I
am a sixty-one year old adult child of divorce. My parents divorced in 1956 when I was two years old. My mother remarried in the same month that the
divorce was final. My mother had full custody of me, and my new step-father raised me into adult-hood. I had minimal contact with my natural father
especially after he remarried a couple of years later and produced four more children. He became busy taking care of his family, like we all do. But
his absence in my life as I was growing up bothered me emotionally a great deal. I was in enough pain that I started smoking pot at about twelve years
old and drinking alcohol at about thirteen whenever I could get it. Smoking pot lasted about twenty years, and I use alcohol to this day.
I have been through a divorce after a twenty-two year marriage and was not the best husband or father during that first marriage. I have remarried and
have been married now for twenty-one years and almost ruined this one with alcohol abuse, anger rages, arguments, etc. For many years of my life until
recently I thought my father had done somethings wrong or had not been a good husband to my mother and somehow screwed up the marriage. I was angry at
him. I could not relate to him when I did see him, so I went long blocks of time, years, without having contact with him. I loved him, he loved me, but
we had zero relationship. I also missed out on relationships with my aunt and grandparents on my father’s side. My father passed away ten years ago, and
my aunt and grandparents are also gone. My aunt passed away last about ten months ago, and I all of a sudden had access to family photos, scrap books,
misc. documentation. This prompted me to research my mother and father’s marriage and divorce all those years ago.
I found out that my mother became dissatisfied in their four year marriage and hooked up with a friend of my father’s (while she was still married to my
father). This new man in her life became my step-father, who raised me. I did not know this information until I was sixty years old, just a few months
ago. All through my life none of my elders told me what really happened, not even my father. For at least fifty years I had misplaced blame for my
parents’ divorce. I blamed my father. When my father remarried, he was married until death, about forty-five years. My mother has been married four
times during her life.
After learning this information now, I am in anguish thinking that if I had only known this information when I was twenty and was able to process it, maybe
I could of had a relationship with my father over all of those years. In my humble opinion, I think the sexual revolution may have started a long time
before the 1970’s. My testimony to the negative effects of a divorce when children are involved is that I am sixty-one years old and I am still emotionally
disturbed about my parents divorce that happened sixty years ago.
Submitted by R.A. October 2015.
