Divorce, from an adult kid’s perspective

It’s not just the young ones who feel it

It’s been about 13 years since my folks divorced. I’m 32 now, and live a relatively peaceful, well-adjusted life. I’m a successful professional, have wonderful friends, and things are generally going well. When I was 19, however, it wasn’t so great.

I don’t remember when my parents sat my sister, who is three years younger than I am, and I down to tell us that they were getting divorced. I don’t remember the words that were said, the questions I doubtlessly asked, or even how it felt when I found out, but the impact on my life was subtle in the beginning.

I never felt like the divorce was my fault - and it wasn’t, of course. Adults who’ve had two kids and raised them for 18+ years don’t get divorced because of their kids. They get divorced because of their own issues.

I knew that my father, at some point in the past, had been unfaithful to my mother. I don’t know the extent of that, nor do I want to. I also know that my mother had a similar experience as well. I know that the period of time it all went down, however, things weren’t so fantastic for them.

In the mid-90's, my father was a successful businessman - a Director of Communications & Investor Relations for a fairly big and quite well-known HMO in the Mid-Atlantic region. He’d experienced some great successes in his career that started in advertising, and he was (and still is) a fantastic wordsmith. He was a published author, and always had aspirations to do more with that.

My mother, who had graduated from the University of Maryland many years earlier with a B.A. in Theater, worked full-time for a multi-national cosmetics company, and also ran the after school drama club for a local middle school.

Things were, on the surface, pretty normal. We were your average (reformed) Jewish family in the DC suburbs.

Around the end of the 90's, however, things turned south for my father. He ended up leaving the HMO, and for the next few years struggled to continue working in his field, after which point he started working as a car salesman - very much outside of his comfort zone. These were the dark times, but that comes a little later in this story.

When my parents were nearing the finalization of their divorce, they had to sell the house that we’d lived in for almost a decade. When my mother had moved out, and was no longer contributing to the mortgage, it became impossible for my father to afford the house, and I believe the house was briefly in foreclosure. I do know that in the end, my father declared bankruptcy because the money from selling the house simply wasn’t enough to pay it off in full.

At the time, I was working part time for WeatherBug - then known as AWS Convergence Technologies - as a Jr. Web Developer. I worked on the WeatherBug app at its launch, and am very proud of that. It was actually this job - which I’d fallen into as an intern in high school a year earlier - that both got me my start in Web/UX Design field, and also served as the end of my innocence.

When the house was sold, and the bankruptcy finalized, my father and I moved into an apartment together a few miles away. It was a nice apartment in a new community, but it was very expensive, and it was the first time in my life that I’d had to pay rent. I was also going to college at the time, and in the middle of my sophomore year, I had to drop out to help my father pay for the apartment, along with my own expenses.

I was lucky to have job, and that I could help make the rent payments, but from that point forward, for about five years, my life was in flux. I was deeply depressed. I’d stopped talking to my mother - for a number of reasons, which I won’t go over here - and I was feeling very much alone in the world.

I wasn’t ready to be a full-fledged adult, with a job, financial responsibilities, and I didn’t have good spending and budgeting habits (sadly, this came from my parents own inability to do this as well - my sister and I were never really taught how to handle money properly).

There’s a lot more to this story. A lot that I’m leaving it. The truth is, however, that I’m not writing this for you. I’m writing this for me. The imperative of the story is that even when people get divorced when their kids are adults, the impact can be just as hard - if not harder - as it hits young children when their parents part ways.

I hope this helps someone. I hope someone reads this and gets something out of it. At the very least, I hope someone sees that dark times pass, that a college degree is important but not an imperative to have a successful career and life. That life goes on, that things get better, and that it’s not their fault if their family is - at least temporarily - broken.