July 25, 2005

Tales From The Crib

After the divorce ...

Jennifer Margulis

My husband’s parents divorced when he was 3. Mine split up when I was 10. When my daughter’s teacher helped the kindergarteners write five-line biographies about themselves, one little boy wrote at the bottom of his page: “My daddy doesn’t live with us anymore, and I want to go to his house.”

The first time I came to volunteer in class at Lincoln, a tow-headed 6-year-old with a sweet smile showed me his drawing of a speckled doggy. “Do you have a dog at your house?” I asked him. “Well,” he looked thoughtful, “I used to. But I got divorced from my mom and dad…” Another little girl who was making a drawing of a princess volunteered matter-of-factly, “My parents were fighting since before I was born, and they still are now!”

More than half the families at Hesperus’s school were already split. And my daughter was only 5 years old.

Sadly, this is right in keeping with national statistics: According to the American Association of Marriage and Family Therapy, approximately 40 to 60 percent of first marriages will end in divorce. The majority of these divorces are in families with children under 18.

I know from my own experience that even a “good” divorce is hard. My father and mother sat us down on the couch and told us they had “grown apart” and were divorcing. My older brother started to cry. I remember feeling proud that I didn’t. I had no real idea what “divorcing” meant so I had no reason to cry. The tears came later.

“The marriage isn’t over when the divorce papers are signed,” says Suzy Yehl Marta, founder and president of RAINBOWS, a nonprofit organization that helps grieving children. When I received a review copy of Marta’s book, “Healing the Hurt, Restoring the Hope” (Rodale), I was taken aback. I was married and intended to stay that way. Why would I possibly read a book about children hurt by death or divorce? But I read the first page and couldn’t put it down. The book is written with so much wisdom and so much heart that it teaches parents about talking to children about anything — not just divorce.

In a phone interview, Marta told me that parents often mistakenly try to negate the marriage that produced their children. There will be many times in a child’s life that parents will need to talk about the divorce. “When the child is older, they are going to want to revisit it at every one of their maturing benchmarks,” Marta said.

Marta should know. She married her childhood sweetheart, had three sons, and watched her husband succumb to alcoholism while she herself became more and more of an enabler. When her grown son was in the Peace Corps and got gravely injured and Marta found herself leaning over her child in the hospital with her new husband (who was also divorced with three children) and her ex-husband at her side, she realized even more strongly that when you have children with someone your connection to that person, however tenuous and fraught, does not end when you divorce.

“If you are a parent and you divorced, it kills you to know you caused your child pain,” she said. “…[But] I still believe that if the marriage is abusive, emotionally unhealthy or stressful, it is better to get divorced. If you have really worked on the marriage and it can’t be resolved in a healthy environment for the children, it is better to get divorced. Kids watch. Their first language is nonverbal. They are watching what parents are doing.”

But instead of pretending you were never married and trying to put the relationship behind you, Marta recommends that parents help their children remember the good family times before the divorce. “I think that divorced adults need to look ahead — what is the memory you want your child to have growing up? Do you want it to be bitter? Do you want the child to be living in the acrimony that you have set up?”

However difficult your marriage, it was that relationship that gave you your children. As Marta puts it: “That relationship that brought them in the world is the beginning of your child’s history, don’t destroy it.”

Marta’s own sons are now in their mid to late 30s, married, and with children of their own.

“I have to tell you,” she said, “my adult children, we still have conversations about the divorce.”

Jennifer Margulis is the editor and co-author of “Toddler” (Seal Press). Her new book, “Why Babies Do That,” is available for pre-order on Amazon.com and will be in bookstores this fall.