Avoiding a nightmare

MAXINE COHEN

My middle daughter, Sherri, came in to spend the weekend with me. She

got married in November, the first of the girls to take the leap.

And what a big leap it was. I had no idea until the morning of the

last day of her visit. I was just waking up when I felt the plop of

her body on my bed.

“Mom,” she said. “Are you awake?”

Without waiting for a reply, she continued, “I gotta tell you my

dream. I just had it again. The same one I always have that just

freaks me out.”

No, I wasn’t really awake but I was waking up real fast.

“In the dream, I look over expecting to see Jay (her lovely

husband) but instead, to my horror, I see ... (the prior boyfriend

from hell). I don’t know where Jay went or how ... [boyfriend from

hell] got there so I start to look for Jay, but I can’t find him. I

look harder and harder and am getting more and more upset and ...

[boyfriend from hell] is still there.”

“Whoa,” I said, fully awake now and remembering all the pain and

craziness of that bad relationship. “Whattaya think that means?”

“Well, before we got married, Jay and I talked about the fact that

both our parents are divorced and how hard that was for us growing up

and how we want our marriage to last. Things are so good between us

right now that it’s hard to think that we might not get along, but

we’re both afraid that that might happen.”

“So how do you think the dream relates to that?” I asked.

“I think the dream is my fear that Jay will turn into ...

[boyfriend from hell] without me even knowing that it’s happening and

the marriage will be a disaster beyond repair.”

“Sounds right on to me,” I offered.

So this got me to thinking. Sherri is 30. I was an old married

woman by then, eight years under my belt and the mother of two. I had

no fear when I married that it would end in divorce; it wasn’t even a

consideration. People stayed together. To this day, I can recall

being in third grade when the scandal hit my little town -- there was

a family getting divorced.

But this is a very different time and place. The baby boomers have

seen to that, all right, and I am one of them.

And so instead of making the grade, getting married, and living

“happily ever after,” today’s young people are only too painfully

aware that there is no such thing as “happily ever after.”

So what do the experts have to say?

Judith Wallerstein, Ph. D., has done the most widely respected

research on the effects of divorce on everyone in the family. In

particular, she followed 131 children, now in their late 20s to early

40s, over a period of 25 years and compiled her findings in “The

Unexpected Legacy of Divorce” and “What About the Kids,” among other

books.

She found that compared with children from intact families,

children of divorce are “without a doubt” more worried that

relationships can’t be trusted to last. This worry becomes

overpowering in young adulthood, when the developmental press to make

a commitment and marry is strongest.

Wallerstein recommends that the best way to minimize the effects

of divorce on children is to have ongoing, honest conversation about

it. Even though you may have talked about it before, probably many

times, children of divorce continue to work on understanding their

parents’ divorce all through their childhood and beyond. At each

developmental stage, it’s a different level of understanding as they

use their increasingly sophisticated ability to comprehend complex

relationships. A 7-year-old cannot and does not need or want to

understand in the same way that a 15-year-old does. A

20-something-year-old, dealing with the issues of trust and

commitment and trying to make a life of his or her own, needs to

understand fully what the serious issues were that broke up the

marriage.

And so, child of mine, child of divorce and single parenting,

child that did not get to see a model of a man and a woman relating

well that she can imitate and learn from, I wish for you, with all my

heart, that Jay, who truly is a dream, will never turn into that

boyfriend from hell, who was indeed a nightmare.