The shame, the split, the broken home

I was watching some videos from Split Happens interviews with young adults and children who went through or are going through their parents' divorces.

And it struck me that as each of them spoke about coming from a broken home, that this particular phrase still crops up in MIAMs all the time.

I'm guilty of using the term as well, often referring to myself as a child of a broken home, but I do so knowing that was the prevailing view in the 80s when my parents separated.

Was my home broken? Not really, whether it is trauma blanked out or I was simply too young to remember I do not recall my dad sitting us down and telling us he was leaving, I am told that this presumably pivotal point in my childhood happened but I have no memory of it at all. I was 6.

I know my mum felt shame as divorce was not something she would ever have considered and so perhaps to her the relationship was indeed "broken" but the home wasn't. If by home we mean the place I lived, then yes it changed, I recall vividly moving house which must have been within a couple of years of the split, but it was never broken.

I'd love to say that was due to my parents attending mediation but it wasn't it was down to hard work by my mum and her efforts to cope with a sea-change, I don't know how my dad coped (other than going through a string of marriages - he must have liked wedding cake). Yes our lives changed forever, I rarely saw my dad after that (we reconnected a little before his death now over 10 years ago) but the home was never "broken" we weren't (as the then government would have painted us) wild miscreants roaming the mean streets of rural Lincolnshire looking for trouble. We were just a new arrangement of family trying to do the best we could.

So I shall have to call myself out (and clients) on using the term broken, rarely do people enter into marriage aiming to end it (pre-nups notwithstanding) and to suggest that a change, any change, is a breakage rather than a development hinders the ability to address those changes in a way which does not ascribe blame or imply the change is not normal, people have been getting divorced and separating for as long as people have been getting married or together, it is more normal than not, if over 40% of marriages end in divorce and similar numbers of long term relationships outside of marriage end then only mathematically is divorce/separation unusual, and frankly it's within calculation errors to be 50/50.

Food for thought.