I was 5 going on 6. If I did know, I repressed it. I was shocked when I was about 14 and realized due to the timeline that Dad was probably having an affair with my then stepmom back when she was “just a friend of my parents’.” It took another thirteen years of spiritual work and therapy and failed relationships before I realized exactly why being in the vicinity of an arguing couple (whether I am one of the arguing people, know the arguing people, or even see total strangers arguing) makes me feel like the world is crumbling around me and it’s all my fault, and how my lie was linked to their fight, and the fight to the divorce (at least in my mind.)
My parent’s marriage fell apart when I was ~12 and they finally divorced when I was ~20. Infidelity was never an issue; they just didn’t get along.
It never occurred to me at any time then or now that any of this was in any way my fault. I’m sure they stayed together for at least some of those years for “the sake of the children”, myself the eldest & my younger brothers. Although we were factors in that decision, I never thought then or now to look at my mere *presence *as translating somehow into it being my fault.
Hint to all parents out there. For the “sake of the children”, get divorced sooner rather than later. Two separated half-happy half-households are far better than one angry and divided single household.
No, I never thought it was my fault, I thought it was because they fought constantly and bitterly for years.
The divorce came as no surprise, but a welcome relief. And they did not tell us while tucking us in at night, as I doubt either one of them had ever tucked us in in our whole lives.
I have no recollection of actually being told. Just the huge relief of somewhat less fighting in the house. (There’d have been considerably less, except that my sister was a surly teen at the time).
I was 4 or 5 when I parents separated. One of first clear memories is of them telling me that Dad was moving out, in their bedroom. I believe I asked them if it was my fault and they assured me it wasn’t. I didn’t think it consciously, but I think I had a vague feeling that it was for about the first year or so.
I never thought it was my fault, but I was only 2 at the time. However, now that I have kids, I can certainly see having children in general being a contributing factor to the failure of a marriage if it’s already strained.
I’ll never figure out why people sometimes choose to have kids to save their marriage.
To answer the OP, perhaps a bit late, my grandparents had a rather fraught relationship. My father’s mother and father were married twice. Once, which ended in divorce after she found him tomcatting around. Then a second time, when they decided to start a child to give them a reason to stay together.
And they were divorced, again, for his infidelity before my father was born.
My father does not talk much about his father. But one of the comments that have slipped out about the whole situation was something along the lines of, “So I knew that I’d failed at my purpose in life even before I was born.”
It is not a logical conclusion, nor is it one that I believe he was much oppressed by as an adult. Kids, however, don’t always reason past emotional conclusions. I can’t say how common such thinking might be, but I’ve heard of it often enough to think it’s a real pathology.
Now I am kind of getting it. It’s not that the kid willfully caused the divorce. It’s that the existence of a kid was the reason that the parents stopped getting along. Maybe the had constant fights about child rearing or one of them didn’t really want a kid but just went along with it and then resented the whole thing, or at least that’s what the kid perceived the problem to be. It’s the kid’s fault but indirectly.
My mom left because my dad threatened to hurt me. I was a toddler, and he made the threat in an attempt to scare my mother, to prevent her from leaving. Instead, it was the final straw that caused her to leave. If not for me, she might have stayed in that relationship and been much worse off because of it.
I don’t know, but someone should ask my ex. She walked out on me. Though I knew it was happening she didn’t want to tell the kids. As a matter of fact it was the night before they left that I ended up sitting them down to talk to them about it. They were 4 and 2. She got mad at me for telling them that they were going to move out the next day. I don’t think she was planning on telling the kids at all. Actually she doesn’t want to talk about anything important with the kids.
Myself and my older brother were both conceived after the divorce so no. I’ve been married for 17 years with an 8 and 6 year old. I seriously doubt we’ll get divorced because we’re very happy, but my sis-in-law has been married 18 years with 13 year old twins and the ONLY reason she’s not divorced now is the kids. They are the reason the parents are NOT divorced yet, so it’s just the opposite.
Never occurred to me that it might be my fault. But I suppose it depends on why they divorced. There are parents who have kids, who don’t like their kids, and who never ever should have had them in the first place. Arguing about undesirable kid-related tasks (like whose turn it is to pick them up from school, or who needs to go shopping because you’re out of milk), where kids can hear, CAN make them think it’s their fault. And it’s better to tell a kid “it’s not your fault” just in case, even if there’s no way the kid could possibly think it’s their fault, than it is not to say it when they might have a niggle that it is.
I mean, in my case my dad would punch and smack my mom and kick her and push her down stairs and yell awful words (I grew up hearing cunt-this and cunt-that reverberating through the house multiple times a week) and barricade us out of the house using my mom’s piano and destroy library books when he got pissed off. Even a slow child would be stupid to think their divorce anything to do with their kids, and I was extremely bright.
I WAS the cause of my parent’s divorce, at least as the catalyst. There were many underlying factors, but they likely would have been hidden away as they had been if I had not done several things that I did that forced the issues into the open.
I don’t feel bad about it- better the marriage over and done with than lived that way…