Tween/TeenLit: Split in Two: Keeping It Together When Your Parents Live Apart Helps Kids Adjust to Two Homes
My fondest wish when I was a kid was that my parents would divorce. Naively, I believed that I would live with my father.
The reality, back in the day, was that if my parents did divorce, my brothers and I would end up with our mother (who didn’t particularly enjoy motherhood). We all got out of the house in our late teens, and our parents stayed marry ‘til death did they part (they were in their 80s).
Author Karen Buscemi’s book, Split in Two: Keeping It Together When Your Parents Live Apart, deals with the realities of being the kid shared by two former mates.
In addition to having two “homes,” kids from split homes have to spend (waste) time traveling between parents, lose time with their friends, may have two different bedrooms but not what they need when they need it (“oh, shoot, I left it at the other house”), and experience chaotic schedules, often affected by things that no one could have foreseen or controlled.
Having voluntarily spent my time in two homes—one in Louisiana and one in Mississippi—up until five years ago, I can attest to that feeling of waking up and wondering where you are, which I still experience although I’m living in one place.
Being a tween or teen, undergoing the pressures of school and peers, and dealing with your own hormonal changes must increase that confusion tenfold (at least). Imagine what it must be like to feel your life has been reduced to moments between traveling back and forth, and it’s not something you caused or can control.
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