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 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.

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.

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.

Quite nicely, yes, thank you! –aag