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I’ve Never Seen My Parents Kiss
Pre-cognizant divorces are just as damaging, if not more so, than divorces that happen later in childhood
I’ve often heard people tell the story of their parent’s divorce. They look sad as they say it happened when they were 8, 10, 14, or some other age at which they were aware of what was going, and I’ve always pitied them for it. My parents got divorced so soon after I was born that I never really identified with the other children of divorce. I felt like I had no basis for comparison; I have no memory of the before, and I wasn’t even cognizant of the divorce as it happened. I’d usually shrug my shoulders, act like it didn’t affect me, and reserve my pity for the real victims: those who were old enough to be conscious of what was happening as it happened. But recently, I’ve begun to reconsider.
A baby, of course, isn’t aware of what’s happening in a classic sense, but they’re still sensitive to it. You argue around an infant, and even though they might not know what’s being said, it can still be very upsetting for them. In light of this realization and others, I can reframe it, and I’ve concluded I may have actually been more affected by my parent’s divorce than someone who was old enough to be aware of it.
They separated when I was 18 months old. I don’t know what the arrangement to follow in those early days was, but I know my parents could no longer occupy the same space, which means that I would have to spend basically all of time away from one of them.
We sometimes construe trauma as something with an intellectual base, meaning that if we can forget what happened that the damage would be undone. But the science shows differently. In fact, the period when we seem to be the most susceptible to certain epigenetic changes is in the very first years of our life. I’m no scientist, but I’ve read enough studies on the brain to know, for example, that when a child is neglected at this age they undergo an epigenetic response that methylates their oxytocin receptor gene and messes with their ability to form attachments throughout life.
Of course, I don’t remember much of anything from those earliest years, but I do have scattered memories, and when I was denying any impact from my parent’s divorce, I…
