ON A LIGHTER NOTE






When you reach the end of your rope, tie a knot in it and hang on. -- Thomas Jefferson


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Adult Children of Divorce Sometimes Choose Estrangement

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I have been avoiding writing this post in my blog because I realize that many acods maintain a relationship with their parents or even the “offending” parent after a late life divorce occurs.   I want to encourage that and hope and pray that many grey divorces do not end with estrangement of parent and child.   But in my own experience and in the lives of other acods who have written to me, or whom I have met, that is not always the case. Often the adult child or the parent chooses estrangement for many reasons. “Offense”, “sin”, “hurt” …call it what you will, but when an adult child has one parent who has made a conscious decision for months or years to betray the other parent,   the adult child learning of the situation is often in disbelief.    Hoping to understand, they talk to the “offending” parent, only to receive defensive language and behavior and the acknowledgment of hurt and pain caused is denied.   Often a lack of personal responsibility and lack of feeling fami
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Adult Children Of Divorce and Grief

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When I first became aware of the stages of grief, I assumed that I would experience it firsthand when someone close to me died,  not when my parents divorced in my adulthood.  As I cried my way through the first days and months of the shock of what was about to happen to my family of orgin, the pain was deep and unbearable at times.  Before the tears came readily and daily I seemed to walk around from task to task while hours ticked away in my day, as I functioned on auto-pilot, but my thoughts were consumed with the surprise and disbelief that my father had another love and would leave my mother and what we knew and loved of family to be with her. I reasoned that he would reconsider, that the affair wasn't as serious as it seemed, and that all would eventually be OK.  Little did I realize that I was experiencing the Stages of Grief due to the great pain and loss that I was experiencing.  The Stages of Grief are expressed by various words in different grief literature.  I wil
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I'm An Adult , but the Pain of My Parent's Divorce Still Hurts

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What is the pain of an adult child of divorce like?   It begins something like this : "Honey, do you have time to talk right now? Because I have something that I need to talk to you about".  Your heart begins to race, you feel emotions from fear to anger, a need to take flight or to fight, and at the end of the conversation you hang up the phone and realize by the deep physical feeling of sickness in your stomach , that nothing will ever be the same again. Adult children of divorce are expected to be able to handle their parents divorce.  It is imagined that they are less impacted than younger children.  In an article in the Huffington Post from May of 2011 by Erica Manfred, that thinking is referred to as a myth.  In her article The Kids Are Never Grown , Erica says  " The notion that divorce is easy once the kids are grown is a myth. Divorce is never easy and the kids are never grown." Divorce is likened to open heart surgery and death for the people actual
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