Primal Loss: The Now-Adult Children of Divorce Speak

by Leila Miller

The kids have absorbed the message that people sometimes leave each other or get kicked out.

Each parent is half of who the child is. When the parents reject each other, they are rejecting half of the child. They may tell the child, “We still love you; we just don’t love each other.” The child cannot make sense of this impossible contradiction. In my opinion, this is the underlying reason for the well-documented psychological, physiological, and spiritual risks that children of divorce face.

The worldview of people of faith is this: Every child has identity rights and relational rights with respect to their parents. When children are deprived of these rights without an inescapable reason, this is an injustice to the child. And these rights impose legitimate obligations on adults to provide these things to children.

The competing worldview is this: Every adult has a right to the sexual activity they want, with a minimum of inconvenience, and children must accept whatever the adults choose to give them.

Divorce is rooted in the sin of at least one adult, and as such is an injustice against children—who have a primal right to an intact home, safe with Mom and Dad.

The broken family is a reminder that a parent had a choice. The child doesn't have a choice, though, and this is a perpetual source of confusion, pain, and complication where peace, joy, love, and simplicity should have been the norm.

In a nutshell, I have a hard time trusting in unconditional love from anyone: parents, husband, children, God. I feel like I can easily lose someone's love by messing up or having a personality flaw.

When parents start up new relationships with new people, it offers a large amount of unsupervised time for the children of divorce. It creates an environment where the children are no longer prioritized, but the new romance is. No one much cares for the children of divorce who are left behind; the new guy or gal coming in wants the undivided attention of his or her new lover, and children are often "in the way" and treated as such—if not directly, then indirectly.

More than a worldview, I consider it an addiction always to be fantasizing about starting a new life.

I believe it instilled a fear of abandonment in me with regard to all of my relationships.

The happiness of the current romantic couple always trumps the happiness of the child. Always.

So, even if you are an adult when the divorce happens, you still have angst every time there is a baptism, wedding, holiday, funeral, etc., and you worry about coordinating around each parent.

There is also a lack of shared memories. My mom doesn’t often go down memory lane. We don’t reminisce about “that one Christmas when someone hit our mailbox and your father grabbed my Japanese kimono and ran out into the street—he thought it was his robe.”

I just feel very passionately that divorce is a selfish move. It is putting yourself above everyone and everything. It is about what you want and it doesn’t even matter how it affects everyone else.

I grew very angry at my mother in particular. How could her happiness be more important than the long-term wellbeing of my brother and me?

The most damaging pain to a child is watching your parents find love with another mate other than your parent.

They each rejected half of me, and this goes on forever.

And as horrible as the fights were, the separation is worse. I miss my family being whole. I miss spending holidays together, as trivial as that may seem.

We may have succeeded in limiting the damage, but the damage is there.

I’ll always remember the words of the priest during the homily of our wedding Mass when he pointed to the crucifix and said, “That is your job, and if you aren’t ready for it, then we shouldn’t be having this wedding.” My wife and kids deserve nothing less.

Divorce is simply a bloodless form of child sacrifice, nothing more, nothing less.

My parents’ generation inverted that. They decided that it was better a child should have her world torn apart than an adult should bear any suffering.

Children survive abuse, poverty, starvation. That doesn't mean we should purposely inflict such things on them.

Maybe you think that parents being happy will make their kids happy, but when divorce occurs, someone does the leaving. It is not usually a congenial mutual decision. My mother cried her eyes out and fell apart when my father left her.

Too often it seems to be the case that parents divorce for the sake of their own happiness, and somehow they believe that their happiness will transfer to their children.

Divorce impacts every holiday, every milestone in life, every accomplishment and failure.

Even with the "best" divorces like mine, a seven-year-old should never be in a position to somehow take the responsibility of her parents' emotions. She should never have to think about which parent gets to hear or see something from her first, for fear of hurting the other parent’s feelings.

I think they are right about all those things, but just because kids are resilient doesn't mean they should have to suffer the pain of divorce. Children can overcome many difficult situations, even the effects of physical abuse, but does that mean we should not try to protect them from harm?

My existence is proof of the sacrament you undertook.

It basically boils down to this: We want to keep our parents happy so they don’t leave us, too, like they left each other; whether the split was easy or hard doesn’t matter. [55]

Divorce says that love is conditional.

had great anxiety as a child athlete in a divorced family with stepparents. For example, I once had a stepparent ask me why I would hug my mom first after a game before hugging anyone else. So the anxious self-questioning begins: Who should I hug first? Will the other parents be offended? Who should I go sit with? Should I ride home with this set of parents or would that upset the other parents?

Protestantism almost mimics the culture of divorce, because when there is a disagreement within Protestantism, quite often there is a subsequent "divorce,” and one denomination or church splits off from another.

Don't be fooled by empty promises of fulfillment and chasing your dreams at the expense of others, or eventually you will find yourself estranged, alone, and full of regret.

To parents considering divorce: Why do children have to adjust everything about their lives just because you two can't get along? Why don't you adjust your lives instead, so that the children stay put in the same home, and one parent at a time lives in the children's home? Let the parents move back and forth between two homes, not the kids.

“The person who does not decide to love forever will find it very difficult to really love for even one day.”