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"Yesterday I made the five-hour drive north to where my oldest son, who I&amp;#039;m going to call Liam, is at college. Sweet boy: He has a class this morning, but really wanted me to come up last night so we could have dinner together. It was a crappy drive. It gets dark so early now, and there was a lot of rain, and a headlight went out on my minivan, and I somehow misprogrammed the GPS on my iPhone and instead of paying attention to where the directions were sending me, I just followed along and wound up in Boston. (Kind of like my marriage: Don and I just followed along, in the dark, minus proper illumination, until we wound up in Splitsville. There should be an app for avoiding that.) Anyway, about halfway through the drive NPR went all static-y on me, so I was stuck thinking my own thoughts, and my mind wandered to when James and I split up, and how we told Liam. He wasn&amp;#039;t even three at the time, and so used to his dad not being around (he did a lot of regional theatre) that the two of us simply moved to a new apartment\u2014Look, Liam! Your own room with a big-boy bed!\u2014and that was that. Naturally, James and I thought we&amp;#039;d dodged a bullet by parting ways while our son was so young. We figured James&amp;#039; travel-heavy lifestyle worked in our favor: Liam really didn&amp;#039;t see him any less after we separated, and so there was no real drama involved in the actual split. The drama came later, when Liam was around six. We&amp;#039;d been to the supermarket and I was fumbling with the key to our apartment, grocery bags piled helter-skelter in front of the door, when he piped up and said, &amp;quot;Mom, do you still love Dad?&amp;quot; Whoa! I was totally unprepared for that one. Liam had never said anything about the fact that his dad and I didn&amp;#039;t live together. It was a huge lesson learned, though: There&amp;#039;s no &amp;quot;ideal&amp;quot; age for children to be when their parents divorce. Coping and sorting out and healing is as much an ongoing process for the kids as it is for the grown-ups. My theory is that once Liam started school and figured out that most of his pals&amp;#039; parents lived in the same house, he pieced together how different things were for him and, rightfully, wanted some answers. It&amp;#039;s interesting that he didn&amp;#039;t ask a more mundane question, like Why does Dad live in the city and we don&amp;#039;t, but I&amp;#039;m glad, because that would have been harder to answer. It would have involved crafting some age-appropriate way of talking about how sometimes people just don&amp;#039;t get along well enough to live together, blah, blah, blah, which is going to sound lame to any child no matter how carefully phrased. In this case, the answer was staring me right in the face. All I had to do was look at my little boy, who&amp;#039;s so very much like his dad, right down to the funny way his hair grows into a little point at the nape of his neck, to see it: &amp;quot;Yes,&amp;quot; I told him. &amp;quot;I will always love your dad, because without him, I wouldn&amp;#039;t have you.&amp;quot; And I meant it. I expect to be fielding questions from my other kids (and Liam) about Don&amp;#039;s and my divorce, and I&amp;#039;m not sure I&amp;#039;ll be any better prepared. So if you&amp;#039;ve got any advice, I&amp;#039;ll take it. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.womansday.com/life/a41824/q-a-3792/?click=wdy-more>