Divorce Kids Resentment Lingers On

In movies, step children seldom hang out, become friends. I guess it’s the same in real life, because kids of the first wife always feel the father threw out the baby with the bath water. He left because he no longer loved their mother, and them. Financial conditions also result in resentment.

The first wife brings up the kids alone in the original home. If the man is wealthy, he moves to a better suburb with the new wife, who looks good on camera. In fact, rich people tend to divorce more than poor folks. Poor people sigh and say, no marriage is perfect.

Kids become even more resentful when they see their father living large with the second wife. Half and Half is a vintage American sitcom that is quite unique. A man left his first wife and married a hurricane. She is an actress. She enters the room like a river in flood. She talks a mile a minute and doesn’t like chairs because she’s always in motion.

Anyway the man in question has two daughters, Mona and the other one, I forget the name. Mona the first daughter is always angry when she visits her dad in the beautiful house he shares with the hurricane and their daughter. The father wants his only two kids to bond so he buys a building with three apartments. Mona lives downstairs, her spoilt rich sister lives on the top floor, and Mona’s mother lives across from Mona.

That is what the sitcom Half and Half  is all about. It is a brave concept, which shows television producers can think outside the box if they want. In real life though, kids of the first wife are angry at the desertion or blame themselves for the divorce. What I will not tolerate are daughters blaming mothers.

“You drove Dad away.”

“How? For having you and your brothers? For losing my body? For leaving my career to raise all of you full time? For having hair that is as tired as my soul?”

By: Nonqaba waka Msimang.