Andrew Root on children and divorce. Chilling.

In the documentary film One Divided by Two: Kids and Divorce,  there is an animated scene that relays the haunting dream of a child  after the divorce of his parents. The narrator begins:

When my parents first divorced I was scared that my parents would  both start new families and forget about me. Around this time I had  a dream. It was Christmas and we were all doing our shopping. I had  some money to go and buy my parents and family some gifts. All of a  sudden, out of the corner of my eye I see my mother. I was so happy  to see her that I decided to run up to her and give her a big hug and  then wish her a merry Christmas. My mother was with two other  children, and I kept calling her, “Mommy, Mommy.” But she didn’t  even know who I was; she was calling the little children her little  children, and they were calling her “Mommy.” I felt so strange and  awkward, I had seen my mother in a different family, and she didn’t  even recognize me.

‘This dream reveals the ontological ramifications of divorce. This  child’s dream communicates the questions of being he faces as he  confronts the loss of a familial community. As he thinks about the  divorce of his parents, his deepest fear is that in their division they  will start new families. In these families and communities he is a  stranger and, as such, worries that his being will be forgotten. If  he is in the midst of acting with and for these people, if he has his  being in the midst of this family, what will it mean for him (what  will it mean for his being) if they depart to start new families?  The children born into this new family will be elected through the  union of parent and stepparent (they will have biological correlation  to both parents), but this boy will be part of this new family onlythrough choice. He can depart the new family at any time to live  with the other parent (or grandparent, etc.). In this back-and-forth of  choice, this boy wonders whether between one family and the next  he might get lost or, rather, feels, ontologically, like he is lost. This  new family will be forever tenuous for him, for his being is not the  outgrowth of it. He is there only by “choice” (choice of his parent  or his own choice.

In this community, this new family, he is ontologically different,  for his being is not bound to both parents, but only to one, and this  one-in this instance, his mother-has cleaved her being to others  that have no direct connection to the boy. Will she remember him and  the way they were together? Will she honor their connection? And  if she forgets or denies it, then who is the boy? How can he be? He  worries so deeply about this that his unconscious communicates it to  him in a dream in which his mommy has other children and forgets,  ignores, or, more radically, negates his being. His being, in his dream,  has become a stranger to her own. He calls her “Mommy!” from the  core of his being, but now with these other children and family all  around her, she cannot see him. His plea is a deep ontological cry (as  object relations psychology has told us, and as we will see below),  but the dream-mother returns his longing for community (for being-with,   being connected to the origins of his being) with nothing but  confusion, for her being is now connected to others.

– Children of Divorce, The: The Loss of Family as the Loss of Being (Andrew Root)