Yesterday I ran into an old friend at the grocery store who is also a single mother to a teen girl. After catching up for a few minutes, we exchanged teen daughter horror moments, the worst of which on my half consisted of chicken pox scars and the occasional bad attitude. She confided in me that she and her ex-husband had endured a lot of heartache with their daughter since the divorce, as she found rather quickly how to play her parents against each other to get her way.
When you have kids, a divorce can wreak havoc on their psyche. For years we all heard about how divorce affected children, many of them believing their parents split up because of something the child did. In a society where just thirty-years ago, divorce was taboo and people stayed together for the sake of the children–even if they were miserable, I can definitely see where this theory came from.
Telling my daughter that her father and I were getting a divorce was probably the hardest thing I ever had to tell her throughout the course of her life. When I sat down to talk to her, she was confused and shocked, as she never saw it coming. The dysfunction of our relationship as a couple had never really been something she was exposed to, so it was a big surprise. Scared, she asked what would happen to her? What would happen to the family atmosphere she had known all her life? Was it somehow her fault?
Once I assured her it was not her fault, we sat down and discussed the future. I let her know on the spot that just because her father and I weren’t going to be together anymore, she still had two parents.
A couple of months after we separated, she tested the waters to find out how true that was. Would her father and I band together as a parental unit if she acted out? You better believe it! Even as we had our differences, we still had one piece of common ground between us: her. There would be no playing us against each other, or trying to use our separation as a weapon against us. I think that shocked her a little bit, but it was a good shock. It let her know that she wasn’t alone in the world, no matter how she felt after her family fell apart.
Getting a divorce is never easy on the kids. It shatters their whole universal ideal, and some kids never recover from it. I worried at first that my child would be one of those kids, but as weeks turn into months, and months into years, she grows into her own person. The fact that her father and I don’t draw swords every time we see each other, facing off in epic duels, is probably one of the smartest things we ever did as parents. It shows that we still respect each other, and because of that she hasn’t lost respect for us either.
Relationships fall apart for a number of reasons, but showing your kids that they are still part of a family is important for holding them as people together.
Photo via New Way Law
