful dancing, tickling, or wrestling with your spouse draws a child sprinting across the house to join in the fun. After all, children don’t experience their parents’ love and playfulness and flirtations with each other as some sort of competition for their love. In a strange, unexplainable way, when children see their mother and father acting this way, they actually receive love; the love between them is also something that belongs to them, the child. And they know instinctively that their place is to be right in the middle of it all. Mauz saw his mother and father enjoying each other in this way and jumped right in. Sadly, he had no way of knowing the video was intended to announce the death of his own family.
The internet backlash came hard and fast. Muniz was forced to delete the announcement, and instead replaced it with a happy-looking picture and a more conventional, culturally acceptable statement:
“Following a period of separation that we kept private, Paige and I have decided to move forward with ending our marriage. After 10 beautiful years together, we’ve grown in ways that made us realize our relationship feels most natural and strong as a deep friendship and as co-parents. We share an incredible son who remains the center of our world, and we’re both happier, stronger parents because of the love and growth we’ve shared.” He then promised to keep “building Muniz Racing together” and closed on a high note: “We’re closing one chapter with gratitude and opening the next with bright futures ahead, for us as individuals and especially for our son.”
Now, I (Josh) want to tread carefully here, because as a child of divorce myself, I know on the one hand how fortunate that child is to have parents who seem to be handling this amicably. I know that divorce is sometimes necessary; in cases where there is abuse, addiction, adultery, or abandonment, ending a marriage can be justified, and in some cases an act that protects a child. But it should never be lost on us that even under those extenuating circumstances, every child caught in the middle of that dissolution, however warranted, will carry the scars.
Frankie said after the backlash that “we grieved our divorce beyond anything you can imagine.” I think that’s a normal and even good reaction to such a big, traumatic event. But that isn’t the message of the original video. The initial attempt to spin or even celebrate your way into framing the decision to divorce as something good, especially while reaffirming how prioritized the child would be, received the pushback it deserved. Nobody films a dance number for a funeral, and there is a reason for that.
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Watch that video again from the child’s side of the equation.
He walks in on the two people he loves beyond belief, bonded to them in ways he couldn’t express if he tried. He sees them delighting in each other. His body reads that as safety and stability. He runs to get in the middle of them because he believes he’s joining a moment of love, recreating the perfect triad, a fusion of those two people. He finds himself in harmony at the rightful place, the center of all of it. And yet all viewers know that in reality he is being deceived. He is a piece of Instagram content, a prop in a PR production.
What infuriated people was not the adults’ decision to get a divorce; many probably disagreed with it, but that is hardly newsworthy in this day and age. It was the propaganda: enlisting the child in a fictitious depiction of how happy their new family units would be, how willing and excited he looked to be in the middle of it all. The commercial was selling the idea that after the divorce they would remain one happy family, that he would be happy, that everyone could stay happy. And there he is at the center of it, an unwitting participant, blissfully unaware of the pain that awaits him from the very decision he is celebrating with dance moves.
Return for a second to their original statement’s claim that their son “remains the center of our world.” That is a myth that needs to be dispelled, because it describes something that is no longer possible. The only way for a child to truly be the center of his parents’ world is for all of them to live in the same one. Divorce separates a child’s world into pieces, sometimes two, sometimes more. I know because I’ve lived in them. There is dad’s family, there is mom’s family, there is the shared third space the siblings carve out between the two, and then there is the lonely fourth space a child occupies by himself when none of the others quite fit. You may be important in every one of those worlds, but the existence of them all makes you the center of none. There is no way for two people to divorce without requiring their child to make sacrifices on behalf of adults. There is no way to create separate worlds without destroying theirs. You may say he is the priority, but your decisions still hand him the bill.
The research is blunt about what those sacrifices cost. An NBER research paper released last year linked tax and Census records for more than five million American children and found that experiencing parental divorce at an early age raises a child’s risk of teen birth by roughly 60 percent, his risk of incarceration by nearly 40 percent, and his risk of early death by roughly 45 percent, while cutting his adult earnings by 9 to 13 percent and lowering his odds of attending college.
The standard reply is that unhappy parents make unhappy kids, so the split ultimately serves everyone. The data resists that too. A University of Chicago-led team found that two-thirds of unhappily married adults who stuck it out and stayed married described their marriages as happy five years later, while those who divorced were on average no happier than those who endured.
But here is the bright spot: it was not too long ago that the culture was silent on divorce, especially high-profile ones. “Conscious uncoupling” might ring a bell. This time, the comments were filled with people telling a Hollywood star to fight for his marriage, to not exploit his child to manipulate his audience, and to stop putting a positive spin on the death of his family. The pushback grew loud enough that he had to take the video down. Something is shifting, and it’s shifting towards children.
That brings me back to the boy in the frame. Someday Mauz will be old enough to find that clip and understand what he was dancing to, and the cheerful question about staying friends with your baby momma will not be the line that comforts him.
Divorce is sometimes necessary.
It is never a celebration.
And it is always a tragedy, especially for the kids.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Currently, I serve as the Executive Director of Them Before Us, advocating globally for the rights and well-being of children.
I am also the co-founder of All The Good, a leadership organization helping non-profits do all the good they are called to do.
I studied Cross-Cultural Ministry and Humanitarian and Disaster Leadership at Messiah and Wheaton. I read a lot and sleep less than I probably should.
My wife and I live in Charlotte, North Carolina, with our 4 kids.
If they get along so well, what in the world could have happened?!
I am 74 years old and my parents divorced, when obviously it was very much less common. When my father told my brother and I that he was leaving, he gave me his wedding ring. My mother then got hers and gave it to me. What do you do with your parents' wedding rings? I eventually sold them, after my father lost all the money that made it possible for him to leave and for my mother to receive such a large settlement that she never had to work. The symbols of their marriage brought about $161, if I remember correctly and I gave that money to my destitute father. I hate divorce.