How do kids deal with the shidduch stigma of their parents’ divorce? How do they build healthy marriages when they didn’t grow up with a positive example? Parents and children share their firsthand experiences.
Gila Jacobson* will never forget the time she was sitting in the backseat of a car listening to her newlywed cousins discuss directions to a store. It was in the early 1970s and Gila was then an impressionable teenager. “My cousin told her husband to make a left turn instead of a right one. When they realized it was a mistake, he took it so calmly — there was no blow up. I couldn’t believe my ears. In my family, that would have sparked an explosion,” says Gila, now a grandmother.
Growing up with parents who were in a volatile marriage left Gila with deep emotional scars. Yet a few years after their divorce, she managed to put the pain behind her and enter a marriage of her own, a relationship that has withstood the test of time and still remains strong.
How did she do it? For divorced parents and their children, that is the million-dollar question.
The mere thought of marriage can trigger doubts and worries in the mind of a child of divorce: Will I have the same kind of miserable home that I was raised in? Can I succeed where my parents failed?
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