The Un-Wedding

By Babette Cole

Demetrius and Paula Ogglebutt have perfect lives, except for one little detail: their parents can't stand each other.  Their mother and father can't agree about anything!  "Mum disliked Dad's crazy aunts in the west wing.  Mum hated Dad's musical friends.  Dad could not bear Mum's cooking, nor her insect-eating plants that chewed up his bees! Mum would not tolerate Dad keeping fish in the bath, nor his cows living in the house."  I think you get the picture.  It turns out that the longer Mr. and Mrs. Ogglebutt lived together, the more they disliked each other.  And because they constantly have ugly thoughts about each other, they themselves become uglier and uglier.  Soon, the parents are playing all sorts of nasty tricks on one another.  Demetrius and Paula don't know what to do!  So they post a sign at school to see if anyone else had problem parents.  Many, many children show up, and they agree that it wasn't their fault that their parents didn't get along.  But what could they do about it?

Soon, Paula has a brilliant idea.  The two of them go to work planning an un-wedding.  They send out un-wedding invitations and order an un-wedding cake.  The parents have their un-wedding and go their separate ways on their un-honeymoons.  They build two seperate houses, and they learn that they can live happily ever after - apart.

This book is controversial because of it's un-wedding (read: divorce) theme, which is somewhat understandable.  But when you live in a society where the divorce rate reaches 50%, it becomes pretty clear that it is probably something that a lot of kids would like to talk about in the classroom.  And I think this book does a really good job of showing the "good side" of divorce.  Not that divorce is ever part of the "plan" or the ideal outcome of a marriage, but clearly in this case the mother and father were very unhappy living together.  They became much happier once they had their own houses and could live the way they wanted.  And I think that another important message to send to kids is that it's not their fault.  Paula and Demetrius and all of the children in the meeting agree that it had nothing to do with them.

Divorce happens, whether we like to admit it or not.  But acting like the problem isn't there isn't going to make it go away.  In my opinion, it is much wiser to bring the issue into the open for everyone to discuss.  As educators we must teach our students about all aspects of life - not just spelling and mathematics and geography.  It's more than likely that you will have several children with divorced parents in your classroom every year, and it will probably make them feel much more comfortable and accepted if they know that you're willing to talk about it, instead of ignoring the issue.