Divorce hurts children says D Mead

I would change only one thing in this article, and that is by taking out the 'sometimes' in the title... Many studies have been done that show this to be true, regardless of how many 'well-meaning' others try to tell us differently.

Sometimes divorce hurts children long after the fact

Inside Bay Area

'I just wish you and Mom could get back together."

My son, Matt, was crying as he poured out his heart to me. We were at the drive-thru window at Jack-in-the-Box, and we were both in tears.

"Give me a No.3 with a Coke and a No.4 with a Sprite," I said, sobbing into the speaker.

"OK, I got a No.3 with a Coke and a No.4 with a Sprite," the ever-chipper JITB employee said. "And, are you OK, mister?"

"Yes, just give me my food, please."

This conversation was not a few weeks or even a few years after my divorce. It was eight years after the fact, and my ex-wife had remarried and had a child since then.

"Son, would you want your little brother to go through what you went through, just so Mom and Dad could get back together?"

He didn't.

It was one of the most difficult conversations I ever had with my son, then 15. We had divorced when he was 7. The pain was still there.

What triggered it was a mini-divorce, in his eyes, the break-up of my engagement a few months earlier to a woman who loved my son and whom my son loved. He was missing her, and it triggered the teary confrontation.

I just tried to listen to my son without being critical. He was hurting. I didn't chastise him and tell him he was nuts for thinking that. I didn't tell him that the thought of his mom and me getting back together sent shivers down my spine.

It's wholly natural for him to miss his parents being together. The best scenario for kids is to grow up with a loving mom and dad who are married and love each other. Those kinds of families traditionally produce the most well-balanced kids in society. Sure, kids from divorce can grow up to become productive members of society, and undoubtedly some kids from intact families end up in jail.

But by and large, kids from divorce struggle with some aspects of their parents' not being together for the rest of their lives, and it spills into other areas of life. I don't think my son, now 17, thinks about it very often anymore, but I think at times he wonders what it would have been like to have a mom and dad around for the big moments of his life.

I have a friend who does seminars for children of divorce. At the end of the daylong seminar, when the parents return to pick up their kids, he picks out about 10 kids, at random and covering all ages, to tell one dream they had. Most kids give a similar answer: "I wish Mom and Dad could get back together."

My dream is that when my son gets married, he puts his best foot forward in being a husband and a dad and that he loves his wife with all his heart and puts her first.

So how do we get our kids from Point A, their parents' divorce, to Point C, marriage and subsequent parenthood? I think they have to see someone reach those goals to believe in it. It's on his mind, no doubt. Maybe that's why he spends so much time at his friend Mike's house; because both his parents are around and they just get along.

Since that day some three years ago, Matt and I have not had a follow-up discussion on the subject. Maybe it's too painful for him. Maybe at that time, he just needed to unload on me. It was huge of him to bring it up, because he doesn't talk about the divorce very often. He chooses to cover it up, wipe it from his memory, so to speak.

He was hurting, and he chose to talk about it at that moment. The ensuing discussion opened up his eyes to some of the truths of the divorce. I told him I was sorry we got divorced and asked him to forgive me.

And I think he has since then, but until that moment, he blamed me for a lot of things I had no control over. It was a hurt that still hurts him. He just wanted me to know that.

Doug Mead has been a single parent for 11 years. He and his teenage son live in the East Bay together. He can be e-mailed at

dmead@angnewspapers.com.