Becoming an Adult Child of Divorce

This blog post comes unapologetically from the heart. It’s one that’s been sat inside for years and the one I so wanted and needed to find about ten years ago. If you’re an adult child of divorce and you’ve found this blog, I see you. If you’re an adult who grew up with divorce as a child I also see you. I also see those of you whose parents are still together and quite frankly I am jealous (I’ll come on to that later).

My dad left my mum for a much younger model when I was twenty-three. I was living at home at the time although my dad had been working away in Cairo for a few years. I always felt very lucky to have grown up in a stable household where there were very few crossed words or raised voices. In hindsight the issues were what wasn’t being said and passive aggressive undertones. In the twelve years that have passed since my parents split, here are some of the lessons I have learnt from becoming and Adult Child of Divorce (ACOD).

1.     Grief

It was a couple of years after my dad left and I was on a training course with EY which focussed on personal development. Until this point, I’d only briefly spoken to a couple of GPs or friends about what was going on and so support came very much in the form of immediate care and copious amounts of wine to numb the pain. During the course we had Action Learning Groups and I remember Elery, a very compassionate and wise facilitator, taking me to one side and saying, “has anyone ever discussed with you that you might be going through the stages of grief?”. Somewhat naively I thought that to suffer with grief you had to have physically lost someone through death, but Elery was completely right; I was trying to cope with grief.

From years of therapy, I now understand that I really was going through, and still likely am grieving. Grieving for the loss of my dad. Grieving for the loss of how my mum used to be. Grieving for the family I knew and the life I once had. I have found the loss of my dad the hardest to cope with and coupled with heartbreak the divorce it’s been the hardest thing to deal with emotionally. The man I thought I knew, wasn’t. It was like my dad had died, but he was still alive physically. I still feel this pain today, knowing my dad has a new family. We were replaced for the Beta version of the Holdstock family; Holdstock 2.0.

The perfect childhood

During the first five years after my dad left and my parent’s subsequent divorce I went to numerous GPs and was referred into the local “NHS Feel Good Group” or as I used to call it “Wednesday Worry Club”. Through both streams of free support, and some telephone counselling from my company’s EAP at the time I was constantly told “time is a healer”. I used humour to cover up my feelings and somehow haphazardly made it through my accountancy exams and audit life. I wore a huge mask to the outside world and didn’t ask for the help I needed. I so desperately wanted my parent’s support, and I had neither. I completely lost myself during my twenties, suppressing my feelings and portraying a tough exterior. As I hit my thirties the wheels started to fall off and I could no longer keep going as I had been. I wish that someone had scooped me up when everything first kicked off and acted as a pseudo-parent to me back then and allowing me to ask for help and be vulnerable.

2.     Jealousy

Every time I sit at a wedding I feel a huge pang of jealously. Despite 50% of marriages ending in divorce very few of my friends have separated or divorced parents. And those that are divorced can still sit in the same room as each other. If I had a wedding, it would be like the episode of the sitcom Friends “The One with the Two Parties” where the friends desperately try to keep Rachel’s parents apart. I watch the love of fathers to their daughters as they are given away knowing that I will never have that experience. I craved for years for my dad to be my dad again, but knowing that he only wanted me to fit neatly into his new family.

Being the girl next door, I’m often invited to meet with my friends’ parents. I love being welcomed into other families, but at the same time realise what I no longer have. When my sister and I moved to our flat we had to figure out a lot of “man jobs” that we would ordinarily have asked a father figure. Our dad was never great with DIY, but at least he knew of the different types of screwdrivers. Now we always get a man in, at great cost!

3.     Exposure

One of the worst parts of being an ACOD is the exposure to things that you most likely wouldn’t hear if you were a child. Things being dragged up on both sides. Crossed words. Or your mum shouting at you to “come and throw a cup at your dad” from the bedroom window “it’ll make you feel better” she claimed. I threw zero cups and as a conflict avoidant person hid away in my bedroom while my mum proceeded to throw sun cream onto my dad’s brand-new BMW in an attempt to strip its paint.

The last photo of me with my parents together: working in Disney World July 2011

I jest at some of the lighter moments above, but being an ACOD may mean that you are exposed to things you don’t want to see. Like seeing a parent so broken they can’t get out of bed for weeks. Feeling so helpless that there is nothing you can do to ease the pain. Having moments from your childhood you believed to be innocent brought up as ammunition in a war you find yourself accidentally caught up in through no fault of your own.

I have a vivid memory of standing outside of One New Change during a half year audit, having my mum distraught on the phone as my dad had accepted an offer on the house she lived in meaning that she would be homeless in a month. A month later my sister and I were on our way back from a holiday in Orlando airport looking at immediate rentals for my mum to live in. I was twenty-five and felt a great deal of responsibility to ensure everything was ok.

4.     The Benefits

While I can sit here and write about some of the negatives of being an ACOD, there are some positives that come particularly if your parent’s split happens in early adulthood. Both my sister and I are fiercely independent. When dad first left we became carers for our mum. For anyone who is interested in transactional analysis, our parent-child relationship had been flipped upside down. As a result we had to mature pretty quickly and developed a great deal of resilience which has set us up for the rest of our lives.

Double presents. The best present my dad ever got me while he was married to my mum was a USB stick. The year he walked out he got me…a pen! However, for the first few years after my dad left, pre new kids and while still carrying guilt I did benefit from some great gifts (note: if your dad’s new partner is basically your age they know what’s cool too). Now I’m not someone who’s overly materialistic but I did love that Michael Kors handbag!

Conclusion

It has felt somewhat cathartic to start to put some of this down in writing after years of keeping it all inside. I hope that if you’re reading this and going through something similar you can take something away. I don’t think I’d be the person that I am today if this hadn’t happened to me and I can reflect back on events with great insight and self-awareness that I can take forward with me. One of the household favourite films as a child was Mrs Doubtfire and nothing was as poignant as watching it back for the first time after my dad left and hearing the words “just because they don’t love each other anymore, doesn’t mean they don’t love you”.