Summary

The author shares a personal story about the impact of divorce on a child's life, emphasizing the importance of saving a marriage for the sake of children's emotional well-being.

Abstract

The author recounts his experience as a child of divorce, describing the devastating effects of his parents' separation on his emotional state. He compares the experience to being an astronaut abandoned in space, highlighting the profound sense of abandonment and loss. The author reflects on his own marriage and the close call they had with repeating the same story, but ultimately chose not to. He emphasizes the importance of saving a marriage, especially when children are involved, and encourages couples to apply justice, fairness, patience, love, and mercy in their relationships. He warns that the impact of divorce on children can last a lifetime and encourages parents to undertake the "Herculean soul-work" of transforming themselves to avoid transmitting their wounds to their children.

Opinions

Divorce can have a devastating impact on children's emotional well-being, leaving a "mysterious kind of scar" that can last a lifetime.
It is worth it to save a marriage, especially when children are involved, and couples should apply justice, fairness, patience, love, and mercy in their relationships.
Parents have a responsibility to heal themselves and avoid transmitting their wounds and traumas to their children.
The impact of divorce on children can reverberate inside them until their very last breath, and even longer.
The author encourages parents to undertake the "Herculean soul-work" of transforming themselves to avoid repeating the same mistakes in their own relationships.

How to Break the Heart of a Three Year Old

It leaves a mysterious kind of scar

If you’ve never been divorced it’s hard to predict its effect on your kids.

“Will the kids be OK? I mean, they’ll be OK, right?”

“After all, they’re young and resilient. They know the divorce isn’t about them, right? We still love them, they know that.”

It’s nice to think all that, and given decades of time, it’s probably true. After all, even burn victims “heal”. However, reality doesn’t suffer the naïve.

Legal and psychological experts can pontificate all they want, but the view from the outside doesn’t even come close the view on the inside. By the time I was twenty-three I’d had a front-row seat to three divorces between my various sets of parents and step-parents.

I’ve spent a long time pondering how best to convey the destructive magnitude, the devastating amplitude divorce can carry. In the end, a story seemed best.

This one is from my first divorce.

My first love

As a little boy, I had a happy little universe. My mom, my dad, and I.

I was in love with them, the way a puppy falls in love, the way a baby falls in love. They were my sun and my moon, my sky and my sea, the only things that ever mattered. With them my heart rose and fell.

When they smiled, it wasn’t just the world that smiled with them. Being itself smiled.

It took three years for my parents to go from together to separated and another three to arrive at divorced.

My sun and moon pulled away from each other. Impossible, insane.

They redefined reality. Inexorable, unstoppable. Just the way it’s never supposed to happen.

It came apart slowly at first, so slow you couldn’t see or feel it. But it gained steam and eventually, it hit like a sledgehammer to the face.

We would never be together again.

Lost in space

I was an astronaut repairing a satellite. Working diligently, doing yeoman’s work on a hard problem. I wrap up my task— proud, satisfied — and maneuver my spacesuit to go back to the ship.

But when I turn around, the mothership is gone. It’s in full afterburner, already in re-entry.

They forgot about me. Didn’t even radio.

When I radio them, only static answers. I’m alone in the void.

Everything I need — everything that will keep me alive — is on that ship. The one rocketing away at escape velocity.

The one that forgot I existed.

I tasted my first anguish at six years old. Even now, the taste still lingers, and that experience would influence all my years to come.

Broken in the real world

It took me dozens of years to piece together my own internal story of what happened. A career of adulthood, husbandhood, and fatherhood was necessary to unravel and comprehend the emotional, visceral tangle of that childhood.

In my own marriage of 24 years, my wife and I almost repeated this same story.

We came to the precipice, towing three beautiful sons with us, but didn’t cross over.

What’s it all worth?

If there’s one lesson I’ve learned in all this heartbreak, it’s this: it’s worth it to save it.

If your marriage, especially marriage with children, is at all salvable, do your utmost. Sometimes it isn’t, I know that’s a reality too. But if it is, don’t give up.

Apply as much of these as possible to both you and your spouse: justice, fairness, patience, love, and mercy.

You hold in your hands the achingly tender hearts of your children who are just starting their journey into not only this life but all the life that comes after. What happens in their crucial childhood years reverberates inside them until their very last breath, and even longer.

If you do not want to transmit your wounds, your traumas, your mistakes to your children, you must undertake the Herculean soul-work of transforming yourself.

You must be willing enough and courageous enough to take up the responsibility to heal yourself, especially when it means owning the missteps that have hurt you and others. You must simply grow.

If this path is your path, I wish for you the strength of mind, the courage of heart and the overflowing spirit love that all parents need when they embark on the honest adventure of building a life together and raising a family.

It is the most important work you will ever do, bar none.