Boycotting the "Broken Family" Idea

I am excited to welcome Dee Waltz from Crystal Adoptions to TheNorthForty!  She is a mother of 5 and a grandmother of 4 as well as an adoption adviser and birth instructor for adoptive parents.  You can visit her blog at crystaladoptions.com/blog.  Here is her inspirational story on handling family after divorce:

One of the hardest things for your child to accept now is that his family is not intact any more.  Actually, it was one of the hardest things for me, as a mother, to accept also.  I have always detested the phrase, “broken family.”  It always made me think of a slum family with no money, living on dirt floors, and sleeping on cots.  It isn’t an accurate description of a divorced family.  It may be the description of a family who is down on their luck but it doesn’t seem appropriate for a family that made a decision to end the pain of a frustrated union.

So I guess I’m boycotting the whole “broken family” idea.  I’m tired of hearing, and maybe you are too, that I was the reason my family was broken because I filed the papers to make it legal.  It was broken way before that court room I can assure you.  I always want to tell them that we aren’t broken any more…now we’re fixed.

Yet what your child needs more than anything is the reassurance that things may change but that they essentially still have a family.  In our situation I have always acknowledged every part of the family.  When my first husband had other children (all of which he adopted), his children went into our children’s picture albums as brothers and sisters right along with ours.  When I remarried, my first two children referred to my last three children as brothers and sisters not specifying one from the other.  When my children write reports at school about their family we include steps, half siblings and adopted ones along with step parents and step grandparents.  I don’t see any reason I should make my children feel ashamed of the fact that they have several family members who love them and see them as family.

When my daughter had her baby this month both her stepmother and I sat by her bed, wiped her brow and rubbed her feet.  Her father sat in a rocking chair watching us both.  Her step-father, my husband, talked to her on the phone.  My ex’s adopted daughter sat behind me brushing my hair as her little sister and I played cards between my daughter’s contractions.  You would have never guessed by looking at us that we weren’t all one family.  Nor would you have ever guessed that when my daughter was young her father and I spent eleven years of our lives in and out of court on petty trials and fighting bitterly for custody of her and her brother.

Are we an unusual family?  Maybe; but most likely it has to do with how much time has passed, how much one of us tried to avoid fighting and striking back and how willing we are to be a part of our child’s life on all the important events.  Life does go on and even though this feels as if it will never end it does get easier if you work on it.

A family should never be defined by who holds the piece of paper stating custody, birth or marriage.  It is about love and devotion; in this case yours and your ex’s, your parents and theirs, the cousins, the godparent’s, the aunts and the uncles of your child.  Even though you choose not to be with your ex, acknowledge, for your child’s sake, that this person and all of their relatives will always be family to your child.  As much as it frustrates you right now, you are all still a family.  You may be a family that doesn’t live together anymore but you are still a family.

Reassure your child that you will always be a family, even though you aren’t living together, and that there will most likely be more family involved later.  Explain to them that other people won’t see it that way.  Warn your child that most people think that divorce means you aren’t family any more but that isn’t a very real way to see things.  Tell your child, when you feel you can, that it’s okay with you for them to love all of their family.  This will give your child a sense of well-being through many adolescent storms.  Other children can be cruel and make your child feel ashamed of their situation.  Divorce used to be a hush-hush thing that only happened to bad people.  Today, though it’s sad, divorce is a reality that many children have to learn to deal with.  We only make it harder on our children by giving them a reason to feel split down the middle during the divorce.  By letting them love their family, in all its diversity, we encourage our child to see the potential in loving the other people in our lives also and it helps them accept the decisions we have made.  It gives them hope.

Dee is seated far right on the couch surrounded by her children, grandchildren, her ex, his wife, his children adopted from several families, her son's mother-in-law with her husband and her son's father-in-law with his wife.