Colds lead to sore throats. These bring on coughing, which ushers in sleeplessness until finally everyone ends up a tired, weepy mess.
My little ones respond to extreme tiredness by falling asleep approximately three seconds after the lights go out. In contrast, my eldest fights it. “I’m not tired!” she’ll protest, her snarl blending into a yawn before the words are even spoken. “Can’t I stay up and read for a little bit?”
I don’t have a problem telling her no. If need be, I leave instructions with her father to put her to bed early on the nights he’s at the house. But she struggles against sleep so hard that even our best efforts can’t force her to get the rest she needs.
After a full week of sleeping struggles, she was wrung out. Her father had left for the evening. I’d settled in to work, thinking everyone was down for the night. But before long she appeared in the living room with some small issue. I curtly helped her resolve it, then pointed her back toward bed. Within moments she returned, another seemingly minor conundrum on her mind. I was more curt this time. I instructed her not to come back again unless she was bleeding, barfing or on fire.
She didn’t come back. But five minutes later I heard her whispering from the top of the stairs. “Are you bleeding?” I asked.
No, she wasn’t bleeding.
“Are you barfing?”
Negative.
“Are you on fire?”
She began wailing. No she wasn’t on fire, but she neeeeeded me, she sobbed. As I put her back in bed, she sobbed out grief that daddy didn’t live with us anymore. She missed him, she cried. Why couldn’t he live with us?
Lord, I thought. Not tonight. Not any night. “Way after your bedtime when you’re sick isn’t a good time for us to talk about this,” I told her. “But daddy and I were fighting too much.”
“Then why didn’t you just stop fighting?” she whimpered.
Oh if only we could have. “I wish we could have,” I told her.
“What were you fighting about?”
Intimacy, my brain said. Sex. Demonstrating love. Time. Money. Taking care of each other. “Grown up things, baby. Not you, and not your siblings.”
“Grown up things like the economy?” She perked up a little. Her class has been discussing “the economy” lately.
“Yes, I guess we did fight about the economy,” I told her. “Money is something that lots of grown ups fight about.”
“But why didn’t you just stop? You don’t fight now!”
A sudden and unnatural exhaustion hit me. “We don’t fight now because we live in different houses.”
Her sobbing began afresh. “But I miss him so much. I miss him all the time.”
As I tried without much success to soothe her tears, I cursed myself for being so selfish that I could not stay married to her daddy. How much have I hurt these small people, in how many ways, some of which I’ll probably never know? How I wished that I could have held out, held on, put my needs behind those of my children.
Perhaps I should have, to spare them this pain.
*Please, don’t comment just to tell me I’m wrong. Thank you.*
Took me years to get past that. Fact is — despite my own mother endlessly guilting me out for it — my children may be children of divorce, but they are children who do not live with the tension and gut-wrenching grossness of living with two adults who make each other miserable. My youngest was one at the time and she always insisted her dad and I should be together. Sixteen years later, she gets it. They both tell me I made the right choice. (Did I manage to say all that without saying you’re wrong?)
Quite nicely, yes, thank you! –aag
It sucks. My older son finally stopped asking but it took several years. And almost always at night like that, when he was vulnerable and all I wanted to do was get him to sleep so I could get some sleep myself. I’m sorry you have to deal with it now.
I think that was a brave post to make. A beautiful one, too.
I’m not divorced, never have been, don’t have kids; yet I completely understand what you’re saying. It’s OK to feel guilty now. It’s natural. But your kids will thank you for being a happy, healthy person who showed them how to be happy, healthy people when they’re adults. Just be a compassionate person who listens to them and let them know that their feelings were considered when you divorced.
I’m guessing this has been said, but I don’t think it can be said enough.
My mother stayed with my dad for ten years from the point she started considering divorce, (twenty-five in all) trying to wait it out at least until we had all gone to college. She truly believes in sacrificing all for your children, and I will never being able to even begin to repay her for all she has done.
That being said, her decision to stay in an emotionally abusive marriage almost ruined us all. I was at a fortunate age where I could understand the bad without being overly affected by it. My older brothers, however, did not get off so lightly. My parents’ fighting trickled down to their lives in ways that pain them even (and especially) as adults forging their own families. Fortunately, though, my mother’s decision to finally end the abuse taught us all that it is not okay, thereby ending the cycle most likely begun generations ago in my dad’s family.
It has been eight years, and my father just this summer acknowledged that their marriage had to end, for all our sakes. He still won’t talk to my mother, and I wonder about things like what will happen if I get married. Will I elope? Exclude my dad from the ceremony? Invite everyone, and pray to god that it stays civil? But I am certain that dealing with issues like that are mere nuisances compared to what I would be going through today had my parents stayed together.
I know it’s hard – I know my mother sometimes still wonders if there was something else she could have done. But by divorcing my dad when she did, she saved the whole family a lifetime of prolonged pain, and allowed us the chance work on healing ourselves.
You’re definitely not in the wrong, no matter how you feel. I sometimes have differing opinions on the situation now, because my parents divorced when I was seven and my two brothers were younger than that. Honestly I don’t remember anything about that time being any different, other than my dad being gone. He was literally gone – we didn’t see him for 5 years.
Then one year I got a birthday present in the mail wrapped in brown paper and it was a toy that I had wanted. Don’t know how he knew, but I suspect it was a lucky guess on his part. Then it hurt. There wasn’t much hate or anger, it was just a hurting. And it hurt for a little bit until I was comfortable with the idea that my Dad was still ‘somewhere.’ Either he decided that it was a good time to re-enter our lives or my mom finally let him, because we were able to spend every other weekend with him until we were grown and wanted to do things with our friends instead. Now, he’s still in our lives as a friend I guess, but I view him with such a cynicism that I find him bordering on ridiculous. That hurt is still there sometimes, but then I think about how hard my mom worked to keep 3 kids, a full time job and a house afloat – that hurt turns back into that feeling of ridiculousness towards him. It’s not a hate – I think it’s more of a pity for him. He missed out on huge chunks of us growing up. He missed out on being a dad to his kids.
My dad has spent the past 26 years raising 3 different women’s kids and now he’s on his 4th. Some people just weren’t meant to be married. Some people just weren’t meant to have kids of their own.
I guess what I’m saying (rambling) is that as hard as it is to watch your kids struggle with it, you’re not in the wrong. You will almost certainly become numb to your ex and the problems you two have between you. Your kids will grow up to understand what is what and why things happened. They may feel hurt sometimes, but I don’t think it’ll be anger towards either of you.
Kids growing up in a household in a constant state of unease between the parents, become a mess. That tension is palpable and it becomes ingrained in their personalities. They pass it on too, so you’ve done no wrong by them by removing that situation from their lives. Time heals most wounds and this will be no different.
Everyone has their faults, this is not one of yours.
‘Nuff said.
Like a fair number of the commenters here, my own parents divorced, and though I was young, even at the time I thought it was a good thing. It certainly improved my daily life.
I think for kids one of the things that influences how they see the situation is a sense of relative deprivation — that other kids have something they don’t, or that their family is not “normal” somehow. Despite the fact that divorce is so common, I think that kids can sometimes end up feeling that they are no longer part of the mainstream. Depending on a particular child’s need to belong, that can be a larger or smaller issue for them.
I know that I always felt a lot better when adults went to some effort to normalize the situation for me, to make sure I could hang out with children whose families were like my own. It helped to see that I wasn’t the only one, that there were other kids and families like mine and that no terrible thing had befallen them, in fact, they, too, had Pop Tarts. Also, it seemed okay in that context to simply say what my day was like (things like, well, X parent dropped me off at school ad then Y parent picked me up) in a way that didn’t seem okay at school or around kids whose parents were (for the nonce) together. It felt good not to have to think quite so much about what seemed acceptable to say about my living situation.
You were not wrong. I was not wrong. But boy, we both feel vulnerable when we or our children are tired. You deserved better. No regrets for either one of us. Sending hugs for those moment when our kids say that that thing that goes through us like a knife.
First rule of lifesaving… and yes divorce, separation, etc. is a form of lifesaving in my opinion, is that you can’t save the other person (people) if you are at risk yourself.
Staying married and suffering wouldn’t have been better. Kids would have picked up on the tension and issue in time.
Nope, kids say the darnedest things but in the long term you know this was the right decision.
I WISH my parents would divorce. Them staying together miserably has been far worse for my family.