What About the Kids?

As an adult child of divorce, I was always determined that mine wasn't going to be one of those marriages that ended up a statistic.  Too bad I married a gay man.

Any healthy relationship must be built upon mutual trust and respect.  So, by definition, if your spouse is lying to himself and you about who he is, trust goes right out the window.  Same with infidelity, whether with a man, a woman or an eggplant.

As an adult child of divorce, I also knew firsthand the difficulties children experience when their parents split.  I didn't want my kids to experience that -- I wanted to break the cycle of family dysfunction, the gift that keeps on giving.

My poor children -- both young adults, now -- grew up in a home where verbal and emotional abuse were fairly common.  It's interesting that their grandfather -- my ex's dad -- was a very good and attentive father when his children were infants and toddlers, but as soon as they became school age, the relationship became one of power (his) and control (his) punctuated by verbal outbursts and some violence.  The apple didn't fall far from the tree.

When my kids were born, I was heartened by my then-husband's care of the babies.  He was great with them.  He walked them into the wee hours of the morning when they were colicky.  He had no issue changing them, feeding them, bathing them ... he was extremely nurturing and gentle.  You could tell he loved them and loved being a father.  But as they began to grow older -- by mid-elementary school years -- he seemed to lose that deft touch and began to try to control their behavior, much like his father did with him and his siblings.

To be sure, I didn't model good emotional health, either.  I had anxiety issues galore, for which I was finally medicated.  (Zoloft is a good thing!)  My external boundaries weren't the greatest and my internal boundaries were virtually nonexistent.  I had lost my voice at some point during the marriage -- probably in an effort to keep the peace as it seemed we were always walking on eggshells -- and so tried to be the peacemaker in the entire family.  I only started modeling healthy behavior with good boundaries after the elephant came out of the closet, as it were, and I began working a 12-step program and getting intensive counseling.

Today, I worry about my kids having healthy relationships as they move into full-fledged adulthood.  Both are in their early 20s.  My son -- the oldest -- seems to have the hardest time of it.  He's shy and introverted and has a reasonably bad body image (much like his mother!  He was in denial about his father's sexuality for quite awhile and it took my ex actually coming out to the kids to make it real.  This only happened last year.  I believe my son is somehow worried about any potential impact his father's "gayness" might have on him, although he knows that he is strongly attracted to women.  (As a kid, my son was often called gay as a perjorative, and still wonders if it was because of his dad; shame in these situations, is almost genetic.)  Certainly, his father didn't model for him what a heterosexual man behaves like.  While my son doesn't act effeminate, he is unsure of himself and how he "should" act, which makes him self-conscious.

My daughter was in her mid-teens when it all hit the fan, and it was a crucial time in her development to learn her father was unfaithful, had based his life on a lie, was a gay man and -- most importantly of all -- disowned her two times.  She already struggled with catching him in lies.  She was very aware of the emotional abuse.  But, still -- even as now -- he is her daddy.  And that's the hardest part.  She has lost all respect for her father.  (I reminded her today that her dad loves her and she said: Yeah, but he doesn't count.  I told her that it does count, even though she doesn't believe it now.)  Of all the tragedies, this is probably the biggest.  Yes, my son has lost respect for him, too, but not all respect.  He still has a relationship of sorts with his dad. My daughter, not so much.  I hope that changes in time.

While my ex hasn't been a stellar parent, he has at least been more of a stand-up guy than many men, straight or gay, after a divorce.  He always paid his child support, and he has kept both kids on his health insurance.

So, what about the kids?  For me, they are the absolutely best thing to come out of that failed relationship and marriage.  For them, they've asked me why I stayed so long, a question which I've discussed with them (especially my daughter.)  It may be easier for younger children to accept that their father is gay.  It hasn't been for my children who, while they long suspected a porn problem, did not suspect that their dad was homosexual.  However, it's reality.  The thing with reality is that it is what it is.  And the longer they live with it, the closer they'll come -- hopefully -- not only to acceptance, but to integrating it into their lives.