THE KIDS ARE ALRIGHT
Family breakdowns are never easy, least of all on the kids. But how are you supposed to feel about becoming the child of divorced parents when you’re old enough to have a family of your own? And where exactly are you going to spend Christmas this year? Me
“DIVORCE CAN BE AS TRAUMATIC FOR YOU AS ANY EIGHT-YEAR-OLD... AND YOU WON’T EVEN GET A TRIP TO DISNEYLAND OUT OF IT”
At school, do you remember there were the “regular” kids whose parents were together, and then there were the children from “broken homes”. Their reality, of stepmothers and half-siblings, alternate Christmases and shuttling back and forth between houses, took up exactly no space in the imaginations of those of who took a tight, nuclear family for granted. And continued to do so into adulthood. “By the time you’re an adult, you’ve already got a fairly solid story around what your family is, and you have constructed your identity around being part of an intact family,” says Jennifer Douglas of Relationships Australia.
So what if, after 30 or so years, your parents announce that they’re done, divorcing, it’s over and you find yourself, suddenly, belatedly shunted into the other camp. You’re not a kid. You’re an adult child of divorce (or ACOD, as they’re becoming known) and no matter how emotionally self-sufficient you are, no matter if you have an amazing career and a solid relationship and have stopped taking your wool-wash home to Mum, what comes next can be as traumatic for you as any eight-year-old made to choose which parent to live with. “When a new piece of information comes to light that challenges your adult story and forces you to revise, the psychological impact can be huge,” says Douglas. “Something you thought was enduring turns out not to be.” And you’re not even going to get a trip to Disneyland out of it.
Because for all the information, the studies, the support available for young children going through their parents’ divorce, there are few resources available to adults in the same position, and no real understanding of how it impacts their mental and emotional wellbeing. Yet, based on Australian statistics, it’s an experience many of us will face in our twenties and thirties as an increasing number of baby-boomer parents decide that till-death-dous-part is too big of an ask. While the overall divorce rate is falling in Australia, the average age of divorcing couples is on the up and the rate of marriage breakdown is soaring among the overfifties. And new standards of longevity mean that a 25-year marriage may only be halfway done.
If parenting duties were glue enough for a while, society has evolved so much in its understanding of what wedlock is for that there’s little stigma attached to ending a relationship that was only holding itself together “for the children”. “Marriage used to be understood as the functional structure for raising children, or an economic unit,” Douglas says. “But expectations have changed – people are squarely putting their individual psychological, romantic and even sexual needs first.”
After we take a second to acknowledge that no matter how mature we are, all of a sudden having to see your parents as sexual beings remains truly chunderous, consider the broader possible fallout of your parents’ late-in-life split. The house you grew up in goes on the market, and with it goes your sense of where home is. “It’s hard, no matter your age, to have to change your idea of home,” says psychologist Dr Samantha Clarke. “Even when you’re older, that you can’t come home anymore brings a huge sense of grief and loss.” (And in real terms, may mean your inheritance just got divvied up for two flats.)
While you’re a financially self-sufficient and independently capable gen Xer/millennial, your mother who married at 19 and never worked again after having children may not know how to Bpay her own gas bill. “Practical support tends to be a burden that falls to daughters more than sons – the taking responsibility for parents on a practical and emotional level,” says Clarke. It’s a role reversal – the child parenting the parent – that’s likely to become entrenched, as the parental parties struggle with their own sadness, shock and newly single status and children feel obligated to provide
“TO SEE YOUR PARENTS AS FALLIBLE BEINGS, PRONE TO ERROR AND NOT HAVING A PERFECT RELATIONSHIP, CAN LEAD US TO BECOME RESENTFUL AND WITHDRAW”
emotional support. Think how guilty you would feel being out on a Saturday night knowing that your dad is sitting alone in his scantily furnished studio struggling to access “The Netflix”.
Even when we’re grown up, says psychologist Danielle Maloney, “the child is always the child in one sense, but divorce can force you into a parenting role and you become enmeshed and overly involved”. And, she adds, if previously you deified your parents, “to see them suddenly as fallible beings, prone to error and not having a perfect relationship, it can lead us to become resentful and withdraw”. All the more so if your parents are coming down on the wrong side of TMI, badmouthing each other, forcing you to take sides, admitting to infidelity or needing to workshop the reasons for the breakdown during thrice-daily phone calls (“Mum, I’m sort of at work...”).
There’s also a distinct likelihood that if your parents did stay together for your benefit, but exposed you to years of domestic conflict, when they finally decide to separate you’ll be more angry than grateful – why didn’t they just do it and save everyone the agony? According to a study by British law firm Resolution, 82 per cent of people aged between 14 and 22 who have endured family break-ups didn’t want warring parents to stay together. Resolution head Jo Edwards concluded that “despite the common myth that it’s better to stay together for the sake of the kids, most children would rather their parents divorce than remain in an unhappy relationship”.
Conflict between siblings is also likely to occur after a split, Clarke says, “depending on where you are in the family, which parent you’re closest to, how much your siblings’ family narrative differs from yours and whether the burden of care falls particularly on one child”. Who said children are raised in the same house, and different worlds?
Meanwhile, rapid re-partnering is a riot for everyone, especially if infidelity had a role in the break-up. Or the new partner is, say, a family friend. Or Dad’s now dating someone called Jeff. Expect, at that point, to start reassessing your own relationship, or even your concept of the marriage ideal.
And then beneath it all there’s your hard, cold grief that you may not even feel entitled to feel – since you’re an adult after all. “I absolutely did not see it coming,” says Monique, a 27-year-old online editor whose parents divorced in 2014. “I was under the assumption that everything was fine with my parents, apart from the occasional blow-up that happens in every relationship. We had always been this tight little nuclear family, and there was nothing at all that pointed to breakdown, except that the house was suddenly on the market.” When her mother arrived unexpectedly at Monique’s work and, sitting together in the car, announced her 25-year marriage was over, “I was so shocked and it’s taken me a long while to come to terms with it.”
As the process of a separation began, “I became the middleman, which was pretty taxing,” Monique says. “They were trying to sort out what was happening, but they couldn’t even talk to each other. I hated having to be in the middle, but because my brother was overseas, it fell to me to be the go-between.”
“ADVERSITY COMES WITH AN OPPORTUNITY FOR GROWTH. BEING MADE TO LOOK AT THE IDEAL VERSUS THE REALITY COMPELS YOU INTO A FULLER STAGE OF ADULTHOOD”
Monique’s personal grief compelled her to try to understand why her parents had chosen to part. “I asked a lot of questions. I felt I needed to know exactly what happened so I could put myself in their shoes and think, ‘Maybe I wouldn’t have tried to fix it either.’” Now, after three years and one supremely awkward graduation – “my mum was on one side and my dad was on the other and I didn’t know who to say ‘Hi’ to first” – the family is on mostly good terms, aided by Monique’s eventual decision to step back from her parents’ conflict and “let them sort things out for themselves”. In the end, she says, “I definitely have respect for them. They probably did it the best way it could be done.”
If that’s best-case scenario, it’s not the only scenario. For 25-year-old PHD student Sophie*, her parents’ recent separation remains messy and painful, coming off the back of her mother’s affair. There was never a chance of reconciliation and, as the eldest of five, Sophie automatically stepped in to care for her “distraught” father. “Growing up I was always closer to my dad,” she says. “He’s not a really emotional guy but he was a mess, losing all this weight, so I felt like I had to make sure he was eating. My mum was angry at me because I wasn’t supporting her as much as I should have but it was more natural to support Dad, given the nature of their split. I was torn in the sense that, the angrier she got, the more it pushed me away.”
Especially painful was the revelation, on her mother’s part, that the 23-year marriage was only ever, for her, one of convenience. “She was already pregnant with me before they got married and couldn’t face being a single mother basically,” says Sophie. “For my dad, I think it was love, but she just needed to not be alone.”
At the same time as her parents’ separation, Sophie’s own relationship ended, in part, she believes, because her partner was so personally affected by the split. “He started to worry there were parallels in our situation, and it just freaked him out, even more than me.”
Four months after the split, at Easter this year – the first that didn’t involve a family lunch – Sophie gave in to her own grief. “Everyone went their separate ways, and I ended up by myself for most of it and I think that’s when I started processing it. I took four solid days just being sad and angry.”
Organically, Sophie had found her way to what experts consider the first step in recovery. “The quicker you can acknowledge the feelings, the quicker you can move through them,” Clarke explains. “It’s so important to be able to acknowledge that such a huge loss and huge change is happening.”
And that, this year at least, Christmas is going to be pretty shitty – but not every year hereafter. “It isn’t hopeless,” says Douglas. “Inevitably, there is adjustment, as with all loss. But adversity always comes with an opportunity for growth. Being made to look at the ideal versus the reality often compels you into a fuller stage of adulthood.”
“Understanding that it’s actually incredibly common, that it happens more than we think, does really helps me,” Monique says. “Now I feel like my parents can both get on with their lives and be happy, which, for me, was a realisation of, ‘Oh... okay, this is it then.’”