What I Learned From My Two Dads and Three Moms

The first cut is the deepest. You don’t have any scars to protect you.

I’m an expert in divorce.

No wait, that’s not the whole picture.

I’m an expert on divorce’s effect on kids (that’s better).

I’m an only child of my mom and dad. They separated when I was three, and finally got divorced when I was six.

I don’t remember the exact details, but my primary emotional memory was abandonment.

My dad remarried two years later, after dating six women. Simultaneously.

This marriage introduced me to brothers; a stepbrother, and a brand-new half-brother, born when I was nine. This marriage, all rocks and broken road, dissolved when I was thirteen.

I didn’t get along with my first step-mom, but it still hurt to find out she was never coming back. I’d just begun to trust her enough to call her mom.

A year later my dad reunited with the love of his life, a lady he’d met before I was born.

They lived happily ever after (well, for 33 more years, which was about as much of ever after as my dad had left). Enter step-brother two and step-sister one. I didn’t live with them, but we visited a lot.

Not to be outdone, my mom remarried when I was fifteen. She and her new husband promptly had two girls, my two half-sisters. Total sibling count: 6.

My mom’s second marriage faired about as well as my dad’s second, and it dissolved when I was twenty-three.

By the time she told me over the phone, I’d already seen this movie twice before.

I knew what it meant to watch your emotional skin get peeled back by cataclysms utterly beyond your control.

It’s hard to put that feeling in words. This video does a pretty good job, though.

First thing I did was call my dad to check on his universe. He was fine, and so was his third marriage. That was comforting.

For the first time, I’d found civility in the midst of civil war.

Many adults say “Divorce can’t be that bad. Kids are resilient, they’ll forget, they’ll get over it.”

That’s a rationalization.

It’s something mom’s and dad’s say after a double-shot of whiskey and a hope chaser.

They don’t want to think they’re hurting their kids. Who does? So they buffer the emotional sledgehammer with the see-through illusion that their kids are a super-hero combo of Stretch Armstrong and X-MEN’s Wolverine.

Kids are tough. They still have most of their growth ahead of them. They will make it through, but not undamaged.

I can assure you, from my experience both as a boy with two dads and three moms and also as a father with stepchildren and my own children, it’s easier to raise healthy, functional children than it is to heal broken adults.

What I learned from all this is fairly simple, though I had to practice the lesson in my own marriage.

Being married is hard. It’s not anything like what TV and movies say. Staying with it is an honest adventure of total commitment. Once children arrive, it gets even harder and more important.

But working to stay together is worth it, and it is the most intense personal work you’ll ever do.

Can you admit you were wrong, that you made mistakes that hurt the ones you loved? Can you admit it in front of your spouse and your children?

Can you try to improve your self despite failing over and over?

Can you pay attention to your thinking all day, every day, to catch your bad self-talk, your angry thoughts, your vicious ideas and then mentally change direction a hundred, two hundred times a day?

This is the hard work of personal growth in marriage. This has been my own personal journey.

The “worth it” part is giving your children a priceless gift: the emotional, mental and soulful stability of an ordered familial universe.

Out of these formative years children will build their identities, they will make judgements about whether the universe is hostile or not, they will form the psychological templates of what they deserve in life, and how other people should treat them (especially their future partners).

The price you pay to stay in a rescuable marriage is the cost of the gift you give to your children that they can grow into healthy, functional, loving adults.

It’s worth it. It’s the most worth it thing in life.