Kids of divorce:ever consider it "your fault"

In My Humble Opinion
21

Same reason some people will bring a subject up just as they and the spouse are getting into bed, same reason Dad would say “we need to talk” in the Voice of Doom (meaning my grades had arrived) but the actual Talk didn’t take place until the following Saturday at the earliest… common sense requires thinking.

And if the price for their staying together was your shutting up, it was way too high a price. I swear, woman, you do blame like you were raised by a whole army of Mediterranean grandmothers (with a handful of Irish ones thrown in).

22

Never.

23

No, and I was really insulted when my mother reassured me and my brother (22 and 20 at the time of our parents’ separation) that it wasn’t our fault. We weren’t five, for fuck’s sake, of course we knew it wasn’t our fault. But she’s always infantilized us, and this was par for the course.

24

My mother actually told me it was my fault. Then she told me it was all my fathers fault. It was never ever her fault or my brothers.

I only believed her for a couple of years.

25

My mom told me it was my fault but I didn’t believe her for long. I was pretty upset by that for a little while though.

26

Sometimes it is the kid’s “fault”, if by fault one means “catalyst” - for example, a child with a disability that the one parent decides he/she just can’t deal with any longer and needs to get out.

A close friend of mine was born with a form of the “brittle bone” congenital disorder (like the “Mr. Glass” guy in the movie Unbreakable) that left her wheelchair bound (for the most part) and very small in stature, and requiring many surgeries in her early years to elongate her limbs so she could use them and (I think) to improve her hearing. She was the second child born to her parents, her older sister is normal (physically… :P).

About a year after she was born her father just… Left. Walked out the door and never came back. The legal divorce happened “off-screen” (she was too young to remember it anyway, though her sister does). She has no memory of ever seeing her father in person. He later remarried, moved away, had another family and never saw them again, no phone calls, no nothing.

Hard not to read into that action that it wasn’t “her fault” that he left - by all accounts there had not been any unusual fighting, no money problems, no affairs, etc., going on in the marriage and he had had a normal and warm relationship with his first child too. But he passed up on all of that on the turn of a heel.

Fast forward 40 years when her father passed away, she decided to go with her mother and sister to his funeral to have some closure on this topic. There she met her half-siblings for the first time. They were all very surprised and shocked to meet her - they had no idea she existed! Her mother, as his previous wife, yes; her sister, yes, he’d talked about her as “his daughter from his first marriage” that he missed but wouldn’t reach out to because “a complete break-off was healthier for everybody”. There was never any mention of a second child.

Well that’s the nail in the coffin, so to speak, isn’t it?

27

No. I was 7 when my parents split up. I’d always assumed it was because my dad was an alcoholic with a predilection for beating the crap out of my mom. After a particularly doozie of a fight, he took my sister and I out for ice cream. The minute he came outside and said, “Hey, you guys wanna go get ice ream?” I totally knew he was about to tell us they were divorcing. I was happy about it because I knew there would be no more screaming, fighting, or bruises on Mom. I didn’t even know that the waitress he was banging on the side was actually the reason for the divorce until years after he married her. (He chose to leave. Mom is such a doormat, she was willing to forgive the cheating. She did put her foot down and told him if splitting up was what he really wanted, then fine, but she wasn’t going to be yo-yo woman and go through cycles of break up-get back together over and over. Basically, she said, “You get to break up with me once. Are you absolutely sure?”)

28

I was dating someone divorced 2x with children of both marriages. The younger child (of marriage #2) blamed one of the older children (of marriage #1) for the divorce #2 and the split up of his family. It seemed a very deep root of resentment that would rarely manifest itself in that capacity, but it was there.

What I observed is that husband #2 was abusing that older child (of husband #1) in a resentful and demeaning way. The child of husband #2 was picking up on that, and that was continuing the hurt of the elder child.

29

No, it never occurred to me.

30

I always wondered about the kids that thought that and the parents that felt the need to reassure them that it wasn’t my fault. My parents got divorced when I was 14. Of course it wasn’t my fault. It was sort of my fault that my parents got divorced RIGHT THEN because I am the one that gathered enough incontrovertible evidence of yet another of my father’s affairs to present to my mother so she couldn’t ignore it. It still wasn’t my fault in the least overall and fuck anyone who who even thinks of mentioning such an idiotic thing to a kid. I was still really, really happy about it though and wasn’t shy about telling people that.

31

My Dad divorced my (first) stepmother when I was 9 and she told me it was my fault because I broke my arm right before they went on a Very Important Date.

Damned best broken arm of my life. I couldn’t stand the social-climbing whore.

32

I’ve never had any doubt of whose fault it was, and it wasn’t my sister or I.

33

Wait, what?? :confused:

The consequences being that you wouldn’t be abused anymore? That a child molester wouldn’t be able to find new victims? I assume I must be misunderstanding, 'cus that’s just wack.

34

Yes, in fact I’d like to think that I was instrumental.

35

I am not sure what you are referring to but it did make me think of something. God forbid, if the worst case ever struck and I did become married again, I am fairly certain my daughters could break it up if they wanted to. Kids rank a ten on my scale of important relationships and spouses a five max if they are the parents of those kids and about a two if they are stepparents. If a stepmother interfered in my relationship with my daughters, I would have to get rid of her regardless of who’s fault it is. Luckily, I know that so it won’t happen but I read stories like Cinderella and wonder why the father didn’t just kick the stepmother to the curb. That fairytale wouldn’t have ever gotten started if it were up to me. My mother asked for my permission to marry my stepfather which I appreciated and he is a great person but I know she would pick me if we ever had any true conflicts.

36

Oh no, you’re understanding just fine. Yes, it’s whack, but that line of reasoning on the victims’ part is one of the consequences of abuse and also one of the reasons it’s so hard to fight. Having a mother, as in olives’ case, who makes her child responsible for her own (the mother’s) happiness, is a thick layer of icing on that shitcake.

37

Of course he can find new victims. It’s not like he had to suffer any consequences for his actions. My major miscalculation was that people would actually believe me. The truth is I had no intention of telling my family, at least not while I was still reeling to put my own life together, but a therapist called social services and I didn’t have a choice. It was like a bomb going off and destroying everything in its path. I lost so much. Meanwhile my parents stayed married another six years.

So I’m not saying I did anything wrong. I’m saying that in retrospect I can’t help but weigh the pain of guarding the secret of the abuse against the pain of having half my family disown me when I was 17 and spending the next several years defending myself for having been abused. The aftermath was the worst part.

38

I was just a baby when my parents split up, so no, never entered my mind it was me.

39

How old were you when you said this to your mom? I just ask, because if you were over a certain age maybe you knew something was going on. On some level, but not directly. Like my one grandfather was cheating on my grandmother, but it was open and no one EVER talked about it. For clarity, he actually lived with this woman. I think he may have had kids with her (I’m still not sure to this day if this people are my half aunt/uncles or not but that’s another store). I said why does grandpa have two families when I like five. I knew in my little mind something was wrong, but I didn’t KNOW. My grandmother cried and my parents told me not to talk about when I went over in his other house.

40

My parents separated when I was very small, and while I didn’t think it was my fault when I was a kid, I have thought about it now and again as an adult.

I still don’t think it’s my fault, exactly, but … I’m pretty sure my parents had kids without much thought about it, it’s what people in their generation and their social class did, they got married and had kids. I think if either of them had actually thought about what they wanted in life, it would probably not have included having children at that time, and possibly not even being married at all.

They’re actually both great and loving parents, so I’m certainly not claiming they avoided their responsibilities or even raised us with resentment, but it seems realistic to me that they sort of woke up one day, in a house in the suburbs with rugrats underfoot, and said “wait, how did I get here?”