Women with HD...is it true or just situational?

[TeaEarlGreyHot]

The fact is, kids DO NOT automatically feel OK about their parents sleeping with other people JUST BECAUSE they have divorce and re-marriage paperwork that makes it all official, kosher, and holy. To a lot of kids, it feels wrong that parents sleep with new people, sometimes regardless of whether they do it in a marriage, or after a divorce.

Quite true.

My mom and dad separated and then divorced when I had just turned 7 (between 1st and 2nd grade). As bad as the fighting was before she moved out, it didn't get any better afterward as my brother and I were pawns in the power play. My brother, who is 3 years younger than me, didn't really have a lot of memories of my mom and dad together, and in some ways he was more vulnerable to the propaganda than I was.

Although neither of them remarried, it was difficult at times to deal with all my dad's girlfriends. A parent who insists that you tell the truth except when it comes to whom he is going out with....creates many difficulties.

When my first wife told me that she was having an affair, I was right back to the day my mom told me that she was leaving. Our son was 3 when she told me and turned 4 right before she left. Within days of moving out, her boyfriend/lover moved in with her. He has no real memory of a time when his mother and I were together and in love with each other. His mom and I did not use him as a pawn and my son has thanked me for that, saying that as divorces go, we did the very best we could to keep him out of the middle of it.

I was always careful to not say anything derogatory about her out of anger in his presence. I never pumped him for information to know what was going on. But if he had questions, I almost always answered them AND when I did I answered them honestly.

Now, 25 years later, my son is asking adult questions about what really went on and comparing his own experiences with what he has observed and my experiences. I know part of what is driving this and part of that is that it really was not okay (given the way things have turned out and some of the things he has told me) for his mom to leave me.

Of course, I waited for her to come back and she didn't. And eventually, I went my own way and started dating, which was probably a big mistake on my part.

Divorce and effects on children are very big and can reach far beyond what we can imagine. I notice that people my age who were the children of divorce have a completely different perspective on it than those adults that never experienced it as children.