Children of Divorce Olympics Staying Married - 9/17/07

[Smartmarriages]

- DIVORCE OLYMPICS

Hmmmm.....that's what you'd think, that the determination of adult children
who experienced the pain of divorce would would be enough - that they would
be able to break the pattern and avoid divorce - and as this writer says not
have to experience the pain and disruption of divorce twice in their lives
(their parents divorce and their own divorce.)   However, sadly, we know
this is not the case. The research finds that children of divorce are,
themselves, much more likely to divorce. However, reading this, let's allow
ourselves a bit of optimism and hope that with the combination of their
determination and our Marriage Education courses and information, the tide
will turn.  In any case, gotta love this article. It's articles like this
that help us turn the tide.  And, if anyone checks out her book, Silver
River, let me know what you think. Is it one to recommend? Post on the
website book list? 

Also, as you read this you'll realize that it echoes Elizabeth Marquardt so
closely that at first I thought "Daisy" had to be a pen name.  Elizabeth's
workshop on her book "Between Two Worlds" was again one of the top rated
sessions at the Smart Marriages conference. I highly recommend it to anyone
working with adult children of divorce, or for adult children of divorce who
are still trying to sort it all out. - d

> 757-411
> Between Two Worlds
> Elizabeth Marquardt, MDiv
> Even in the best divorces, kids live divided lives in which they struggle to
> understand their parents' behavior, negotiate tangled family systems, and
> develop values and beliefs.


Children of the divorce Olympics stay married
London Times
September 16, 2007

A victim of the break-up boom of the 1960s, our correspondent says her
generation will fight to avoid inflicting such pain again
Daisy Goodwin

>From the age of six I have lived a double life. Not because I was
intrinsically deceitful but because, like 20m other people in this country
(according to a survey last week), my life has been profoundly altered by
divorce. My parents split up in the late 1960s and they both remarried and
had more children. Like Diana, Princess of Wales, my childhood was spent
rattling across the country with my younger brother from one parental home
to another.

In one house we drank coffee, went to bed at eight sharp and always had
clean socks; at the other we drank tea, put ourselves to bed when we felt
like it and had bare feet. In one house the bed was always made, in the
other it was a mass of rumpled sheets with sand at the bottom. Capital radio
was forbidden in one house, Elvis was compulsory in the other.

Every holiday, Christmas, birthday was bisected by the iron curtain of the
two incompatible ideological universes in which I lived. I became an expert
at an early age in ³reading the room². My mother thought it was funny that I
was trying to read Lady Chatterley at the age of 11, my stepmother
confiscated the book. I started learning Russian at school because back in
the cold war 1970s I thought my upbringing made me uniquely qualified for a
life of espionage.

I was one of the lucky ones. I saw both my parents regularly, materially I
had everything I needed ­ perhaps more: double Christmas presents for a
start.

As a child I used to say to sympathetic questioners that I was fine, lucky
even, after all it was the only life I knew. But now that I am grown up,
married and have children of my own I have stopped being stoical. I can
admit that things were not fine. They were strange and bewildering and their
mark on me is indelible.

The circumstances of my childhood have made me adaptable, resourceful and
emotionally intelligent, true, but I am also needy, insecure and unable to
set boundaries. I have been clinically depressed.

However, the one thing I am not is divorced, because I know what divorce
means. And the latest statistics suggest that I am not alone in this
awareness.

Divorce rates have fallen slightly in England and Wales for the third year
in succession. There are several explanations for this: people aren¹t
getting married as much as they used to, the property boom means people
can¹t afford to leave home, people are getting married later and therefore
have less time to repent at leisure. But I wonder if there is another
underlying trend ­ that my generation who grew up in the 1960s and 1970s
when the divorce Olympics were in full swing have decided that marriages are
not as disposable as their parents thought.

The statistics appear to bear this out. The biggest drop in divorce rates is
among the underforties ­ in other words, the children born during the
divorce boom that started in the late 1960s. Having been through one
divorce, the children of broken homes have no desire to go through another.
They realise, because their parents didn¹t, that in Margaret Atwood¹s words,
³a divorce is like an amputation, you survive but there¹s less of you².

My mother and her three siblings have all been married at least twice. But
the same is not true of my generation: my brother, half-sister and I have
now all been married longer than our parents were. Never say never, of
course, but so far we seem to be making a better job of staying together
than our parents did.

I don¹t think this phenomenon is confined to my family. When I was a child
at least a third of my friends came from ³broken² homes, but there are few
divorced parents standing at the gates of my daughter¹s school. And while
there have been divorces among my cohort of metropolitan thirty and
forty-somethings, they are the exception rather than the norm.
Significantly, the people who have got divorced have been the ones who grew
up in ³unbroken² homes.

Even though divorce is not the legal blame-fest that it was when my parents
split up, no one ­ children, parents, grandparents ­ comes out of it
unscathed. There is always a loss. That loss can reverberate well into adult
life. I have just written a book that goes back four generations to find a
narrative that makes sense of the failure of my parents¹ marriage. Readers
from similar backgrounds to mine have told me how their adult lives have
been blighted by their past, of their longing for a different future.

Outward success is no substitute for that early loss. Alex Mahon, 33,
managing director of Shine media, has been married for four years and has a
four-month-old baby. Her parents divorced when she was six and she boasts no
fewer than 10 stepbrothers and sisters. Despite having a PhD in astrophysics
she says that ³to have four children and to keep my marriage together would
be the biggest achievement of my life².

My mother had married in a crochet minidress in the 1960s; at my wedding in
the 1980s I wore a full-on meringue complete with veil, as if wearing the
outfit would somehow make the whole thing binding. My parents were rather
surprised that I wanted such a ³conventional² wedding, but to me a white
wedding complete with cake was a talisman against what I knew to be the
fragility of marriage.

Silver River by Daisy Goodwin is published this week by Fourth Estate,
£16.99 


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