Girl to mom after parents fight: ‘Mom, is this what love will be?’

The fight wasn’t so different from what her daughters had seen a hundred times. The family had just watched a movie together — mother, father and two daughters — when something set off a fight between the parents.

There was screaming. There were threats. Then crying. Anger and quiet fear were in the air.

After the worst was over, the mom stepped out onto the front porch to get herself together. She was crying when her daughters came outside to check on her. Then she put on a brave face and reassured the girls that everything was fine.

The 13-year-old was silent, but the 11-year-old asked a question.

“Mom, is this what love will be?” she asked with fear in her voice.

After years of putting up with ugly fights and threats, that was the moment when everything changed for the mom. She told me the story tonight — about the night she decided to leave — nine months after this family drama played out.

For years, the woman had been in denial. She believed her husband’s promises to change. She accepted his excuses. She told herself that her girls deserved to have their father. But if this is what her daughters were learning, it was time to get out.

The woman and her children are now living elsewhere. There’s a protective order against her husband. He can’t see the children except during strictly supervised visits. The woman and the daughters are all in counseling. And she told me she’s happier than she’s ever been.

“I had been lying to myself,” the woman told me. “I had left him before but I kept coming back, because it was easier than fighting him to end things. I felt guilty, like I was doing something wrong for wanting to get away from his abuse. But if this was the lesson my daughter was learning from what I was doing, I had to make a change before it was too late.”

She said her daughters are taking it hard, because both of them want attention from their father. But the attention they get often ends up being toxic. And the lessons they were learning from him — about how a woman should be treated by a man who loves them — were poisoning their futures.

“I couldn’t see that for a long time,” she said. “Well, I knew it with my head, but I kept talking myself into seeing things another way — because that was easier than breaking free of his toxicity.”

When I was young, I constantly watched my parents fight. Many of my earliest memories are of screaming fights — sometimes at home, sometimes in a car. I never understood what they were fighting about. I just wanted it to stop. The fighting — and the constant fear that violence was about to break out — colored everything for me.

I remember having a conversation about divorce with someone when I was in college. This person was arguing that divorce was always wrong for Christians, except in the most extreme circumstances. I had grown up believing precisely what he was saying. It’s what I had always heard in church. I believed it was the implication of what I read in scripture.

But for the first time in my life, I voiced the emotional observation that my parents getting divorced was actually the kindest thing for everybody involved. They couldn’t live together — and their fighting was destroying their children. I had never admitted that until then, even to myself.

The ideal situation is for a mother and a father to raise the children they create together. The family should love one another and live in peaceful harmony. This is the obvious best outcome for any family.

But parents who cannot get along are doing their children a disservice when they teach them that this is the way a family should live. Even if the parents have the best of intentions, they’re unconsciously training their children that this is what a “real family” is. And that training is damaging the children for life.

Divorce will never be ideal. It’s nothing to be celebrated. But breaking up miserable “families” is preferable to letting children believe that the instability and fighting they see every day is what love is going to be for them in the future.