Are the Kids Alright?
Giving Our Kids a Voice
It was so refreshing to see this recent New York Times Modern Love column, written by a 15-year-old girl about her parents’ divorce. When we talk about the effect divorce has on children, we often see stats, or hear expert opinions from leading psychologists. All of these are relevant and important, but it is rare to actually see or hear the voices and perspectives of the kids themselves: What are they dealing with? What does it feel like? What do they need?
My own parents divorced when I was 18. I had just moved away from my (married) parents’ home to start college and figure out who I was, who I wanted to be, and what color my parachute really was.
Less than a month into my first semester at school, my father, who had recently started a job as the dean of a college which was about an hour away from me, uncharacteristically called one evening to ask if he could take me to dinner.
“Is everything ok?” I asked, tentatively. He assured me it was, he just wanted to see me and talk.
I think that was the last time I ever took anything at face value. Friends of mine often comment on my spidey sense — “you always know at the beginning of a murder mystery who did it — how?” Try having everything you thought you knew from birth to 18 change like the flip of a switch and turn out to be a lie, that’s how. (I don’t recommend it, but at least I got super human powers out of it.)
Anyway, that night my father took me to dinner and told me that not only were he and my mother getting a divorce, but that he was getting remarried to someone else. When I expressed surprise and upset, he said, “But don’t you want me to be happy?”
I was given a tad bit more than my fair share of things to deal with that year: in addition to my parents getting divorced, my grandfather died, my father got remarried, my brother got married, and my mom was diagnosed with cancer. Some days I still feel a bit of whiplash.
But, one thing at a time. Because I was 18 and had just gone off to school, when my parents got divorced I didn’t have a local support system I could lean on, because all of my friends were scattered all over the country in their first year of college, busy trying to figure out what color their parachutes were. While I did form some close friendships at school, I didn’t have a solid group of people who I could fall apart to, who would know this was just a thing I was going through, and that I wasn’t a basketcase. So, my instinct was to keep a lot of it to myself, and pretend I was fine (spoiler alert: I wasn’t). And because I was 18, many people just assumed that my parents’ divorce shouldn’t be a big deal for me.
But it was a struggle for me to figure out who I was in the wake of that and where I fit in. In the column referenced above, the author mentions the difficulty children of divorce feel in trying to regain their footing:
“This experience isn’t unique; many children don’t feel like they have a place within their families. In my case, I didn’t know if there was even an opportunity for me to have a place, because I didn’t understand how I fit in when it came to the shifting ground of my divorced family. There’s something about hearing your parents argue over who gets to take you on spring break that makes you feel like there’s no room in the conversation for your own anxieties.”
I think a lot of times people forget that kids, especially when they’re a bit older, are struggling to understand their place in the world based on their place in their family. We don’t look into their inner lives and see what’s really going on for them and how deeply they are affected. And this is not a plea to parents to not get divorced. I am divorced, and I fully believe that it is necessary in many situations, and that in reality it helps everyone in a family to not be in a toxic or uncommunicative environment.
But if you are a parent going through a divorce and you think your kids are fine because they’re not telling you otherwise, it’s possible they are struggling to understand their place, and would like to talk about what they are going through, but maybe they don’t want to tell you because they know you are going through a tough time. That was certainly my experience -- my mother had her own trials to face and I didn’t want to add anything to her burden, so I kept a lot of it in when it would have helped me heal sooner to be able to talk about my experience and deal with it as it was happening.
And of course it depends on the age of the child. Everything is different for children from age zero up to 18, up to adulthood. But of course it does affect our children, and they need to be given the opportunity to voice their experiences.
As a single mom now, I try very hard to figure out what my daughter is going through regarding her parents not being married, and to see things from her perspective. And, in a funny twist of fate, a lot of times she doesn’t want to talk to me about her feelings, so here we are full circle. But I do try to provide her with a forum to open up if she needs it, and to let her know it’s there for her whenever she does.
No matter what our circumstances, we each have the ability to build our own beautiful life given the right tools. I would love to hear from you about what that means to you, and how you find the beauty in every day.
Peace and love, my friends.
Paula