Series on Parenting

by Deborah Hansen

A New Love in Your Life

Your spouse is gone and you’re on your own. The wound may still be fresh, its edges raw and reddened. Or some time may have passed and the cut has begun to heal a bit. At some point in the journey towards recovery, you may meet someone who fills the void of loneliness, someone you believe can help you back toward a normal life. It’s fairly certain that you will remarry at some point, but how quickly should you integrate someone new into your family before any new relationship has been time-tested and found to rest on a foundation solid enough for a marriage?

You might be tempted to bring this new person into your home very quickly, setting yourselves up in residence as a couple to lead the family in its new configuration. Your longing for a return to some semblance of a “normal” relationship can be overwhelming, and that is completely understandable from the perspective of an adult. Before you go too far along that path, though, remember that your children must be considered, too. Your child’s other parent will always fill that role for them, not merely until Mom or Dad finds a new mate. Their bond will always be a factor that must be considered. Have you discussed your next move with them, especially the older children? How will it affect them, their everyday life as well as their emotional well-being? Their home is perhaps the one secure place left in their lives and they deserve to be included in such a momentous decision. Even if you ultimately decide to proceed with your plans to bring the new person into your home, at least the children will know that you took their opinions under consideration.

Your future with this new person may seem rosy at the present time, but things can certainly change, can’t they? Those of us who have gone through a divorce already are painfully aware of this. What happens if your children form a bond with the new family member only to have it fall apart if the rose-colored glasses fall from your face? Hasn’t this happened to them enough already? The end result for such children is the inability to form any bond at all with people due to the fear of such painful failure.

Another consideration revolves around those belief systems you hold dear and want your children to learn and follow in their own lives. If your beliefs teach celibacy until marriage, are you modeling such behavior for your children in their line of sight? Or are you circumventing those beliefs because of your loneliness? Arguments abound concerning adult behavior versus a child’s behavior, and there is certainly some validity to those arguments. But consider carefully what you’re doing in front of your kids. They learn by your actions more than your words. If you demand that they follow the rules, and want them to live according to a system of tenets the family holds sacred, you must consider your own actions, too. You are the most important influence in their lives, bar none.

Our first responsibility as a parent must always be our children’s well-being. We were chosen to be with them and must protect them from any further pain, even if that means our own needs come second for awhile. The rewards will be worth it for them today and hopefully into a future free of some of the mistakes that we made in front of them.

-- April 2007

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Deborah Hansen is a veteran of divorced parenting, and a former middle school teacher. She is also a certified county court mediator, and a regular columnist for several parenting publications. She may be reached for comments and suggested topics at [email protected].

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