Divorce Won’t Traumatize the Kids
The marriage will.
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If your parents got divorced past your adolescence, there is a decent chance that the marriage was more traumatic than the divorce. Sure, post-divorce parent meetings and visitations and conveyance of messages were awkward as all hell, but there was far less shouting and crying and guilt and the occasional plate being thrown.
Now, I’m not married, divorced or a parent, but I can imagine that divorce is not a pleasant experience for a couple with children. I know that the financial and logistical repercussions of the separation left scars on both my mother and father. Whether or not it would have suited them best to continue slogging along in a relationship neither of them liked or were even neutral to, I am not equipped to say.
But what I’m certain of is that the divorce was the best thing they could have done for me.
The first time my parents announced that they were getting divorced, my brother and I instantly began crying. We were 8 and 6 and the only family structure we ever knew was going to end. My grandfather happened to be there, and he made his displeasure quite clear.
Divorce is such a sharp and callous word, too. It rhymes with force. And coarse. Shares a prefix with divide and dilapidated.
Divorce was a word that floated around our family, hiding in the shadows when we saw it in the corners of our eyes. Other kids would casually ask if my parents were divorced and I’d say, “Well, no... No, not really.” The marriage was a relative the age of Methuselah who just kept chugging along: so long we all seemed sure it was immortal. The death was shocking, but I mean, come on, how long did you think it was gonna last anyway?
But as it happened, this was a false alarm. The marriage limped on for another half-decade. Another five years of secrets, important and otherwise. Five more years of shitty communication: of screaming at the drop of a hat or walking out the door in the middle of a sentence. Five years more of grabbing my little brother and sitting behind the closed door of our bedroom, trapped there by another ill-phrased compliment or imprudent purchase or whatever it is adults fight about.
During that time, my grandfather passed away. He was the last grandparent I had, so there were no more parents to keep the marriage going for.
My mother began taking my brother and me on trips away from our dad. In response, my dad began spending days on end in his late father’s apartment. He wasn’t around, and when he was he was miserable. He regularly occupied the couch which made our secret-all-night-TV nights impossible.
Yet, it was my mother who felt the most alone. And I who seemed to have the bloodiest heart for it. I stuck around for the tears and told her what I thought she wanted to hear. Because she deserved to hear it. And whose responsibility was that if not mine?
I can’t decide whether every moderate who has ever preached bipartisanship was the product of a viciously broken home, or if their parents never so much as glared at each other. I have had my fair share of desperately shuffling around coins on the scales, trying to make them as even as possible: trying to evenly distribute the shittiness they possessed as a couple in such a way that their virtues are maximized. I’ve also ripped one of the scales off its chain and banged it mercilessly on the ground until it was folded in half.
I clung to allegiance and I balked at it. I cared too much and not at all. My heart was constantly tugged at and pushed away depending on how the cards well that day. And I learned that now I could never serve them both. So I’d have to serve myself.
The second time my parents announced that they were getting a divorce, I was completely unfazed. Because I had suggested it.
My parents wanted to stay together for me and my brother, but by the time I was 13, it was more than clear to me that my brother and I were not being served by this arrangement.
We used to sit in our bedroom when a fight was going on, our identical eyes adopting a sophisticated dialect of sibling-speak. At some point, our talk shifted from I’m scared to when are they gonna give it up, already?
So by the time I was old enough for my mother and I to be ‘wine moms’ together, I felt comfortable explicitly suggesting the divorce. She felt comfortable telling me her side of the story, making no gesture toward impartiality, which from the perspective of an adult I can mostly understand. She was in pain, and I was a ‘good’ kid who wanted to make her feel better. Suggesting she divorce my dad was something I said almost off-handedly, ‘Girl, leave him!’
As is normal, my dad was the parent who left the home. I missed him, but by that point, I was probably seeing more of him after he moved out than before. Who can blame him? Who wants to spend time in a house where your family talks about abandoning you, sending you away? When we visited him, we were in his home; we came to him because we wanted to see him.
I am not entirely sure if my brother feels traumatized by the divorce, nor would I feel it appropriate to write about it publicly if I was. But from my perspective, the divorce was the best part of my childhood. It made that conversation with other children of divorce easier too.
“Hey, are your parents divorced?”
“Hell yeah they are!”
“Ah me too! Divorce gang!”
As for my parents, I think it likely that the divorce left a scar. Not just the marriage, but the disaster of having a precarious home you tried to build demolished due to a rotting foundation. The rot took years to eat away at their happiness, but that wrecking ball was a fast and devastating shock to the senses.
I think the rest of my family is okay now, 13 years on. And yet, my own ‘okay-ness’ is completely unaffected by them. They are each responsible for their own happiness, now. And I am too.
