On Divorce
Sadly, we cannot protect our children from the storms visited upon them. The storm of the COVID-19 pandemic has created an ongoing shadow storm of family breakdown and reconfiguration in its wake. “Annoyingly, life can suck!” one of my sons articulated clearly. We only get to choose our response to trauma, not whether or not it is inflicted on us. Feminist psychotherapists would tell us that often all we can do as parents for our children is to validate and listen, in the spirit of what Dr. Becky Kennedy calls: “I can’t change the hard, but I can change the alone.”
In his wise megawork The Myth of Normal, Gabor Maté lends his white male credentials to exploring what feminists have been saying forever – that trauma is systemically meted out by racism, misogyny, ableism and transphobia. Maté is particularly interested in how we cope with the grief these killing systems engender. As he notes, children (and all of us) resist grieving when traumatic things happen. I mean, of course! Like the rest of us, children are not really in the mood to openly embrace loss and change. And yet, Maté reminds us that it is grief that helps us to face the new reality: “Grieving is coming to terms with the loss. Yes, we’ve lost something. Yes, life will go on. In this way, Grief is the antidote to trauma. . ..” .
I am the child of divorce and have experienced it multiple times in my adult life. It is hard and scary and sad to watch your children grieve alongside you the families you imagined would accompany you into the future. I sometimes feel like I grieve the Christmas photos we’ll never take – and I realize the acute irony of this unfulfilled wish as I am a Jewish parent. And yet, much like life, grief is not reasonable. It is painful, idiosyncratic, and sometimes borders on the absurd. Many years ago, when talking to one of my sons about how our family looks now, he kept looking at a photo of the two of us and crying and crying. “Don’t you miss those days when it was just you and me?” he wept. I found that so uncomfortable. Am I being disloyal to our new family if I say yes? And yet, of course I, like him, I have moments where I miss those days. I do. I do. Just like the pregnant mother in Pecan Pie Baby says, “I’m going to miss the time before that ding dang baby.” “Those were some good times” agrees her mother.
I always thought validating children would be the most natural thing in the world. And yet it’s hard. So hard that I am daily humbled. Yes, you hate the dentist. Yes, you’re really angry. Yes, school is so boring and you never want to go. And yes, you’re sad. You’re sad. You’re so sad! You miss our family the way it was. This post is hard for me to write, and yet I want to swim my way through the waves of grief until they are smaller and further apart - trying and trying and trying again to help our children heal. And in that spirit, here are 3 books that can chart the complex emotional geographies many of us must navigate separately and together.
By Anastasia Higginbotham
I find all of the books by Anastasia Higginbotham helpful, but particularly the brilliantly titled Death is Stupid and Divorce is the Worst. With very bare artwork, Higginbotham writes words that are an arrow to the heart. Confusion and bewilderment are such a huge part of family breakdown for children. As Higginbotham explicitly states, divorce may bring feelings of betrayal: “You promised to be together forever! We did. You BROKE your promise. We did.” This book identifies the gamut of fight, flight and freeze responses children and grownups feel in their hearts and bodies: “You may want to run. (Uh oh – why don’t my legs move)”. It also makes clear the role of a good therapist for children, who can tell them: “This is not your fault.” And finally it makes clear the unbelievable powerlessness that children have over our lives: “We don’t decide our parents’ lives. What they decide affects our lives.”
Finally, Higginbotham reminds kids that while parents may have their reasons (we fell out of love, we made mistakes): “their reasons are theirs, not yours.” I also like the ending. It doesn’t end with the trite, sometimes untrue assertion that parents will love you just as much after the divorce, or that their behaviour will feel loving. When a family falls apart, sometimes one parent does not rise. Instead this books says: “Divorce means your parents are splitting from each other. YOU stay in one piece.” This seems truer to me - although still not fully true as trauma does create fractures in the self.
For this generation, who have so many reasons to need to heal themselves and work together to heal our world, I am inspired by artist Naoko Fukumaru's deep philosophical thinking about her practice of kintsugi, the ceramic art. In kintsugi, cracks in broken vessels are filled with liquid gold, making the repair very beautiful. Describing how she came to this art practice as a ceramicist, Fukumaru describes how she was surprised to feel like kintsugi was repairing her, just as it had the ceramics. As she says: "Instead of ignoring our pain or trying to forget, we have to work on it . . . Kintsugi is giving us permission. We can be ourselves. We can transform brokenness, imperfection through beauty.” Rather than running away from our mistakes, Fukumaru as an artist and thinker suggests running towards them. Like Fukumaru's understanding of kintsugi as part of a grief practice where people “face their mistakes and transform them through healing”, so too does Divorce is the Worst help us to do the same.
(en français: Un ami lumineux)
By Simon Boulerice, Marilyn Foucher
One of my sons loves this book. Maybe because it’s less heavy. There are only two pages devoted to divorce. The first two pages read: “Ludo’s parents didn’t love each other anymore. There was nothing to be done – love is like a flame, and their love had been extinguished.” Both parents are pictured facing away from each other. “They had decided to live separately. Ludo’s mom stayed in their house in the country, and his dad moved to an apartment in the city.” To me, this really gets at what Divorce is the Worst is saying. Adult decisions have nothing to do with us, and yet, they profoundly transform and change our lives. If your kids are tired of wordy, heavy, boring books about feelings - this book, which is much more about making an imaginary fantastical friend - is for them.
By Laurene Krasny Brown and Mark Brown
If you can't tell from the terrible image I included, this book is old. It’s from 1986, and seriously, couldn’t they have updated it? It’s so heterosexist it makes me mad. All the characters are dinosaurs, and yet they still gender them as mothers and fathers. The jokes here feel like such low-hanging fruit. When I grow up, I want to be a toy for boys! says a dinosaur in Elise Gravel's masterpiece Pink and Blue and You!
And yet, here is what is profoundly feminist about this book. It gets at some hard truths. It is clear and descriptive and without parallel that I know about. “Some parents have violent, noisy battles. Other parents fight silently by not talking to each other. Parents sometimes fight with you when really they are angry with each other.” (Isn’t this always helpful? This happens in all families regardless of divorce). It is also to me one of the few books talking about the connection between family breakdown and addiction. It features both alcohol and drug use of a parent and says explicitly “Sometimes parents who are upset with each other behave in ways that hurt themselves and the rest of the family.” It talks about the complex cocktail of emotions that children going through a family breakdown/reconfiguration may feel. These feelings include relief as well as the usual gamut of sad, mad and afraid. It can be confusing and shame-inducing to children to feel incredible relief at a divorce, and we need to talk with kids about these complex realities. This is also the only book I know of that deals with many complex issues including guidelines to setting boundaries with parents: “You don’t have to listen when parents say bad things about each other. Say you love them both and hearing this upsets you. You may have to tell them more than once.” In this way, Dinosaurs Divorce is doing the work of psychoeducation for parents. We need this! How can we possibly know all the things there are to know. Other hard truths this book offers is what it might be like to all of a sudden live with one parent, in that you maybe feel uncomfortable visiting someone you used to live with at first. And then, I love this page, it is a home truth for many children: “Some parents feel too guilty or unhappy to visit you.” This is a fucking reality. We don’t have phrases like “deadbeat dad” and “parental abandonment” because these phenomena are so rare. We *need* honest and hard-hitting books that address these tough realities for children. Dinosaurs Divorce also has the best definition of a stepparent I’ve ever seen: “a stepparent is a grown-up who, just like you, loves your [parent]”. I also like this: “Not everyone loves [their] stepparents.” These are hard, hard home truths. But they are real, they ring true, and they encompass a much fuller of the diversity of children’s realities than most books.
I would also recommend Nassem Hrab’s excellent book Weekend Dad which I have written about here. A second great book about step-parents called Timeless Love is here, and My Sometimes Dad addresses these realities for queer families as well.
Divorce, family breakdown – and whatever it’s called when things don’t go as planned. Grief is real – and like the night that allows us to enjoy the light of the stars, so too do grief and sorrow have their place. There are so many days when I appreciate the kids – the joy they bring – and it’s so much sweeter not in spite of, but because of, the grief I know that we all share and experience. Grief and sorrow are uniting emotions – they are part of what it means to be profoundly human. They connect us, they can cause us to reach out, and they can provide beautiful moments gathered around a page that make a child and adult simultaneously feel seen. That feeling is precious – including the moment when one my sons said: “wow, that’s pretty familiar, isn’t it mom?” And I agreed, indeed it was. “Well, enough of that!” said my son, cheerful in the wake of having felt seen by a book and of having let some of it out. And I had to agree – it was a beautiful day, it was time embrace the feeling and then let it go. I hope these books help you to do the same.
Until Soon,
Shoshana