Divorcing After 30 Years? What Your Grown Children Need From You

Divorcing after 30 years of marriage? A divorce coach and J.D. on what your grown children need from you, and what they should never have to carry.

Dear Divorce Coach:

Over Labor Day weekend my parents told my brother and me that they are divorcing after thirty-two years. I am thirty-eight. I have two kids of my own, and I live twenty minutes from them.

Since then, each of them calls me most nights. One wants to talk about something the other did in 1998. The other asks whether I think they can afford to keep the house. My brother lives across the country and says, “You’re closer, you handle it.”

I love them both. I am exhausted, and I feel like a terrible daughter for wanting the calls to stop. What is my job here?

Somebody’s Grown-Up Kid in Sacramento

Dear Grown-Up Kid,

You are not a terrible daughter. You are a daughter doing four jobs at once, and three of them were never yours. Wanting the calls to stop is not a failure of love. It is your body telling you the load is wrong.

You are not the referee, the messenger, the financial advisor or the therapist. Your job is to be their kid: love both of them out loud, keep showing up for Sunday dinner, and refuse to pick a side. When a call turns to the other parent, you can say, “I love you, and I can’t be the person you work through this with. Who else could you call about this part?” And ask your brother for a thirty-minute call this week to divide the load. Distance changes what someone can do, not whether they help.

That is my answer to you. But your letter asks a second question, and I want to answer it for the two people who should hear it most.

To the parents reading this

If you are divorcing after thirty years or more, your grown child may have forwarded this to you. If so, they love you. They are also tired, and they did not know how to say it.

I have worked with couples and families since 2015, many of them divorcing later in life. Here is what I tell parents at this stage.

Your children are losing something too

It is easy to assume that grown children take a late divorce in stride. They have their own homes and their own families. But the house they grew up in, the holidays, the story they told about their own childhood: all of it is being rewritten at once. Most adult children grieve quietly, because they think you need them to be strong. Let them be your kid, not your support system.

Find a steady person who is not your child

A divorce after thirty years raises real questions, and each one has a professional whose job it is to answer it. A lawyer explains the law and your options. A financial professional tells you what is actually true about the house, the pensions and the retirement accounts, which matters more at sixty-five than at forty-five. I walked through the first money questions to ask in an earlier column. A therapist helps with the grief. A divorce and conflict coach, which is my work, helps with the practical and the nervous system: what to say, in what order, and how to stay steady enough to decide well.

When you call your child every night, you are asking them to do all four of those jobs without the training, and without being able to say no.

Talk to each other, not through them

If you need to tell your spouse something, tell them. Routing it through a child feels easier, which is exactly why it is so costly. You two are going to share grandchildren, weddings, graduations and holidays for the rest of your lives. Learning to speak to each other directly now, even briefly and even stiffly, is the single biggest gift you can give your family.

And resist the urge to explain the marriage to your children. What happened in 1998 is between the two of you. Your child cannot rule on it, and every time they are asked to, they lose a little of their relationship with their other parent.

Settle the first holidays early

Decide how Thanksgiving and December will work well before November, and tell your children plainly. Do not ask them to host a summit to prove the family can still sit at one table. Separate visits are fine. Surprises are not.

Consider one family conversation

Sometimes the most useful thing a family can do is sit down once, with both parents and the grown children, and agree how the family will handle this: what the children will and will not be asked to carry, how the holidays will work, and who each parent will lean on instead. That conversation goes better with a neutral person in the room. It is some of my favorite work, because one well-held hour can spare everyone years of strain.

If you are still deciding what comes next, I wrote about the questions that matter most when couples separate later in life and about divorce at or after fifty. My book, Should I Stay or Should I Go?, was written for exactly that crossroads.

Not ready to talk to anyone yet? My guides are a gentle place to start.

Your marriage is ending. Your family is changing shape. Your children still need you, as their parents, and that is a job no divorce takes away.

Warmly,
Cherie

If you are the parent reading this, book a complimentary Discovery Zoom with me →
If you are the grown child, forward this to them.