When I learned that my parents were going to get a divorce, I recall feeling, for the first time, like I was outside my own body. It’s still fresh in my mind, when my mum told me and I was quick to respond— It’s your marriage, it’s your choice. I have no say in this. What I recall best is thinking to myself, “This is not a normal response. You should be hysterical, maybe distraught. Most people in this situation would be.”
It didn’t hit me until two months later. At that point, I was roughly four months away from graduation, watching all my friends make plans for job and graduate school. I remember considering dropping out, thinking that was the best way to deal with the divorce— just put my education and my dreams on hold and maybe get back to it later. I remain indebted to my mentor in university, who sat me down and made me promise I wouldn’t give up even if everything I had ever thought would fall apart did so. When your parents’ split hits you, your balance shifts. Nothing has moderation anymore. Everything— thoughts, feelings, emotions— everything is heightened. You grow up, skip years of maturity in minutes. You start trying to make sense of something you’re not capable of doing.
And this is where the problem arises— you’re an adult. This is supposed to make sense. You’re not a kid anymore; confusion over Mommy and Daddy being together doesn’t exist. By virtue of having attained a socially prescribed age that stands to say you’re fully capable of being a person, it is assumed that you understand this. You’re going to become an adult child of divorce (ACOD). It’s okay. You’re an adult. You’re bound to get it.
Truth is, you barely ever do get it. The first responses you get are, ”Hey listen, at least this didn’t happen when you were younger” or “It’s a good thing it happened now, when you’re ready for it” or even “Listen, I think you’re making this seem bigger than it is. Calm down. You’re made to handle this.” And that sets off a terrible cycle— a cycle that begins with wondering if you’ll ever make sense of experiencing your parents’ divorce as an adult and ends at reconciling with the fact that how you think about family stands changed forever.
When you realize you’re going to become the ‘girl with daddy issues’, as most would say colloquially, everything falls into disrepute. Looking back, your life feels meaningless— How did I not see this coming? This is my family; these are the people that raised me. It ruins your idea of love because where does love stand if a long marriage with all the socially acceptable elements in it is coming to an end, refuting concepts that have become hard as stone in your brain? A family is a unit that doesn’t break; it doesn’t fall. That is your blood. It’s the only thing you’ve learned you can go back to when the world turns on you. What do you do when you’re 22, on the brink of completing two degrees, hoping for employment to fall in your lap soon and grappling with the knowledge that what you could go back to isn’t going to be there anymore; the way its always been?
Divorce is always difficult on the kids but so often, it is adult kids of divorce whose experiences and feelings are readily dismissed all because why: They are adults. What nobody tells you about becoming an ACOD is that you don’t remain the kids anymore. You become the counselor, the confidante. You become the bearer of dark secrets, of histories that make you question the existing relationships around you. You begin to question if you’ll feel whole again; if you’ll feel like you don’t have to pick a side to spend more time with. You wonder how and when the people you have established relationships will leave you even if there is no inclination of it.
The social, emotional and mental weight of being an ACOD is enormous. It is so simply because there are so many assumptions associated with being an adult that nobody thinks, “That’s a child going through a family falling apart.” At the end of the day, we’re still our parents’ children. They still stand to be the example of what must be unbreakable and of a safe haven. When that safe haven cracks from the bottom, how do you believe the foundation holding it was good? How do you take forth this knowledge and see the world from a lens that isn’t cloudy? How do you believe that you won’t be left the same way years later? How do you convince yourself that someone will stick by you, unlike your parents?
Ultimately, how long do you wait until the people around you understand that your experience is valid? How much do you yearn for someone to get that being an ACOD is just as tough as a child facing it too? How do you learn to rebuild everything, knowing that the pieces will never go back into the same places? How do you know that from here onwards, you go alone?
As an ACOD, I don’t look for happy endings or the silver lining. Perhaps my cynicism and sarcasm have benefitted from watching my parents go through with a divorce. Maybe this is all fodder for projects I might take up in the future. And maybe, this is how every ACOD works through it: through breaking and re-building, knowing that structure will never look the same. Maybe, we just make it work.
