Here’s what she wrote in her email to me: “I’m interested in teenagers and how divorce affects them. Specifically when one parent (father in this case) divulges all information to the child and uses son as sounding board. Has created huge chasm in mother/son relationship.”
This particular situation is one that I can relate to as divorce was a constant threat in our home beginning in my early teens. My mother was extremely unhappy being married to my father, not because of anything he was doing that was particularly wrong in the relationship but because she wanted more from life than he was able to provide for her. She didn’t know how to divorce my father without ending up a single parent tied down even more by responsibility for her three children, a teen daughter and son and a preteen son. She wanted freedom and we represented the closed and locked door in the way of that freedom.
My parents struggled for years. They would argue, my mother would contact her lawyer to draw up the papers, and then they would make a fragile peace, most times “for the good of the children.” We kids knew we were the reason our mother and father stayed together and we begged them to divorce, but they preferred to stay locked in a battle in which no one was a winner. Years later, once we were all out of the house, they did divorce then eventually remarry and continue their love-hate relationship for another 25 years until my father died of cancer.
Probably because I was the oldest child, both of my parents sought my approval for their actions. As a teen facing all the usual teen emotions, I was placed in the uncomfortable role of confidant to each of them. It was a terrible situation for me as I loved them both and, if truth be known, I felt more empathy for my father than I did for my mother since he didn’t want the divorce and seemed to be doing everything he could to make my mother happy.
If I didn’t show the proper amount of anger or indignation when my mother gave her accounting of their troubles, she accused me of being on my father’s side. If I didn’t show the proper amount of anger for my mother’s actions when my father told his version of their troubles, he assumed I was taking her side. They both needed to confide in someone for moral support but their teenage daughter was not the appropriate choice to tell all the intimate details of their marital problems. Nor was it their teen daughter’s place to give either of them her approval for their actions.
Unfortunately, like most dependent children, I had no way to get out of the difficult spot they placed me in. And, each time they reconciled, the fact that I had been told so many unpleasant details of their private life made it impossible for us to return to a normal parent-child relationship.
My situation and the situation of my brothers was not an unusual one. How we each played our particular roles was not unique to our family. The fact that my brothers and I felt we were responsible for our parents’ unhappiness wasn’t unique to our situation, either. At the time, we didn’t realize that what was happening to us was happening in other families to other kids like us.
If we had known that our parents were behaving the same way some of our schoolmates’ parents were behaving, we might have felt less alone, less confused, less at fault. But, trouble at home is not something that most kids discuss with their friends.
Divorce is always going to be difficult on the children no matter what age they are. Their parents are splitting apart, emotions between their parents are bitter, and they may find themselves drawn into the middle of an emotional tug of war they never asked for and they are powerless to run away from as I was.
Some children believe they are the cause of the problems in the family. Perhaps they have misbehaved and this was the trigger that escalated into talk of divorce or even resulted in divorce. There may be absolutely no connection between the child’s actions and the divorce, but in the mind of a child the divorce may seem the direct result of their misbehavior. Sometimes parents will tell children they are the cause of the problems in the home which is something that happened in my own home.
No marriage goes from good to divorce overnight. It may take years for the abuse or alcoholism or adultery or the unhappiness of one spouse to cause the husband or wife to say “enough is enough” and call an end to the marriage. Children are not blind to the breakdown of a marriage and they may build their own coping skills to deal with the emotional pain they face as they watch their parents deal with their own issues.
Children are placed in a difficult position of having to choose between their parents, living with one, visiting the other. Divorce should remain between a man and a wife but the children get caught in the middle of child support issues, visitation fights, and custody battles. Divorce does not change parentage and it should not mean that a child’s love is withdrawn because one parent no longer lives at home. No matter what caused the marriage to come apart, children do not have an obligation to one parent to condemn the other parent.
It is understandable that a parent who has decided to end the marriage will want to justify the decision to his or her child and want that child to support the decision. It is also understandable that the left behind spouse wants their child to consider them to be blameless.
It is unreasonable to expect children to have the emotional maturity necessary to deal with the splitting apart of their home. Putting additional stress on the child to pick one parent over another is not looking out for the child’s best interests.