Anger goes missing

“You and Daddy yell at each other all the time,” the boy said to his mom. “I’m afraid of the fighting.” She thought about what the 6-year-old had just said and what his words meant to her and to her husband. She walked her son to school and then called her husband of 12 years. She set in motion their divorce.

Though they had been trying to shelter their three kids from their anger and fighting, she had to admit that in reality, “we weren’t hiding anything, we were only hurting everyone.”

The story from Good Housekeeping is similar to experiences lived by many parents in Las Vegas. They try to hide their disagreements, their fights and their anger, but the children pick up on the signals sent by slammed doors, overheard insults and tension over dinner. The woman who shared her story in the magazine said she didn’t want to hate the man who she had once loved and didn’t want to subject her children to any more of their not-so-secret, constant quarreling.

So her husband moved out one day and everyone was very unhappy. She missed him. The kids missed him. She cried. The kids cried when they left her to go visit him and they cried when they left him to come back home to her. They missed him, then they missed her and then they missed him again.

“But after a while, we all noticed the biggest thing that was missing in the house after my husband moved out,” she wrote. “The anger.”

The fighting had moved out, too. Anxiety seeped out of her life and her skills as a mother were rejuvenated.

It’s a tough decision to make, but for many parents, the decision to end a marriage is the right one to make for their children and for themselves. A skilled, experienced divorce attorney helps you get through the legal process so that you can tend to yourself, your children and your lives.