My Child’s Divorce Is My Pain
The New York Times, September 2nd, 2007
The breakup of the marriage brought Ina Chadwick heartache, guilt and
financial hardship. The divorce, she said, tore away from her
everything in her “Cinderella dream.”
But the divorce she so ruefully speaks about was her daughter’s, not her own.
“You live through your child’s divorce,” said Ms. Chadwick, 60, a
writer who is still dealing with the fallout from the collapse of her
middle daughter’s marriage four years ago.
Marsha Temlock, a
retired family counselor in Westport, Conn., said her initial reaction
to the divorce announcement of one of her two sons five years ago was,
“How could you divorce this wonderful girl?” For months she fielded
calls from the son and the daughter-in-law like a “switchboard
operator,” she said, letting their divorce monopolize her life.
Ms.
Temlock eventually let go, and even wrote a book for parents going
through their own children’s divorce. But for a long time, she said, “I
was bereft.”
As the ties between parents and adult children
have grown closer over the last few decades, more parents find
themselves navigating the rocky shoals of divorce, or even the breakup
of long-term relationships, right along with their children, some
family and marriage experts say.
Parents today are not only more involved in their adult children’s
lives but they are also living longer and more active lives, said
Andrew Cherlin, a sociologist at John Hopkins University who was the
co-writer of a book on American grandparents. This means, he said, that
“it’s much more common for adult children to have their parents still
living when they divorce.”
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