“‘Where do you live?’ the middle aged businessman asked the nine-year old girl sitting next to him on the plane.  ‘I live with my dad in Oregon and my mom in California.’ ‘I mean, where do you live?’ the businessman persisted. ‘I live with my dad in the summers and my mom during school time.’ ‘I understand honey,’ he said, ‘but where is your real home?’ The little girl looked as puzzled as her seatmate. Then she explained: ‘I have two real homes. My mom’s house and my dad’s house.’”

This beautiful passage is quoted from one of the seminal works on family separation and transition, “Mom’s House, Dad’s House: Making Two Homes for Your Child” (Simon & Shuster, 1997) by Isolina Ricci, Ph.D. All too frequently, however, children and parents facing separation and divorce do not experience this functional and smooth blend of acceptance, clean transition, new emotional and psychological boundaries, and renewed  attachments and bonding. Divorce provides a potential recipe for confusion about the presence or absence of one or the other of the parents.

In her book, “Ambiguous Loss: Learning To Live With Unresolved Grief” (Harvard University Press, 1999), Pauline Boss talks about how “The family event of divorce . . . can be better understood and managed by everyone involved if it is viewed as an ambiguous loss.” The marriage has been lost, for example, but parenting continues. It’s important to both validate and confirm to children this change in the marital relationship, and at the same time stress what remains the same in their family. Boss continues: “Identifying what has been lost and grieving it while also identifying the connections that continue in their lives is a healthier approach for children than simply saying, ‘Mommy and Daddy don’t love each other any more, but they will always love you.’”

What can make a divorce especially painful and difficult, according to Ms. Boss,  is the ambiguity and unresolved loss that often accompanies it. This can be exacerbated by the parents creating confusion as to “who’s in and who’s out” in the family. She gives the example of the family photo. How many times do parents, in their anger and grief, arrange to have the now-divorced parent excised from the photo? Other examples are parents who are uncomfortable attending children-focused events if the other parent is there; children who make the rounds of multiple homes during holidays. In the end, Ms. Boss notes, children become ambivalent about seeing the other parent because tension is so high.

As we approach and experience the holidays this year, let’s take time to look at what should be important and precious in all our lives: love, connection, acceptance, presence, continuity and stability, and family.

I hope you have a wonderful, peace filled Holiday and a happy and joyous New Year!

Don Desonier

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 16th, 2009 at 2:22 pm and is filed under Collaborative Family Law, collaborative divorce. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.