During our young and impatient years, we sometimes do things we live to regret as we come to ourselves in intelligence and temperament. Some actions are mistakes that can come back to haunt us and harm us in our more thoughtful years. And sometimes the consequences of these mistakes will even be visited upon our children. This may never be known until we go through the parenting process in a thoughtful way.
     Mistakes and unavoidables may take the face of a failed marriage where a child is caught in the mix of emotions and hostilities; it may take the face of an abortion; or it may take the face of a child’s premature death or a child being put up for adoption. It may have many faces, some having been caused by the once immature and impulsive us, who is now more enlightened and informed or simply worn by time and chance that occurs to us all as the uncertainties of life.
In America, divorce is one of the most prominent of those faces. Divorce is often hard on a child’s development, especially when certain unpleasantries occur during divorce. A divorce can become so bitter that one parent may cut himself or herself off from the child as well as the spouse; that can have an unfortunate consequence on the child.
     To the child, he or she has been abandoned; that child thinks it and knows it; even the abandoning parent who is hardened in his/her pain and wounded emotions knows it, as he/she tries to rationalize his/her actions, which is a way of easing the feelings of failure and guilt that person naturally feels. Although that parent tries to put the feeling of failure behind him/her, it is buried within and will gnaw at the conscience of that person; it will always be there and seek redemption.
     Hostile divorces always leave wreckage and wounded children, if there are children of that marriage. A case in point to highlight what an abandonment caused by divorce looks like in a child is this: A young Black boy came to my group home as a very angry young man. His probation officer told us this, “This little bastard will not be in your facility for more than a week or two. I’m going to have his little ass back in the hall soon. He’s been in many facilities, and he won’t stay in yours.”
     We thanked him for the encouragement and accepted the child anyway. That youth had been injured in a bitter divorce battle and abandoned by both parents. The mother, an attractive young woman, had divorced the father of the child, and had married another man. After marriage, she moved up in social standing to an upper class home in the Oakland Hills and told the child not to visit her because he reminded her too much of his father.
     The father was a man of poor health--Sickle Cell Anemia--that limited his mobility and activities; he had given up his son to the county’s social service department because, in his words, “The boy is too active for me to take care of.” So the only person who seemingly cared for the child was a grandmother. But while in our facility, she died; the child felt he had no one.
     He, no doubt, felt that he had some part in the parents’
divorce and their not wanting/loving him. Any angry child that feels some responsibility for his parents divorcing and also feels that he has a right to be angry because he has been abandoned is hard to bring in check. He had started assaultive behavior that brought him into the juvenile justice system and to us.
     As we worked with this child, understanding his confused pain, we modeled the behavior we demanded of him. At some period during this child’s two and a half year stay with us, his probation officer said, “I don’t know what you people are doing there, but keep on doing it because it’s working.”
What we were doing was lifting children out of the wreckage of harmful divorces so those children could become self-sustaining young men even in the midst of an uncaring society and uncaring parents.
     A divorced parent who abandons the marriage and the child knows that there is wreckage in his or her actions. And he/she also knows that the child of a bitter divorce who grows up without a parent may well become angry and antisocial. That anger may lead him into many untoward and unfortunate directions. When the rage of a divorce is subsided and a parent comes to himself/herself, that parent usually recognizes that something unhealthy has happened to the child; then his/her buried guilt shows itself alive still.
     Feelings of guilt may ask, “Did you really do all you could have done?” And the conscience will always say, “You could have done more; you should not have abandoned your child. You should have stayed, if for nothing more than for the well being of your child. You have been a bad parent!” This is how the conscience works in response to guilt. It inflicts an emotional pain upon that parent, regardless of what prompted the divorce.
     Guilt usually makes a person want to compensate for some
wrong; in hindsight the offense seems like the worst possible offense one could have done. And in many instances, that person will look around for some redemptive actthat can release him/her from the pain of guilt; this is especially so when a divorced parent has left the marriage angry, never reconciled with the ex-spouse, and had no contact or very little contact with the child since leaving.
     As a result of that abandonment, that parent is often guilt-ridden, and that feeling will have a very profound impact on the parent who is now mature and contemplating having another child. Those guilt feelings may be called by many other names, but they will always generate guilt-ridden consciences and a need for redemption.
     Abortion of a pregnancy and putting a child up for adoption are two of those other occasions that have great impact on parenting. A mother may seem happy and carefree after an abortion or giving up a child for adoption for many years, but when she wants children and starts to have a family, her past often comes into play and invokes a sense of shame that may haunt the now mature adult who is embarking upon a family. And that haunting may continue throughout this new parenting process. Without getting into the polemics of abortion or adoption, let us examine how these guilt-provoking factors may operate in an adverse way in this new parenting adventure.
     Because abandonment of a child, putting up a child for adoption, or an abortion weighs heavily upon a parent, that person will often seek redemption for what he or she has done. For sanity sake, that person must realize that what is done is history and cannot be undone; this is one of those truths of life. Yet, in spite of that undeniable truth, the parent who has done acts that he/she wishes could be undone will nevertheless attempt to compensate and therefore redeem himself or herself through the child he/she is now about to parent.
     Shame and guilt are powerful forces; often a guilt-ridden parent may have another child as a way of redeeming himself
or herself from past transgressions. That parent may use the new child as some type of redeemer. The belief may be that....

[Pages 110-113]

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