How your parents told you about their divorce
January 29th, 2007 by DWordDiva
http://yourchildyourdivorce.com/how-to-tell-your-children-about-divorce/
but I thought it would be funnier (or at least more interesting) to hear the real stories.
FOCUS: How did your parents tell you they were getting divorced, or if they didn’t directly tell you, how did you find out? What happened?
Come on, let it all out!
8 Responses to “How your parents told you about their divorce”
What do you have to say?
My mother and my father got divorced when I was about 4. They didn’t really need to tell me, I figured it out on my own. How you ask? My mother grabbed two black garbage bags and threw whatever would fit, grabbed my brother and me, and got the fuck out. My dad eventually got custody of me because he lied in court, saying my mother did drugs and abused us kids. He was the one who abused my mother and was addicted to pain medicine, which eventually led to his heroin addiction that got him labeled as “Missing” (Read: He was murdered, they can’t find the body).
About two years later, and my father being in and out of jail monthly, she finally got custody.
My parents divorce was a complete shock to my 11 year old brother and I (9 then), they never fought or raised their voices around us. One day Dad moved out, there was a couple of months of “counseling” then they dropped the hammer. The result is the holy trinity of fucked up children, my sister (4 at the time) is 27 and openly hates men, my brother is 34 and has never had a relationship (other that the occasional stripper), and has not shown a human emotion other than rage since he was 11. I started drinking and smoking pot at 10 and was a complete mess until after grad school, luckily I found a woman who is able to put up with my shit most of the time. What I got out divorce was the deeply ingrained knowledge that the adults move on and heal, but the children are fucked up forever. I would sooner live in hell with a woman that I despised, than cause that type of damage to my children.
My parents, true to their fashion, couldn’t even get divorced in a normal manner. I remember being about five (my brother is three years younger than I am, and in my memory, he could speak, so I had to be at least that), and sitting with my family in our living room, and my dad telling us, “Daddy isn’t going to live here anymore.” I was a smart kid, and we lived in a big city; divorce was not a foreign concept to me.
“Are you getting a divorce?”
“No; no, we’re still going to be married. I’m just going to live in Baltimore for awhile.”
Well that totally boggled me; I knew parents who were divorced, and I knew parents who were married. I didn’t understand this concept of “separation.”
Neither, apparently, did my parents. Dad moved to Baltimore for maybe a year, during the course of which my brother and I would visit on weekends. Then he bought a house a full quarter-mile from my mother’s, where he lived for the next 15 years - where we also lived, Brother and me, and where mom lived about 5 nights a week. Plus holidays, of course. She made dinner there, she read the paper there, she bought the dog food and the laundry detergent. We went on family vacations together, we visited grandparents as a family, not with the respective parent alone. It wasn’t until my dad had been asked by Crazy Stepmom to marry her that my parents finally got a divorce, and put an end to the 20+ year marriage that really only lasted a quarter of a decade.
My parents, sneaky bastards they are, both planned the divorce to some extent, taking me to separate psychologists to squeeze shit out of me about the other parent. In my memory I think of myself as 8 when it happened but I might have been 7 or 9. So the “therapists” alluded to the divorce, and then one night my mom kicked my dad out, which is somewhat ironic because she’s the one who ended up broke and without any of the possessions. But it was, in fact, my dad’s boss and a handful of cops who explained the situation to me.
My parent’s are pussies.
8th grade. My siblings were much older and had already moved out, only coming back for holidays. Since she wanted to tell us all at the same time, my mom got the great idea to inform us of the pending divorce on Christmas day. The only way I could respond was to repeatedly ask “why today?” She couldn’t wait until at least the 27th to tell us?
To this day she still doesn’t understand why I don’t get “in the spirit” for Christmas anymore.
My parents didn’t say anything either. Of course this was a very volitile abusive situation and one day my mom got smart and packed us up and moved out. Thank the lord and too bad it didn’t happen sooner. The scars of the marriage are MUCH deeper than the scars of the divorce.
these stories are great! what a great site!
My parents separated for the first time when I was about 5 or 6. I woke up one morning at about 5am to my mother sitting at the kitchen table crying and the headlights of my dads truck pulling out of our driveway. She told me that he was moving to California. We lived in Arkansas at the time. I could have cared less. My younger sister however had a really rough time blaming my mother for making her “daddy” go away. She moved us out to CA about 6 months later and they tried again for about 3 or 4 years. Then one summer my sister and I went to go visit Grandpa for the summer (in Oklahoma). When we got home we decided to move back to OK for good (apparently summer was when they split again because dad wasn’t there anymore). It’s funny because I have no real concept of when they divorced because we just sort of existed in the household with both of them and then just with mom. When I was 11 she got the paperwork back saying it was final. I then went out back looking for frogs….
It has baan about 17 years and now I am going through the whole thing myself. I have 2 kids that were too little to understand the concept of anything more than mommy lives in one city and daddy lives in another. We both make an effort to make their lives as normal as possible. They see him 2 days a week and are with me the rest of the time. I could be completely delusional but they seem really well adjusted…