Divorce bomb: The trauma of family breakup is seamed deep through me still

When parents are at war, it’s always the kids who suffer most. I’ve been there, as a child, and in middle age I still carry the scars.

Trauma: it’s always the kids who suffer most

But what of the kids in divorce cases? Actor Ewan McGregor spoke recently in a way that feels rare, and blisteringly honest, especially for public couples splitting up. “A divorce in a family is a bomb going off in everyone’s life – my children’s lives,” he said. “The sort of healing of that is ongoing.” So, do we talk about the kids enough? What they endure when their parents split? For years afterwards. Decades. Perhaps for life.

Recently there’s been the unedifying example set by two warring actors, Ioan Gruffudd and Alice Evans. Evans released texts her ex-husband allegedly sent their 12-year-old daughter, explaining why he couldn’t see her, citing his new partner. There’s rawness and pain in the exchanges, but I guarantee one person is suffering the most in the situation – the 12-year-old.

Sometimes the will to win among adults, to crush, is so great that the child’s needs are neglected in the process. I see it in kids around me whose parents have been at it since the primary school years, and as the child graduates from high school those adults are still at it. Haggling over money, access, hidden assets, court orders, with AVOs flying on both sides. And meanwhile there’s a damaged, heartbroken child in the midst of it.

I’ve been there, as a child, and in middle age still carry the scars from my parents’ war. “We must love another or die,” urged the poet WH Auden, yet growing up my riven family seemed beyond that. There’s a fragility, still, decades later, that’s hard to explain to those from happy families, happy childhoods. My mother’s voice in panicked argument, my father’s sudden aggression, my weeping at his second wedding when I was 14. Mortifying, public sobbing I couldn’t control, and was so ashamed by. It felt like a culmination of grieving after years of trauma. All I wanted was my daddy back. My parents together again. A normal life. I sensed that despite everyone’s best efforts at that wedding (I was a bridesmaid), this occasion meant one thing in my life with the male I loved the most – relegation. I knew from that day his old family were “the past”, and nothing would ever go back to normal.

My experience of family trauma began early, around age seven. It felt like some fairytale of vicious darkness had seeped into my world and cursed us all, but no one would tell me anything. I was too young; yet amid the acrimony was the silent roar of a little girl lost. I testified in court aged nine. During the protracted battle both parents fought hard for their three kids and I couldn’t work out if it was a love for their children, or a flinty desire to just win, that was the principal dynamic.

The trauma of family breakup is seamed deep through me still. I see something similar in kids around me now and my heart breaks for those fragile young souls, because I know they’ll carry the burden of these times for life. My anguish didn’t stop until both parents had passed away, and now there’s just sadness that so much love and attention was wasted and weaponised. So much energy expended on hatred. So much bitterness lodged rock hard inside a parent, for the rest of their life, so that whenever they spoke of their ex their voice actually changed. Coarsened.

Which is why I applaud Ewan McGregor for being honest about an extremely difficult situation. All children have the rescuing need of parental love, no matter how preoccupied those adults are by their relationship battles. What was this roar of great parental need I felt throughout my own childhood? The piracy of love withdrawn, whether deliberately or by preoccupied neglect, is a hugely destructive force. McGregor’s thoughtfulness is mature and empathetic as he acknowledges the pain of his fragile little family unit, imploded by their devastating divorce bomb.