I need information. It occurs to me that I have a huge information hole in my relationship calculus, and that is the possible effect of a divorce on my son.
I have no personal point of reference on the subject, being the son of two people who, despite a truckload of domestic strife, are still married. The friends I have who are the children of divorce are also the children of alcoholics, psychotics, and the generally unwell. There must be sane people who get divorced and whose children must navigate those waters. I just don’t know any of them.
Thus, my picture of a kid whose parents have just divorced is that of a miserable wretch with no self-esteem, or else a conniver who plays both sides against each other for maximum material benefit. Is this the entire range of possibility? And it’s not the same as kids of celebrity divorce, because in our case, money is a huge issue. If my wife and I are both poorer (and more stressed as a result), my son’s life will be adversely affected.
But of course the other end of that calculus also bears examination. It would be tempting to say that the reason I have a good deal of my head together is because I had a stable home life as a child. But that would leave out the fact that I’m seeing a shrink because evidently there are fair portions of my head that are not together at all. How much of this is due to the fact that my parents were miserable throughout my childhood?
One of the things one always hears is that children of divorce think it’s their fault. If my parents had split, though, I don’t know if I would’ve come to that conclusion. They just didn’t get along. They only sort of get along now. True, my old man didn’t get along with me either, but it was always clear to me that the prime area of tension was between him and my mom.
But how much of the effects are due to the subsequent arrangements? If you have two parents who live in two separate places and you see them an equal amount of time, that situation will yield a different result than if there’s one parent who’s hardly around and another who spends most of their time with you.
Consider, however, the inherent feeling of instability that must be present when your life is split 50/50 between two homes. A sense of belonging would be hard to establish very firmly, given that even things like what room is your room change from week to week. Different neighborhood kids, different toys, different routines, it’s got to be at least a little jarring.
But maybe I only think that because I lived in the same house forever. My wife had the opposite experience, though, moving every few years, and it really threw off her sense of belonging and ability to make and keep friends. Though that’s not really what we’d be doing, it would just be a weekly rotation between two fixed points.
I still need more information. It’s all conjecture until I get firsthand sources. And I’m off…