When you confide your hurt in my heart you are storing up adult pain and robbing me of my childhood. You are taking away my belief that love is unconditional and replacing it with a message that tells me to become hard and not to love because I will get hurt and not be able to recover. You may not understand this today and I am so small you are not thinking about my future, but you are putting me at a greater risk of getting a divorce myself.
At times you are risking my safety to fill a void in your heart. My safety is your job.
Without you and your protection I am unshielded from the world. This will manifest in irrational fears for me because I will stay in a state of fight or flight for most of my life.
Someday this initial shock will wear off, but how you choose to parent me through this crisis will never wear off. I will either feel your sense of selflessness, support, protection or I will have a scar on my heart with a message that reads, “Good things happen to good people…I must be bad.”
Thoughtfully,
the child of divorce
