Between Two Worlds

Another reason not to use a spouse as a experiment....

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....BY: 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 'reading the room'.

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 aren't getting married as much as they used to, the property boom means people can't 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 under-forties, ­ 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 didn't, that in Margaret Atwood's words,"a divorce is like an amputation, you survive but there's less of you".

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 don't think this phenomenon is confined to my family. When I was a child at least a third of my friends came from 'broken' homes, but there are few divorced parents standing at the gates of my daughter's 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 'unbroken' 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 parents' 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 "to have four children and to keep my marriage together would be the biggest achievement of my life". My mother had married in a crochet mini-dress 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 'conventional' wedding, but to me a white wedding complete with cake was a talisman against what I knew to be the fragility of marriage.