Divorce Balance

Negotiation > Recovery > Enhancement

Tuesday, April 26, 2005
Role Reversals

• Dear Dell: This is about my father and what I should think of him.

Five years ago, my youngest brother went to college. The next day, my parents filed for divorce. No emotion.

My father met a woman last summer. That's okay. Then I found some eMails he'd sent her from my computer when he stayed with my wife and me over Easter. Some reference sex. A 50-year-old man can still be pretty interested in sex, I guess.

It was the romantic talk that upset me. Like "my heart aches in the absence of your warm breath upon my neck as we nestle in slumber." I hate that talk. My parents never even held hands.

Am I weird? I was 24 when my parents divorced. I've been married four years. We have an 18-month-old. My wife says what my parents do should no longer effect me. It's not like I was a kid when they split up.

I feel like I have to be his dad now.

• Dear Parentified: You're not weird.

If we put just what you've written here on a time line, it seems to me that we're talking about a rather full calendar.

Your parents divorced on the cusp of your own transition from school to career pursuits. Within the two years following their divorce, you had courted, planned a wedding, and married. Less than a year into your honeymoon, a child was conceived.

Now you're barely into words, walking, and wee-wee, when you run smack dab into adolescent issues a'la a father who's seemingly discovered cuddling. You're feeling pressure to finally start revising family members' disrupted job descriptions and to draw a new seating chart for get-togethers.

Maybe in pencil.

Even without the divorce, Parentified, "weird" would be if you somehow could go forward with your life, sans family-of-origin influences.

Consider this from "When a Parent Dies," by Le Anne Schreiber in O: The Oprah Magazine, November 2004.

"Approaching 40, I speculated that this was perhaps one of the best-kept secrets of life, that nobody ever really feels grown up" until confronted with the loss of a parent.

In a Journal of Divorce & Remarriage paper titled, "Working Therapeutically with Adult Stepchildren," several unique challenges are identified for families where the parents divorce after the children are out of the marital home.

Specific to your question, are you feeling forced into "comparisons" with your father?

"If the parent appears to have achieved intimacy more easily in a new relationship than the child has so far achieved, feelings of insecurity or envy may emerge. The arrival of a stepparent may likewise trigger feelings of anger or jealousy and any overt signs of parental sexuality are likely to prove highly psychologically threatening."

You already knew your father was no T.S. Elliot.

So, what you may want to "think of him" is how this new openness to emotional intimacy may suggest other ways of relating — positively — between the two of you.

He's still your dad.

—posted by Dell Deaton @2:59 PM EST 4/26/2005 [500]

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