The Unhealed Wound: The Damage of Divorce to Children

Sitting in a clinic a few days ago, waiting to have routine blood samples drawn, I watched a brief drama play out on the other side of the room. Turning to a boy of about eleven next to him, a man said softly, “Now, son, it’s very important that you tell me how this new drug is working for you. Very important. Understand?” And with that, he kissed the boy atop his head.

“Yes, Dad,” the kid said, “I will.” His face flushed when he saw me smiling. Inside, my soul reacted with a mixture of warmth and envy. Warmth because the boy was being cared for so well. Envy because in all of my 62 years, nothing like that had ever happened to me.

I am a man-child of divorce.

I know how after your parents divorce, the numbing diseases of loneliness, uncertainty, and mistrust can seep into your marrow and take residence, remaining there to your grave. Watching that lad and his father, my soul also jumped with joy that this was a family that would be spared the torture of divorce.

You will find nothing in this article to comfort those who have divorced because they thought it was “best for the children.” There is nothing good to say about divorce. Those who divorce do great damage to themselves but more so to their children, who neither understand divorce nor know how to “adjust” and “bounce back.” Divorce is an unmitigated disaster, a social earthquake for children, affecting them mentally, spiritually, socially, and, except perhaps among the rich, financially for the rest of their lives. And its fault lines are spreading across U.S. society. The social fabric of our “Divorce Nation” has been as badly torn by marital splits as it was by the Vietnam War and segregation.

On January 30, Pope John Paul II, in a speech to the judges of the Roman Rota, declared that the divorce crisis spreads because, too often, family matters are seen through the prism of secular values, which are often twisted by the mass media. Modern men and women, he suggests, quickly reject faith as a mast in a marital storm, preferring popular culture’s messages. “Today’s mentality, highly secularized, tends to affirm the human values of the institution of the family,” he said, “by separating them from religious values and proclaiming [them] altogether autonomous from God. Fascinated by models of life proposed too often by the mass media, the question is asked, ‘Why must one always be faithful to one’s spouse?’ and this question becomes existential doubt in critical situations.” Coming from the parishes of Krakow where he lived intimately with his churches’ families and their troubles, John Paul II knows whereof he speaks.

In the latter half of the 20th century, millions of human atoms spun off by exploding families have produced a country where 46 percent of first marriages and 60 percent of second marriages end in divorce. It will only expand, like the ripples caused by a rock thrown into still water. The United States has the world’s highest divorce rate, and it is still climbing. Once a beacon of light to the downtrodden, we are now the model for disintegrating families.

Permanence in marriage is largely a thing of the past in America, making it at the same time a pearl of great price, worth far more than the glamour, luxury, and false freedom often sought by divorcing parents. Judith Wallerstein, who shocked America with her 2000 book, The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce, a detailed account of divorce’s debilitating effects on about 100 children studied over 25 years, says she was stunned by what she found. Perceptively, Wallerstein notes that children of divorce end up “feeling like second-class citizens compared with [their] friends in intact families.” That feeling doesn’t go away. Before she did the study, Wallerstein, a University of California–Berkeley social scientist, was naively sucked in by a culture run by parents, not children. And those parents want to be pardoned of any culpability for damaging their children. They want divorce laws fashioned by “assumptions congenial to adult wishes,” Wallerstein now says.

The extent of ignorance and denial about divorce is breathtaking. Library shelves are filled with books by authors in denial. Take the charmingly titled The Good Divorce, in which Constance Ahrons starts one chapter by writing, “If I hear ‘broken home’ one more time, I’ll scream,” quoting a colleague whose son was graduating from Harvard. Screaming is about all anyone has done about divorce, American-style.

Recently, Pope John Paul II had to remind Catholic clergy that divorced parents were still to be loved and welcomed by the Church—short of participating in some sacraments (if they remarried). But even the Church hasn’t recognized its special obligation to the innocent child-victims of divorce. Never have I heard a homily on divorce or a sermon aimed at the children of divorce. Never have I heard of any in-Church missions that target children of divorce, who need comfort, company, and friendship to rebuild their self-esteem. They could be found by the hundreds simply by posting notices in Church bulletins. The Church cares for gays, pregnant singles, poor mothers, new Latino immigrants, and all sorts of groups, but never have I seen any workshops or special services to attract children of divorce in from the cold. Anything associated with divorce seems to be taboo in the Church’s eyes.

Yet the “atomic children” spun out of divorce need to be helped and comforted as quickly as possible in ways their guilt-ridden parents usually cannot or will not approach. Through painstaking research and thousands of hours of interviews, Wallerstein found out what any of us refugees of the divorce wars could have told her in a single telephone call: “Divorce is a life-transforming experience for children!’

One highly regarded judge called Wallerstein in for an interview, then tried to convince her that there is a “divorce gene” that condemns marriage partners to split and that the legal profession isn’t responsible. That was the only piece of her book I found surprising: that even a top-caliber jurist couldn’t admit the devastating effects of divorce.

DNA has nothing to do with it, but Wallerstein’s book finds the surviving children’s wounds surprisingly similar: Children of divorce are less trusting, more aggressive, inclined to depression, more ready to accept failure easily, and confused about many things, including sex.

I second all those motions. More than 54 years after my parents divorced, it still stings, affecting me every day. Its effects run the gamut, from emotional to practical. Many of us try to teach ourselves to love and trust and to be friends because we weren’t taught much about those things by any parent. “Love” wasn’t a word bandied about in my house.

On a more practical level, the workings of cars, the proper way to wield saw and hammer, the nature of plumbing were—and still are, in many cases—mysteries to which no man had introduced me.

I have seven grandchildren now, and while their health and well-being concern me a great deal, my main interest is that their parents stay together, now and forever, for better or for worse. That’s because I know that no matter what bumps lie ahead for them on life’s often tortuous roads, the traveling will be easier for the kids if they come from an intact, two-parent family. Even if their parents sleep in separate beds or on separate floors, even if they frequently quarrel and seldom agree, it still qualifies as a family. And above all else, children need families, not necessarily perfect, five-star, seven-figure, Parents magazine, white-teeth families.

You will find no sympathy in this court for lawyer-blather or feminist-flapdoodle such as “irreconcilable differences.” Those sentiments I will leave to Nashville singers, feel-your-pain social scientists, and wealthy divorce attorneys. The songs—which seldom mention the damaged kids—and the social dons of the universities are dead wrong. It’s the children who need the comfort, not the parents.

Grownups—especially the egotists who seek divorce first and ask questions later—usually are too busy repairing their own torn lives to consider or to confess the psychological bruises they have inflicted on their offspring.

Divorcée Melinda Blau in her 1993 book, Families Apart, acknowledges the juvenile, “me first” emotions of parents dominant in postmodern divorce. She estimates that in about half of divorces, parents “can’t rise above their own adult agony to see their children’s pain.” And she admits, as well, that as many as half of all children of divorce grow up “angry and troubled; they suffer from a vague, abiding sadness that colors their moods and diminishes their self-esteem.” I believe her estimates are tremendously low.

To discomfited parents contemplating divorce, I can only draw on the message from the philosophy of another Nashville number: “I beg your pardon…. They never promised you a rose garden.”

Not only do I wish my parents never divorced, I’ll go a step further. If I had to live my life over knowing it would happen again, I wouldn’t.

My parents divorced in the early 1950s, placing me and my two sisters in the vanguard of the armies of children of divorce, who now make up 25 percent of those 46 and older in the United States. Not only did we have to live with divorce but also with the stigma of it in a nominally Roman Catholic family in the 1950s. Most people treated us as if we had three eyes. Adultery or criminal behavior were among the only grounds for divorce in those days.

But more than a decade later (1969), when the “Me Generation” demanded it, then–California governor Ronald Reagan signed the first no-fault divorce law, and the wildfire spread, burning down families across the country. (Significantly, Reagan himself had a nasty divorce from Jane Wyman under the old laws and probably was more than willing to scribble his signature.)

As a result, says Maggie Gallagher in her 1996 book, The Abolition of Marriage: How We Destroy Lasting Love, “from a formal, legal standpoint, marriage is no longer an enforceable commitment…. Marriage has been reconceived as a purely private act, not a social institution…. Thanks to no-fault divorce and the attitudes, norms, and policies that support it, getting married now more closely resembles taking a concubine than taking a wife.”

Once couples stayed married “for the sake of the children,” she says, but in the last 30 years they have come to divorce “for the sake of the children.” Parents conveniently assume that their children cannot be happy if they are unhappy, but never that they cannot be happy if their children are unhappy.

No surprise that America has the highest divorce rate in the world, 20 or 30 times greater than some countries. Another so-called “great American liberal social policy breakthrough” has caused a disastrous avalanche of social problems, and no amount of billions in government programs is going to clean that up.

Some of my earliest and most painful childhood, post-divorcee memories involve waiting.

My mother was forced into the working world. Lacking skills but not brains, she became a waitress. She figured she could score some hard cash in tips. A gregarious and vivacious woman, she worked at downtown restaurants and hotels and did well. For many years that meant leaving at the crack of dawn to work breakfast and lunch, then taking a brief respite at home, only to return to work later at a banquet or other private function. Though she was sturdily built, it was backbreaking work. Afternoons found her crashed on the living room sofa. She could spare little time for us. In order to talk to her, we often stayed awake until she arrived home from her night shift—usually after midnight. This wasn’t much of a substitute for parenting, but it was all we had. And it sent us to school the next morning groggy with sleeplessness.

We were all good students, subconsciously exerting the effort that would reap us the praise and reward from teachers that we lacked at home. Books became a lifelong retreat for me, each volume a friendly fortress that held off the hobgoblins of loneliness, cynicism, and mistrust for a few hours. To this day I remain a solitary soul, perfectly willing to spend happy hours in my own company. I grew accustomed to that as a child.

My father was little mentioned, though I knew my mother received frequent letters from him. Similarly, aunts, uncles, and grandparents didn’t bring it up. They must have thought they were protecting our delicate psyches, when actually the silent treatment piled on the damage. Similarly, when my mother started bringing home boyfriends and sleep-over suitors, the reality of who these people were was never addressed. Mother knew we hated them all—especially the one who disappeared with her purse—and seemed too ashamed to speak about them.

An air of unreality hovered over everything. None of us could figure out why we had been chosen for this disaster when all our friends had normal families. That feeling followed me when I left the house.

As years went by, my thoughts about my father evolved from wondering why he had left to hating him and, finally, to considering him a nonperson. He reappeared in my life only a few times. When I was off on my army stint, he took me to lunch one day and bought me a pair of high-priced officer’s dress shoes. About 15 years later, he called me from a bar near my office in Rochester, New York, asking if he could see his grandchildren. The years and alcohol hadn’t been kind to him.

When I saw him, I found I had no emotions about him either way. I just wanted him out of my life as soon as possible. I took him to see my kids, my wife fed him, and we had a brief and proper visit. That was the extent of our relations until a few years later, when I drove up to Watertown, New York, to collect his body. He died with $4, a Railroad Retirement ID card, and my telephone number in his wallet. He never said he was sorry; he had never used the phone number.

Emotional devastation finally caught up with my younger sister and me the night he died, and we succumbed to it with alcohol. It was becoming a habit with me by then; it would get a firmer grip as the years passed.

Damaged by divorce, kids aren’t sure what to do about the opposite sex—whether to love it or leave it. Wallerstein’s cohort of divorce flotsam avoided the altar: Only 26 percent married, though many had several relationships that led to nothing.

My response was the reverse. After the coldness of home, I wanted to get married and have a nice, warm family. Looking back at the years, I see that I was casting about for someone who would be loyal and trustworthy and would stick to a marriage. I found her in high school, dated her through college on and off, and married her while I was in the army. Kids followed quickly.

She came from a strong, hardworking family that seemed to laugh a lot together and at life, and I liked that. There wasn’t a lot of laughing at life at my house growing up; the smallest problem could become a great conundrum because we didn’t work together very well. Over our 41 years of marriage, my lack of marital “training,” so to speak, has caused severe strains in our family circle. Many times, divorce would have been the easy way out, but for some reason, neither of us took the fatal step. There are still many differences between us, but none seems irreconcilable. Some are simply forgotten. It happens, if you let enough time go by.

My wife comes from a family where there are several strong marriages, and perhaps she had people who could talk her through difficult landings. I had no one to advise me and often talked to bartenders or bottles about my “troubles.” I know now that a priest would have been a better option, because I use them now as sounding boards as well as confessors. As a result of a lot of praying to the Blessed Virgin Mary in the 1980s, the burden of drinking was, almost miraculously, lifted, and I have been sober for a long time. That’s helped my relations with friends and family, but the veil of my parents’ divorce still blurs my vision.

There is very little literature geared to the children of divorce. But Stephanie Staal’s 2000 book, The Love They Lost, is one of few by a child-survivor. She and I share the belief that all children of divorce change in some way; some more, some less. Her word-picture is effective: “Divorce plants a splinter in our minds, and in response, we assemble our identities around it. When we forge ahead in our own intimate relationships, the splinter twists, and we are often forced to… challenge the lessons learned from our parents’ breakup.”

Over the years, I consciously or subconsciously sought out surrogate fathers. I believe it is a commonplace reaction by male children of a divorce, who usually end up with the mother and lack male bonds. In the process, I found some delightful men who taught me how to write, how to play golf, how to get out of myself, how to enjoy others’ company, and, not least, how to pray. All were wonderful and great role models, but at the end of the day, they went home and so did I.

Nowadays on weekends, when I’m sipping a coffee at malls or rummaging through bookstores, I find myself watching the dads and sons go by, wondering if it’s a weekend custody visit or the real family thing. If they’re in a big hurry, I always suspect I am watching a split family trying to make up for lost time. In an era when the words “I feel your pain” have been cheapened, as so many emotions have been, I feel a genuine sympathy for these custody-wanderers, filling the hours until it’s time to go “home.” Especially for the kid. Maybe he’s getting “quality time:’ but he’s not getting quality love, and though he may go home with an armload of packages, he will feel emotionally short-changed.

Family love, of course, cannot operate on timelines. Some of the happiest families I know lead very slow lives, but they are lived together in peace. As Dickens pointed out, happy families are all the same; it is the unhappy ones that are different. And I can’t help wondering about the guilt-ridden father, especially if he is in a second marriage, that so-called triumph of hope over experience. If there are kids in the second marriage, where does he draw his lines of love? The emotional calculus of divorce is too complicated, especially for children, no matter how suave and sophisticated the players may be, no matter how driven the adults are to “make things work.” God’s arithmetic—one on one—works best for all concerned.

Author

  • John Omicinski

    At the time this article was published, John Omicinski had worked in newspaper journalism for more than 40 years, retiring as a national correspondent for the Washington bureau of Gannett News Service.

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