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Marital Breakup Also Affects Parents

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By MIREYA NAVARRO, The New York Times

Published: September 6, 2007

The breakup of the marriage brought Ina Chadwick heartache, guilt and financial hardship. The divorce, she said, tore away from her everything in her 'Cinderella dream.'

But the divorce she so ruefully speaks about was her daughter's, not her own.

'You live through your child's divorce,' said Chadwick, 60, a writer who is still dealing with the fallout from the collapse of her middle daughter's marriage four years ago.

Marsha Temlock, a retired family counselor in Westport, Conn., said her initial reaction to the divorce announcement of one of her two sons five years ago was, 'How could you divorce this wonderful girl?' For months she fielded calls from her son and daughter-in-law like a 'switchboard operator,' she said, letting their divorce monopolize her life.

Temlock eventually let go and even wrote a book for parents going through their children's divorce. But for a long time, she said, 'I was bereft.'

As the ties between parents and adult children have grown closer over the past few decades, more parents find themselves navigating the rocky shoals of divorce, or even the breakup of long-term relationships, right along with their children.

Parents today are not only more involved in their adult children's lives, but they are also living longer and more active lives, said Andrew Cherlin, a sociologist at John Hopkins University who was the co-writer of a book on American grandparents. This means, he said, that 'it's much more common for adult children to have their parents still living when they divorce.'

Parents Caught In Middle

And when children divorce, their parents' lives are often dramatically changed, an impact that is receiving increasing attention in books, Internet forums and in the courts, where some grandparents find themselves when custodial battles cut them off from grandchildren.

Parents of divorcing children may find themselves incurring debt to help their children financially or putting plans to travel, play golf and simply enjoy their families on hold. Or their lives are turned upside down when a son or daughter needs to move back home or when they find themselves without recourse when their grandchildren are torn from them in custody battles.

Chadwick said she and her second husband took out 'a sizable' loan that enabled her daughter and her two children to keep their house. The loan, which the daughter is slowly repaying, 'cut into us a lot,' Chadwick said.

Some of the older couple's plans, such as a home renovation, have been deferred, but Chadwick said she appreciated being able to help her family.

Less affluent parents, some grandparent advocacy groups note, are sometimes forced to take jobs to help pay for their children's divorce-related costs or struggle for ways to represent themselves in court to fight to see their grandchildren.

A retired couple, Lola and Bill Bailey, lost touch for seven years with their two grandchildren after their daughter divorced her husband and he got custody.

'When they came back to us, we had to mourn the children that we lost, and we had to start from scratch,' Bailey said.

During those years, Bailey helped organize the National Committee of Grandparents for Children's Rights, an organization that lobbies for laws that recognize children's rights to keep in contact with their grandparents after a divorce.

Despite a few legislative victories in such states as New York, where grandparents can pursue visitation rights in some cases, Bailey, who travels with her husband on a motor coach across the country on behalf of their organization, said most grandparents are still at the mercy of the custodial parent and judges if they would like to keep seeing their grandchildren.

To minimize exposure to the acrimony of the warring spouses, parents of divorced children are advised to avoid taking sides or criticizing, even in cases when the parents may disagree with their own child's behavior.

Ex-Son-In-Law Still Welcome

Since Sandra Besas' daughter went through a divorce a year and a half ago, Besas has made sure to talk to her former son-in-law regularly and welcome him in her home. She has two young grandsons at stake. Having been through a divorce, Besas, 67, a nurse who lives in New Hampshire, knows the importance of maintaining family ties. Her connection with her former father-in-law, she said, was so close that when he was old and widowed, he came to live with her and her second husband, now deceased.

'It was wonderful for my children because he was their grandpa,' she said.

But her daughter, Kristen Jackson, 42, said she had not always appreciated her mother's communication with her ex-husband. Sometimes, Jackson said, Besas inadvertently gave him 'too much information,' which Jackson feared could give him an advantage in their disputes.

But Jackson said she wanted to follow in her mother's footsteps by striving for a healthy relationship with her ex-husband and his family because the stability of the boys' relationship with everyone is most important.

'It's not quite Demi Moore and Bruce Willis going on vacation with Ashton Kutcher,' she said, 'but that's an ideal, isn't it?'

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