The Divorce Generation Grows Up

David Selig was also watching his parents' marriage blow up that year, but he didn't talk about it with his friends, either. On the surface, the Seligs seemed like a typical middle-class family. His dad worked in the sandblasting business, coached the T-ball team and took David to Indian Guides, a father-and-son group where members were called "chiefs" and "braves." But under the surface, there was friction at home. "I don't think I ever recall it being a harmonious family unit," says David, who has two sisters. "My father was very strict, very stubborn and extremely set in his ways. He lost his patience quickly. My mother was just the opposite, very lenient, easy-going and always supportive." The couple separated in the months before David's 13th birthday, but managed to stand together on the temple altar at his bar mitzvah. In that sense, David was better off than Robbie Hyatt, who wound up having not one, but two bar mitzvah parties, one for each camp of the family. "I was very close with my mom's dad, because we lived with him after my mom got divorced. He had never been bar mitzvahed, so I had him get bar mitzvahed with me. And my dad went ballistic," Robbie tells me. "It was a huge deal. This family-balance thing is nasty."

As their parents remarried, my classmates were left to negotiate the thicket of resentments that crop up between spouses and their exes, children and their stepparents. Laurie Gelardi's folks split when she was 3, and within a few years they'd married other people. From the outset, her relationship with her father's new wife was fraught. The way she saw it, her stepmother "didn't really care for him having a child from a previous marriage," says Laurie, who spent summers with them in San Francisco, where her dad was a Teamster. The rift worsened after her father and stepmother had a child, and Laurie felt she could never get any alone-time with him. "When I was about 13, I had a pretty big conflict with his wife one day when he was at work," she says. "I basically told him, 'I don't want to be with her, I don't come here to see her, and I don't want to come here anymore if you're going to make me stay with her while you're working.' And he said 'Fine.' That was probably the one and only time we had a serious conversation about the situation." Things weren't much better with Laurie's stepfather (it was her mom's third husband; her second had died when Laurie was 5). "I wasn't very accepting of having another man in my life as my father," Laurie says. "I don't think I recognized it at the time, but I was really fearful of my mom being hurt again."

As they witnessed their parents' pain, many of my friends took on emotional burdens well beyond their years. "When my father's second marriage collapsed, I was a 15-year-old high-school freshman who was forced to become a crisis counselor, sitting in the front seat of his car for endless hours listening to him and trying to keep him from completely breaking down," my buddy Chris Kohnhorst recalls. He may have been helping his dad, but Chris was doing damage to himself, encasing his own emotions in a dispassionate shell. "That outward calm expression has led me to be labeled as 'cold' and 'uninspiring,' and has at times hampered my ability to succeed both in my professional and personal life," says Chris, who decided to study psychology in college largely because of these impromptu therapy sessions with his dad.

Such are the scars of growing up too fast—something many of my classmates were doing in the '70s. As newly single mothers went to work to support their families, children were being left to fend for themselves. "We were latchkey kids," says Elyse Oliver, whose mom took a job at Hanna-Barbera studios, painting animated characters for shows like "The Flintstones" to provide for Elyse and her sister. "We had the little necklace with the key on it and we'd walk home from school, let ourselves in and take care of ourselves until she came home about 6 or 7. We'd do chores and cook dinner. I remember making drinks for her," Elyse says. The rest of the girls who lived on her block—the "Martha Street Gang," they called themselves—didn't come from broken homes. "It was, like, 'Eww, your parents are divorced'," recalls Elyse, whose parents split when she was 5, and whose last name at the time was Croen. By the time she was 13, her mother had been through three marriages: the first two ended in divorce, and her third husband died of a heart attack within a year, the day before Father's Day.

Like so many kids of divorce, Elyse dealt with the instability at home by acting out. At the age of 9, she was smoking. At 13, she was having sex. "My boyfriend at the time went up to my mom and said, 'Hey, we want to have sex, can you put her on the pill?' " Her mother agreed. At least Elyse was getting birth control: a good friend at the time, another child of divorce, had a baby at 15 and gave it up for adoption. The sexual revolution was in full swing in 1977, but Elyse believes her behavior had more to do with her parents' divorce and her father's death when she was 11. "I think I had a problem because I didn't have my dad around. So I was looking for love that wasn't there," Elyse says. She settled for whatever love she could get, putting up with her boyfriend's cheating for five years, then moving from one relationship to the next. "The same night I broke up with my first boyfriend, I met my next. I was never alone; I mean, there's something wrong with that."

But my generation was trained in the art of having to move from relationship to relationship. It begins when the judge determines custody and the children start shuttling between parents. Deborah Cronin was one of those kids you started seeing on airplanes in the '70s, flying by themselves. "I remember the stewardess took really good care of us and made sure we got to the right gates," says Deborah, whose mother sent the 5-year-old and her 4-year-old sister, Kimberly, to stay with their father in New Hampshire for the summer. That was the beginning of Deborah's bicoastal childhood. When she was in sixth grade, her mother moved to California and sent Deborah and her sister to live with their father and his new wife for a year while she looked for work. "I loved being with my father. But it was hard for my sister, as she was very close to my mom and missed her very much," Deborah says. By high school, she was bouncing between her mother's and father's for a year at a time. "It was difficult to go back and forth, saying goodbye to one parent and hello to another. At the airport there was always lots of crying." She may have had equal time with both parents, but there was a price: "At times I felt like a loner," she says.