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Telling the kids you're getting divorced — what I wish someone had told me
Twenty-some months ago my ex and I sat the kids down and told them. Caleb was 14. Mara was 12. We'd planned it carefully — joint front, calm voices, a script we'd workshopped with our couples therapist (who became, briefly, a divorce-translation therapist).
The script went out the window in about 90 seconds. Caleb asked one question we hadn't anticipated and Mara started crying before we got to the part where we explain we both still love them. The whole thing was both better than I'd feared and worse than I'd hoped.
The thing I wish someone had told me: the day you tell them is not the day they actually understand. They process it in fragments, on a delay, often months later. Mara asked me a question last week — twenty months after the conversation — that was clearly the question she'd been holding all along. I didn't have a great answer for it. I have a better one now.
If you're in front of this — script the talk, but plan for the script to die. Plan for the real conversations to happen later, in cars, at bedtime, randomly on a Tuesday. Stay available for those.
No kids myself but reading this thinking about my parents. They didn't divorce but they had a stretch I now know was bad. Nobody talked to us about it. We figured it out the way kids figure out anything they're not allowed to ask about — wrong, mostly.
The "stay available for the conversation that comes later" piece would have changed my childhood by a lot. Glad you're doing it.