I got a call once from a woman I’ll call Dana. She was four weeks into her separation, hadn’t told anyone outside her immediate family, and had been carefully, quietly managing information like she was running a covert operation.
No social media posts. Vague answers at school pickup. A lot of “we’re going through some things” and then she would quickly change the subject.
She reached out to me because her nine-year-old son Jackson had come home from a playdate in tears. His best friend’s older brother, a thirteen-year-old who had apparently overheard something somewhere, was taunting Jackson because now he had a “broken family.” Her son didn’t understand why those words were being said about his family, but he understood the tone and immediately started to fill in the blanks.
You don’t get to choose whether your divorce story gets told only whether you’re the one telling it
Dana had been silent to protect him. And her silence had left him completely unprotected.
This is the thing about trying to control your divorce narrative by keeping quiet: the story doesn’t wait for you. It moves on without you.
Through a neighbor who noticed the second car gone. Through the kids, who are processing something enormous and doing it out loud in ways nine-year-olds do. Through a well-meaning friend who tells another well-meaning friend. Through a thirteen-year-old who heard something and filled in the rest with his own imagination.
You don’t get to choose whether your story gets told. You only get to choose whether you’re the one telling it.
We think the silence is kindness
I understand why people go quiet when a marriage ends. I’ve sat with enough families to know that the silence usually comes from a good place, a desire to protect children from adult pain, to avoid becoming the subject of gossip, to hold something private just a little longer before the world weighs in. There’s also, if we’re honest, shame.
Despite the fact that nearly half of marriages end in divorce, we still treat it like something to hide. Something that happened to us rather than something that is happening in us and through us and, if we’re intentional about it, something we can move through with our dignity intact.
Silence is what does the damage
That shame is the engine of the silence. And the silence is what does the damage. When we go quiet, we don’t just protect ourselves from uncomfortable conversations. We cut ourselves off from the exact people who could help carry this with us, the teachers who notice when a child is struggling, the friends who would show up with dinner, the coaches who would give a kid a little extra encouragement on a hard week. We make ourselves an island at the exact moment we most need a shore.
And we leave our children in the most disorienting position possible: navigating a world where some people know and some don’t, where they’re never sure what to say or who knows, where the weight of adult information sits on their small shoulders because no one thought to lift it off.
What it looks like to tell your story
I’m not talking about announcing your divorce on social media or calling a press conference. I’m talking about something much quieter and much more powerful: a deliberate, brief, human conversation with the adults in your children’s lives. Their teachers. Their coaches. The parents of their closest friends. Your own closest friends and family.
A simple message that says:
We have made the difficult decision to dissolve our marriage. We are committed to a low-conflict divorce and a future that supports our kids. No need to take sides. We are all on the side of the kids. Please don’t ask WHY, just ask us how we are doing. We appreciate your support and discretion as we navigate this very private and personal journey.
That’s it. No details required. No airing of grievances. No performance that everything is okay when you are in the midst of emotional turmoil.
What that conversation does is remarkable. It means your child’s teacher knows why attention is scattered and responds with grace instead of frustration. It means the soccer coach can offer a quiet word of encouragement instead of awkward silence. It means your closest friends can actually be your friends, checking in, showing up, holding you, instead of being kept at arm’s length by your silence.
And it means that when the story travels, which it will, it travels with the shape you gave it. Not the shape someone else imagined.
You get to write your own headline.
What I’ve learned sitting with families
The families who come through divorce with the most grace — the ones whose children adjust well, whose relationships with each other remain functional, whose lives reconstitute into something genuinely good — almost always have one thing in common. They chose connection over concealment. Not perfect, not immediately, not without fear. But they chose to let people in.
And the families who struggle the longest are often the ones still managing information months, even years, later. Still protecting a story that has long since been told by everyone but them.
How we begin is often how we end. The silence you keep early on sets a precedent. It tells
everyone around you, including your children, that this is something to hide. Too shameful to speak. Too broken to be held by the community.
You get to decide that isn’t true. You get to pick up the phone and say: this is what is happening in our family, and we are going to be okay.
That call is the beginning of okay.
More Great Reading:
The Marriage Didn’t Last, the Dream Did: Divorce and International Adoption
