James' World 2

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You don’t want to, but sometimes you get angry. The reason? Pick one. You don’t feel heard or respected. You’re seeing bad decisions, i.e., not how you would do things, be made. You’re really tired. It might be more honest to cry or say that you’re scared, but you go with yelling, because that comes off as strong. But it’s rarely a winning move, and it’s never what anyone aspires to.

“Who wants to deal with an angry person?,” says Lesli Doares, licensed marriage and family therapist and author of Hero Husband: Building a Super Marriage with Truth, Confidence, and Authentic Leadership. “We don’t get angry for the fun of it,” she says.

The problem is often what comes next: shutting down. Instead of talking, you sigh, stare, pace around, thinking that people will just…get that something is wrong. You may shut down because you’re overwhelmed and feeling incapable of dealing with the issue. It may also be a defense mechanism you’ve acquired over the years.

Or it may be because you’ve found that “stonewalling” or the silent treatment has worked in the past. But that’s another of those not-winning moves, and it hinges on having empathetic people around you who are patient enough to bring you back. You realize that’s unfair. Ultimately, you don’t want to retreat and go into isolation. But it’s a difficult habit to break.

“We’re not tigers out wandering the terrain by ourselves,” Doares says. “We need others to survive.”

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It’s a hard habit to fight, especially if it’s one you’ve had for a long time. Here’s where to start.

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Last summer, my husband and I drove with our 4-year-old and 2-year-old to his hometown on the east coast of Canada. We were there to bury his parents, a memorial that had been a long time in the making because of the pandemic. It was a heavy, sometimes magical time that, after a few weeks, took its toll.

On the four-day-long drive back home to Toronto, we pulled a U-Haul full of memories and keepsakes behind our aging Honda, praying nothing would fall off or out or something worse we hadn’t even considered. Our first stop along the way was a small town in Nova Scotia, where we pulled into a restaurant for lunch. We were all sticky from the hot car and tired, emotionally fried from the last three weeks, but the kids were faring surprisingly well.

It was one of those casual, pub-food-type places, where nachos and fried foods littered every table and tinny Top 40 blared from the speakers above the bar. We sat down and ordered quickly, but between the lunch rush and understaffing, our chicken fingers and fries took over an hour to arrive. While we waited, the kids joked around with each other at the table, looked out the window next to our booth, danced in their seats to the music playing over the speaker, and generally entertained themselves during the excruciating wait. Just as we were finishing up, an older couple who had been sitting behind us got up to leave. As they did, the wife got close to me and, in a tone anyone would recognize, told me my kids had ruined their lunch.

I admit: I lost it. I looked up at her, heat spreading across my face, and told her we’d just buried my husband’s parents and maybe she could show a bit of compassion. I regretted saying it immediately. What difference should his grief make to this stranger? And how dare I use it to try to win some hypothetical argument? The woman seemed unfazed. I apologized to my husband, and, thankfully, the kids seemed not to notice that this outburst had anything to do with them. We managed to laugh about it afterward, but that feeling, that itchy mixture of anger, guilt, shame, and resentment, sat like a heavy ball in my stomach the rest of the way home.

I’ve since thought about that interaction more than I want to admit. At any moment, like a shitty magic trick, I can conjure up those exact same emotions. Those maybe ten seconds impacted me, probably forever. And now, as school winds down for the year and parents prepare to scramble to entertain their brood for the next few months, that woman has been on my mind even more. Who has a right to exist, to take up space without judgment or reproach? And if it’s not our kids, some of our most vulnerable, then how can we call ourselves a loving society?

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Photo-Illustration: the Cut; Photos Getty Images

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If you want to raise kids who are supportive allies to the LGBTQ community, are sensitive to the challenges they face, and feel safe expressing their own identity, normalize talking about these topics at every age.

I spoke to John Sovec, therapist and author of Out: A Parent’s Guide to Supporting Your LGBTQIA+ Kid Through Coming Out and Beyond, about having big (and small) conversations about these issues with children. These are his top three pieces of advice for raising children who are supportive and secure about sexual orientation and gender identity:

1. Talk openly and often about the experience of LGBTQIA+ people.

2. Be aware of how expressing LGBTQIA+ supportive thoughts, actions, and language influences and shapes how children will develop that same inclusive approach for themselves and their friends.

3. Know that this is an ongoing conversation and as parents, be available for when these questions and curiosities arise.

Understanding terms and acronyms

If you feel like you need your own refresher on LGBTQ lingo, this is a good resource. Remember, language is always growing and evolving. If you or your child hears a term you don’t know, look it up and learn together. Also, lesbian, gay, bi, trans, queer, questioning, intersex, and asexual can mean different things to different people.

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Photo: Zain bin Awais

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There is no shortage of difficult and even painful conversations we may need to have with our kids throughout their childhood. But telling them their parents are divorcing, changing forever the very structure of their family and their lives, has to be one of the hardest, for them and for you. The messaging necessary in those conversations will evolve over time as they get older, and the behaviors they may display that indicate they’re in distress can look different depending on their age.

But Dr. Joanna Stern, a senior clinical psychologist at the Child Mind Institute, says that although the way you talk to kids about a divorce will change and grow more nuanced the older they get, kids of all ages need to feel or hear reassurance that they are going to be cared for and supported during and after the process.

“What [parents] really want to communicate to kids of all ages is, ‘We’ve got you,’” Sterns says. “‘Your needs are going to be taken care of regardless of what is happening with us and with the divorce.’”

And just as important, Stern says, is to remember what not to say. Namely, don’t bad-mouth the other parent, even in subtle ways, and even with the youngest of kids. So let’s start there—with toddlers.

How to talk to toddlers about divorce

Obviously, there’s very little a parent can or should do by way of explaining a divorce to a child who isn’t yet verbal. A young toddler, though, is likely to require some kind of explanation if you’re divorcing and one parent is moving out.

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Illustration: René Ramos

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