I Never Said One Bad Word About Their Father. It Did Not Matter.
I never said one bad word about their father.
I want that on the record, because it is technically true, and because I held onto it for about a year like it was proof of something. Not one insult. Not one version of events dressed up as a fact. I was proud of it in a tight, joyless way, the way you are proud of things that cost you.
My son was eleven when he stopped telling me about his weekends at his dad’s.
I did not connect those two things for a long time.
What I eventually noticed was the shape of my own voice. There was a particular register I used when I asked how the weekend had been. Lighter than normal. A half-second too long on the question mark. He heard it every single time, and somewhere around the third month he started giving me answers with nothing in them. Fine. Good. We went out.
He was not being difficult. He was protecting me, and he was protecting his father, and he was protecting himself from having to do both at once. He was eleven.
There is a study I found much later that I wish someone had put in front of me in the first week.
Tamara Afifi and her colleagues wired up 112 parents and adolescents and got them talking about the parents’ relationship. They tracked self-reported anxiety and skin conductance, which is one of the standard ways researchers measure physiological arousal. The kids who felt caught between their parents developed a need to protect, and that need predicted both the anxiety they reported and the arousal their bodies showed.
I read that and thought about the car. Fifteen minutes, twice a week, my son sitting in the passenger seat managing me.
It was not in anything I said. It was in what I was asking him to do.
The word I use for it now is recruiting.
Both of us were doing it. His father did it differently, with the over-generosity, the yes to everything, the slightly too-emphatic reminders that he was still a good dad. Mine was quieter and I thought that made it better. It did not. Quiet recruitment is still recruitment. The kid still ends up holding something that belongs to the adults.
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And here is the thing that finally made me stop, because guilt never once made me stop. I could not make myself feel neutral about what had happened. I tried. Neutrality was not available to me in year one and I am not sure it is available now. But I could stop asking my son to be my witness. That is a much smaller job. It is a thing you do with your mouth and your face in a car, not a thing you do with your heart at 3am.
The other study that rearranged my thinking came from Allison Thorson, who has spent years researching what happens to children when a parent has an affair.
In 2021 she published work on 215 adult children of parental infidelity. She was looking at whether feeling caught between their parents predicted their well-being, and whether rumination explained the link. It did. And then the detail I keep coming back to: it did not matter whether the parents had divorced or stayed married. Same pattern either way.
I had spent eight months believing the decision was the whole ballgame. Stay and you damage them one way, go and you damage them another, and the entire question of what kind of childhood my kids would remember rested on a choice I could not make.
It did not rest there. It rested somewhere much more ordinary, and much more within reach, and I had been busy in the wrong place.
Thorson also has a 2014 study where she interviewed adult children about what family members said to them after they found out. She sorted the messages by whether they made feeling caught better or worse.
The ones that helped were unremarkable. That the conflict was between the parents. That there was no good guy and no bad guy to pick. That things could change and that was allowed to be spoken about kindly.
The ones that hurt were the ones I recognized. Being pushed to find things out. Being made the go-between. Being handed other relatives’ opinions to carry.
I had never insulted his father. I had also, without ever deciding to, made my son the person who knew how I was doing. Those are not the same failure, but they are both failures, and only one of them was on my list of things not to do.
I fixed it badly and slowly and in the wrong order, the way you fix anything real.
I said the sentence, eventually, in that same car. That what happened was between me and his dad. That there was no side. That nothing about it was his to manage, including me. He said okay in the flat way eleven year olds say okay, and I could not tell if it landed at all.
He started telling me about his weekends again about four months later. Not because of the sentence. Because I stopped doing the voice.
I do not know how this turns out for him. He is fourteen now and I am aware that most of what I will find out, I will find out in about a decade. Nobody can promise you your children come through this intact, and I have stopped reading anything that tries to.
What I can say is that I spent a year working very hard at the thing that did not matter, and I could have spent it on something small and available instead. If you are somewhere in your own first year, holding yourself together in front of a kid who is watching you more closely than you think, you do not have to feel neutral. You have to stop asking them to hold it.
You do not have to do that first year alone at 2am either. Auré is a private, free peer support space for people navigating infidelity, built for both sides of it. Join the waitlist at myaure.life.
