Moving Between Two Worlds

Divorce is one of the most devastating experiences a child can have. I was twenty and in college when my parents divorced, and even though I was all but grown and gone, it didn't insulate me from the pain and heartbreak of watching my parents dissolve their marriage and the sense I'd always had of home. I'm forty now, and it's not something I've gotten over. One doesn't get over it. One moves on and deals with a whole new reality, hopefully in healthy ways that allow for new integrity in important relationships.

I have three children in my home who have also experienced divorce, two from my first marriage, and one child from my wife's first marriage, and they were much, much younger than twenty when they experienced the heartbreak. In their young lives they've had to make sense of divorce without as much life experience as I had. And now as parents in a second marriage, my wife and I have never expected our children to "get over it." We respect that our kids have experienced something very painful in their young lives, and it was brought on by the most important adults in their lives. Yes, the truth can hurt, but it's still the truth.

We work really hard so that our children can have healthy relationships in our home, and with their other parents in the homes and lives they also share with our children. In the language of the day, we're called a blended family, but that's just another way of saying our children have had to adjust to completely new experiences of home and family, and it's a process that is ongoing. It's never easy, and it requires sensitivity to how the children move between the two worlds they call home.

Our children and all children deserve and need a happy, healthy relationship with their father, and their mother, and that requires the fathers and the mothers in divorce situations to put the needs of the children first and foremost at all times, even when that means biting your tongue, or giving more than you want to, or even supporting those things about the other parent that were exactly the things that caused the divorce in the first place. Just because you divorced them, it doesn't mean the children did! 

Every family, no matter the construction, has dynamics to deal with, and levels of dysfunction. So often dysfunction in a family is actually a result of a strength-- a person simply cannot do everything right. There is no such thing as a perfect family, or a perfect family experience. I see so many of my friends as parents working hard to provide "the perfect childhood" for their children, and know it comes from the best of intentions, but I also know it's an illusion. The perfect childhood is one of happiness, but also where a child learns resilience from having to get up after falling down, and how to deal with things like disappointment in healthy ways. There is no teacher like pain, and learning to forgive is one of the keys to happiness.

Can a child from a blended family can be happy and healthy? Yes, absolutely. Can a child who experienced divorce heal? Yes, but not to what they were before. Only to something new. When it became clear that I could not save my first marriage from divorce, I resolved to provide a happier and healthier home for my kids than they would have had otherwise. That one thought got me through many difficult days. And now my second wife and I have a marriage that would not have been possible without our separate experiences of divorce. We do not take each other, or one single day, for granted. For our kids, we work to show them the sanctity of marriage as we always intended it, knowing it's not the whole story.

There are so many kids in this town and every town who have experienced the pain of divorce, and for the rest of their lives will move between two worlds in relationship with their mother and father. Young kids, like mine, who have two bedrooms in two homes with two separate families. Or kids who only live with one single parent, or with family members who aren't parents. Or something even different than that. As an educator, and as a parent, I've come to understand there is no such thing as a broken kid, only children who need to be surrounded by love and adults they can count on. And a broken home is a cop out: all homes change as adults and children grow and learn, and being happy and healthy is always a work in progress.


Note: This blog post is from a series originally published as personal essays written for the Van Buren County Advertiser from 2008-2014 by Corey Harbaugh under the title It's All Good. The It's All Good columns were written to feature and celebrate life in and around Gobles, Michigan.