Divorce: Can Teenagers Handle the Truth?

Drawing from my personal experience as a child of divorce, I am helping my children deal with the aftermath of my divorce from their father.

Stumbling on sibling conflict

I was creating a server for my son on his computer so that he could play a game locally with his brother when I stumbled on a note on his desktop. I wasn’t intentionally snooping! It was just sitting there in the folder. I thought it was one of the text files related to the game, I didn’t even know it was private, otherwise I wouldn’t have snooped. I was dismayed by what I read:

“i wish my family wasn’t a broken piece of crap. i wish mom and dad weren’t divorced. maybe then i would be happy for a change. but whenever i bring it up my brother just says something stupid like “it’s not moms fault stop blaming mom your always blaming mom stop it!” i wasn’t even talking about mom. He just wants to complain”

I did not confront anyone about the note. It did, however, give me food for thought.

A little backstory is needed to put this note into perspective

My youngest son was, no secret, his father’s favorite. Not just as the baby of the family, but as the favorite of all his children. I stress this point because I don’t think he truly loved his first son, my ex-stepson K. He certainly didn’t dote on him the way he doted on my son.

You’d think I would prefer it that way, but I do not. I don’t think showing or having open preference of a particular child in a multi-child household is healthy. As a mother, I love my children equally. I may like different things that make each of them unique, but my love is the same. I wouldn’t pick one over another.

In comparison, mr horrible vacillated in his treatment of K. His attention ranged from overcompensation motivated by guilt to total neglect because it was too much work to pretend to like him just because mr horrible “hated” K’s mother. (Ironically, he is doing the same thing with R now) 

There were things that mr horrible would do with R that he would not do with K. For example, when mr horrible would teach R how to play the guitar, I would ask mr horrible how come he wasn’t also teaching K to play the guitar, and mr horrible would say that K was worthless, that they (he and K) didn’t have anything in common and how pointless it was to try and teach K anything because he had such a bad attitude. Whereas, R was fun, and interesting and cool–teaching him was fun and made him feel good because R openly worshiped his dad and made mr horrible feel like he could walk on water.

I always thought that situation was a bunch of bullshit. At least he openly admitted that he was going to ignore K. He neglected J because he was the middle child, and quieter. He told me that J had me, and that he and J didn’t have anything in common, therefore spending time with him was also pointless. He wouldn’t even know where to begin. Nice excuses douchebag.

So, between openly tossing his first son aside (the eldest, K) and the latent neglect of his middle child (my bio eldest, J), mr horrible made no secret that R was his favorite child overall.

Growing up in that sort of environment with so much preferential treatment, it is no wonder that living in this new reality would feel so harsh by comparison. My youngest son is having a hard time dealing with the divorce and the question I often ask myself is when will he understand, and how to help him evolve?

Navigating my son’s emotional struggles with the divorce

Do I explain that this divorce was inevitable? How do I convey that mr horrible wanted to get a divorce the moment his brother was born without sounding like an asshole? Do I share that I alone tenaciously kept the family together for the thirteen years that followed?

I thought about the situation and instead of seeking R out to talk about his note, I decided to wait and see if he would come to me. There was nothing going on outside of the note in his behavior that would need me to immediately confront him, so I watched and waited.

My strategy so far has been that when they ask me a question, I do not lie.

My parents were divorced by the time I was six years old. My mother didn’t give me the benefit of the truth because she thought that as a teen I couldn’t handle her divorce, and that assumption cost us both more in the long run. Her because I don’t and haven’t trusted her. Me because it did not give me anything to prepare me for what I was going through now. Thanks, mother, for nothing.

Co-parenting fails

I deeply resent the lies I was fed by my mother as a child growing into a teen. To this day it has contributed to the rift between us.

Lies that she said she gave me because she felt it was “for the best”, but which caused more issues than they were supposed to prevent, especially once I found out the truth.

Had I known that my father did not give her any child support, nor had he made any agreements for child support, I wouldn’t still resent her for every phone call I had to make to ask my dad for money for things like clothing or school supplies.

Calls that break the commandments of what not to do with children of divorce, would have been made willingly. I was not close with my father and I would have done something to help my mother if I knew why she was asking me to do it. I learned much too late that he would give me money for stupid shit like candy or movies, but wouldn’t give me money for things that mattered like tuition, or school fees. Call it what you will, but I wasn’t above lying to him to get the cash for the necessities we needed.

Misinformation on her part, either from pride or whatever the hell control issues she had, kept me from learning the truth about my father until much later, and created opinions that I formed about her behavior that were less than complementary.

Waiting and being available was the right choice

Shortly after I found the note on my son’s computer, he approached me with a question.

He wanted to know why we didn’t move back to Virginia after the divorce? This revealed other issues that my son was struggling with, most of them having to do with his desire to see his father and his father’s lack of communication.

Regarding the move, I was very point blank with him and told him that I moved far away in order to give the three of us distance so we could heal from being in an emotionally abusive household. I explained what it meant to be a victim of emotional abuse, what it looked like and my observations of the toll it was taking on him as he grew up and the sort of young man it was turning him into.

I also let him know that the distance was necessary to maintain control of the custody arrangements without having to fight over it.

Even as I was speaking I had concerns that it was going to be too much. My son is only thirteen and even as “advanced” as middle schoolers may appear to be on the outside, they are in many ways still very young on the inside.

However, he is my son, and he is very smart, and I could see that he understood what I was saying and that he understood it was truth because it was consistent with everything else I had ever spoken about in relation to the divorce.

Consistency is key.  Smart kids notice inconsistencies.

We may think that as parents we can pull fast ones on our kids. If your kids are not very observant, extremely self-absorbed and spend almost no time in your company, then you probably can sell them cheese on the Moon. However, my kids are very astute, and we spend a lot of time together. Therefore, they watch and observe me like hawks.

Nothing goes unnoticed and just when I think I’ve gotten one over on them, they call me out on it and I’m totally busted. So, lesson learned. Pick a story and stick to it.

Not every detail is necessary when explaining divorce to children, be age appropriate.

You don’t have to tell them everything, or be explicit about the divorce. But don’t lie. And don’t veer into fantasy because when you do, you only cut away at the fabric of trust you have with your children. When in doubt, put yourself in their shoes and ask yourself if it will be worth it in 5, 10, or 20 years.