Filed under: Birth Order, creativity, Custody, Exemplary Children of Divorce, Relationship with Father, relationship with Mother
Mishna Wolff is a writer of a humorous memoir called I’m Down about growing up white in an all black neighborhood. Chapter One describes her parents’ divorce when she was seven. Wolff was surprised to learn that she would continue to live with her Father while seeing her Mother on the week-ends. At the time she is not surprised by her parents’ decision to divorce because she has always felt they were “mismatched.” She is surprised to find that she won’t attend the custody hearing so that everyone would want to hear her preferences. Surprise, Surprise.
Mishna was the oldest of two daughters. Her Father paid her an allowance to look after her little sister. She takes on this responsibility with a light hearted attitude.
Sorry, that’s the only chapter I’ve read so far. Just get so excited when I see anyone giving any opinions at all about their divorce experience couldn’t wait.
Filed under: Abandonment, Alcoholism, Exemplary Children of Divorce, High School Drop Out, moving, Murder, Relationship with Father, School Drop Out - High School or College, sex, Trauma
The Black Dahlia murder keeps showing up in my internet play. When looking up James Elroy’s biography I didn’t read about the victim of this murder, Elizabeth Short. It turns out that Short was not really a Child of Divorce, but her parents were separated in a weird sort of way.
After going bankrupt in 1930 because of the Depression, Short’s Father faked his suicide so the family could receive insurance. Short was 6 years old. He moved from Massachusetts to California and rebuilt his life.
Short’s Mother moved her 5 daughters and took a job as a bookkeeper. Short moved to California to be with her Father when she was 19 but he threw her out of the house. Short partied and slept around and moved around a lot. She dated some servicemen during World War II but one, who she was set to marry, was killed.
Her murder is said to be a mystery to this day. She died when she was 22. This was very close to her 2d Jupiter Return which is interesting because she would have been under the influence of her first Jupiter opposition when her Father disappeared. This would explain her charm and her risk taking life style.
Filed under: Uncategorized
Don’t know why I found out about two crime novelists/Children of Divorce at the same time. Good things happen in pairs, I guess. Both novelists are centered in California.
Along with Raymond Chandler, James Ellroy, is another great classic who has written The Black Dahlia, L.A. Confidential, and the awesome Child of Divorce/Murder My Dark Places. This last one is the result of working with a detective for 15 months on the cold case of his mother who was raped and murdered.
Like Chandler, Ellroy didn’t start writing until he was much older. He has suffered from Alcoholism, Depression, Drug Addiction, Homelessness and a Criminal Past.
There are many interviews on the Internet with Ellroy which I recommend. Here is one from the TV News show 60 Minutes. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dI0rpNoSLwA.
I think Ellroy’s parents divorced when he was seven years old, but am not positive on that because for some reason I didn’t write it down. The parents were given split custody. James lived with his Mother, a nurse, during the week and with his Father on 3 week-ends a month. He preferred living with his Father. In My Dark Places, there is a really eerie description of how he felt nothing after his Mother’s death and was happy to be able to finally live with his Father. There are humorous and sad descriptions of typical parental alienation games between parents. His Father called his Mother a whore and his Mother called his Father something else. Can’t remember, but Ellroy couldn’t have become a good writer without these words, no doubt.
Didn’t know that there were previous divorce boom’s in California but apparently there were. California just sort of “booms” a lot with Gold, Real Estate, Movies, Immigration, Divorce. In addition to the 70’s divorce boom which blew the small town where I grew up there was one in the 1950s. According to the CDC there was also a boom in the 1920’s. “In 1956 my mother moved us from West Hollywood to Santa Monica. I enrolled in a cut-rate private school called Children’s Paradise. The place was a dump site for disturbed kids of divorce. “A flurry of single moms hit the gate at 5:10. I developed a yen for women in their late thirties.” (My Mother’s Killer by James Ellroy, gg.com, July 8, 2007). The town, El Monte, place of where Elroy was living with his Mom, was called “The City of Divorced Women.” (p. 25).
My Dark Places is mainly about Ellroy dealing with his complicated feelings for his Mother. Her murder led him to obsession with crime. Reading about crime and committing it. He apparently had an obsession with older women even before that which led to his first novel The Black Dahlia which is about an unsolved murder of a beautiful woman in L.A. just like his Mother.
I suppose the Child of Divorce part of the story comes from the complexity of feelings for his Mother as a result of the stress from the Divorce. It is just not recognized as a catalyst, so maybe it wasn’t.
Here is a nice tribute of his feelings for her which is posted at the beginning of the book. I think a lot of us can relate to us especially when dealing with the grief of our parents’ deaths:
Filed under: Abandonment, Addiction - Parents, Alcoholism, College Drop Out, creativity, Exemplary Children of Divorce, Homelessness, Living with Aunts and Uncles, Living with Grandparents, Long Term Fallout, poverty, Relationship with Father, relationship with Mother
Raymond Chandler is a 20th Century detective novel writer written in a “hard-boiled style.” Some of the titles were The Big Sleep, Farewell My Lovely, and The Long Good-Bye. One might expect that a writer would discuss his childhood a bit but in the book Raymond Chandler Speaking (Gardner and Walker, p.20) he gives two liners to each parent.
His father: “My father was a graduate of Penn, a civil engineer. Divorced when I was seven…Never saw my father again.”
His Mother: “My Mother soon after returned to England to live with her mother and manage the house, and of course I went with her.”
Chandler grew up in Chicago until he was 7 years old. His Father worked for the railroads and was drunk most of the time. Chandler wrote that he was “found drunk if he was found at all.” (Hiney, Tom. Raymond Chandler: A Biography, p. 4).
Chandler’s Mother was born in Ireland and they moved to Ireland to live with family after his Father disappeared for the last time. They had lost their house and were living in a hotel where the boy caught Scarlett Fever. Chandler’s Mother never talked about his Father again.
Chandler said that he had wished his Mother had remarried in London. “I know that my mother had affairs — she wa a very beautiful woman– and the only thing that I felt to be wrong was that she refused to marry again for fear a step-father would not treat me kindly, since my father was such a swine.” (Honey, Tom. Raymond Chandler: A Biography, p. 10)
Chandler had generous relatives and grew up in Britain. He and his Mother returned to the United States. He worked at several professions, getting fired for drinking himself. He didn’t write his first story until 1933 at Age 45. His first novel, The Big Sleep, was published when he was 51.
Chandler fell in love with the step-mother of a friend who was 18 years his senior. His Mother forbade the relationship so Chandler didn’t marry Cissy until after her death. When his wife died in 1954 Chandler attempted suicide.
Chandler died in 1959 of pneumonia which was brought on by alcoholism.
This is a morbid topic but probably much more applicable to Children of Divorce than to Children from Intact Families. Divorcing parents can try to end things. In the last week two celebrities have committed suicide leaving behind children. The 13-year old daughter of fashion designer Kate Spade was at the beginning of her parents’ divorce process and the 11-year old daughter of Chef/Journalist Anthony Bourdain has been separated from her Father for awhile. I’m not listing names in order to respect their privacy and wish to send my condolences.
The Veterans Health Administration has published a page on their website devoted to providing information to children who are exposed to suicide within their families. https://www.mirecc.va.gov. Rocky Mountain MIRECC for Suicide Prevention. It is nice that different age groups are addressed.
Filed under: Statistics
Here is a compilation of some divorce information taken by the CDC for the years 1896-1967.
Some of the earlier surveys asked how many children were affected but the answers are sketchy. At least they tried. Looks like the average divorcing couple had an average of 1.5-2.0 children.
It is interesting how Divorce rates have risen after Wars end. Divorce is War. Probably the Veteran’s come home with PTSD. Or Marriages were rushed before soldiers were deployed.
It looks like there were Divorce Booms in the 1920’s and the 1950’s. Not included would be the Divorce Boom in the 1970’s and 80’s.
California and some other state’s hasn’t contributed any data to the CDC’s records since the early 1980’s. This increases the stigma for growing up in Divorce a huge deal since obviously it’s not important. California rarely elects a politician to run the state who is from Divorce.
Filed under: Uncategorized
“Son who wrote viral revenge obituary about his mom explains why he did it”
Filed under: Addiction - Parents, Alcoholism, Blame, Complex PTSD, Learned Helplessness, Long Term Fallout, Mentally Ill Children of Divorce, Mentally Ill parents, Parents never married, PTSD, The Blame Thing, Trauma
Dealing with parents who are blaming you for everything, probably even dealing with parents who blame each other for everything, can lead to later psychological problems which are now being labelled “Complex PTSD.” A child who regularly experiences this along with alcoholism, drug addiction, suicide, mental illness, poverty, neglect, unreliability, blame, suicide, etc. etc. could develop Complex PTSD. Here is an article which discusses Learned Helplessness which is one symptom associated with complex-PTSD. The author does not recognize fallout from divorce. They never do. Get used to it. She connects it to feeling shame. Learned helplessness can result from trying to get your parents to stop arguing, witnessing domestic violence, trying to convince a parent to stop abusing drugs or alcohol, probably even waiting to be picked up from school if the parent is chronically late and the other kids have all left. It seems there are some studies about this for parents who go through divorce, especially the ones who divorce a Narcissist. I guess kids who are left to fend for themselves with a Narcissistic parent. A psychologist will not gloss over the fact that you had a narcissistic parent. A great Huffington Post article explains what this means. The writer Craig Malkin describes 8 problems which children of narcissistic parents face: 1. Chronic self-blame 2. Echoism 3. Insecure attachment 4. Need-panic 5. Fierce independence 6. Parentified child 7. Extreme narcissism 8. PTSD.
Psych researchers are picking through various talked about problems and trying to identify whether struggle s a child of divorce is dealing with is related to the divorce or whether it is related to the actual problem. Don’t have a link, but one study found that certain stress symptoms are related to being a child of an alcoholic rather than a child of divorce. I don’t think the study looked at children who experienced death of a parent or whose parents never married to compare. Maybe they have at the research level.
I’ve discussed the ACE Study before. The Huffington Post wrote a great 4-part article on the ACE Study. If interested try looking there. It’s a huge study of employed, functional people who developed chronic illness later in life. It found a direct link between chronic illness and multiple stressors in the life. There are more stressors than included in the study. All a Doctor has to do is to question the patient about the 9 stressors involved and then patients will have remarkably fewer problems with the illness. Something like a 30 percent reduction of office visits.
Spoiled Children of Divorce 