The Split is an on-going series in which Decoupling talks to the people who are perhaps most affected by divorce – the kids.  We sat down with adults whose parents divorced when they were kids and talked to them about how their folks’ split affected them.  Each article will address one particular aspect of their experiences.  In this first article in the series, Carla (not her real name) talks about child support.

In many divorced families these days, child support is an almost invisible phenomenon – the money is pulled out of the non-residential parent’s paycheck or deposited directly into the other parent’s account.  But it hasn’t always been done that way.

Carla’s parents divorced when she was seven years old.  Before her parents separated, money was always tight.  Looking back on it, she knows that money was a big part of the split.  Her dad changed jobs a lot, was sometimes unemployed for long stretches of time, and he seemed to spend beyond the family’s’ means.  Her mom worked a stable but low-paying job, and resented her dad’s spending habits and career decisions.  She knew her parents were fighting a lot, and as she grew older she learned that a lot of these fights were about money.

The Check

After her parents separated, Carla and her older brother lived with their mom, and were supposed to see their dad every other weekend.  And their dad was supposed to pay child support every month.  But sometimes neither of those things happened, and Carla came to realize that the two things were linked to each other.

“Child support was how we got to see dad … we’d go there once a month so he could give us a check to give to mom.   There were a few times where he would drop us off at home, and say ‘tell your mom I don’t have the check.”

After her parents first split up, Carla and her brother started off seeing their dad every other weekend.  After their visits, he’d drop them off at home.  Sometimes he’d hand them a check and tell them to give it to their mother.  Sometimes he wouldn’t.  Carla always knew that this check was for her and her brother, and for their mom, for things like food and bills.  She knew that it caused her mom stress when Carla and her brother would walk into the house without the check, even though her mom rarely said anything about it.  She knew that sometimes there weren’t as many groceries in the house as there had been the month before – because dad didn’t send the check.

Over the years, Carla says, “it got bad.”  The check from dad came less frequently – sometimes there were long periods of time where the check didn’t come at all.  Carla’s mom struggled to make ends meet.  Bills didn’t always get paid.  Carla and her mom occasionally spent an evening sitting around the kitchen table, rolling change into the paper tubes you get from the bank so that the coins could be exchanged for cash at the bank later.

At the same time, Carla and her brother were seeing less of their dad.  Sometimes their dad would call and say he didn’t have enough money to buy gas.  Sometimes he wouldn’t call at all.  Carla knew that part of the reason they didn’t see their dad was the check (or lack thereof).  Looking back on it, Carla remembers that her mom sometimes wouldn’t follow their regular visitation schedule when dad hadn’t paid for a long time.  And sometimes her dad wouldn’t show up for visits because he didn’t have the check for their mom.

The struggle to get by wore on them all. Carla and her brother sometimes complained about the fact that they couldn’t afford to buy the things they wanted and needed, and Carla’s mom would tell them that they couldn’t afford things because “Dad didn’t pay the money. Dad should be paying the money.”

I asked Carla if knowing that her dad wasn’t paying child support over all those years changed her opinion of her dad.  Actually, she says, “it changed my opinion of my mom … I felt like she didn’t fight hard enough for us – maybe if my dad knew what we had to do, what I had to do to get money, I bet he would have paid it then.”

It’s not, Carla says, that she blames her mother for her father’s failings.  It just frustrated her because her mother exhibited strength in so many other ways.  After all, she raised Carla and her brother on her own. She always stood up for her kids.  But for some reason she just didn’t want to fight about the check.

Carla has talked to her mom about it over the years, especially now that she’s an adult.  Her mom has a few reasons why didn’t she didn’t fight like Carla thinks she should have:  she knew that Carla’s dad wasn’t working.  She knew he really didn’t have the money.  She wanted encourage her kids’ relationship with their dad.  She didn’t want to send her children’s father to jail.

Still, Carla thinks that her dad would have paid support if her mom had put more pressure on him.  She tells me how, years later, when Carla was in college, her mom couldn’t afford tuition one semester.  The school was threatening to kick Carla out.  In desperation, Carla called her dad.  She told him what was going on, that she was going to have to quit school if the tuition didn’t get paid.  He sent a check.  And after that phone call, he sent Carla a check every month until she graduated from college.

I asked Carla if she saw any upside to going through this as a child.  Yes, she says.  Growing up in a house with money problems made her acutely aware of the importance of keeping a budget, and living within her means.   She learned to support herself without help from anyone else.  She got her first job when she turned 16 so that she could take some burden off of her mom.  Not yet 30 years old, she now owns and runs her own small business.  She doesn’t think she’d be able to support herself as well as she has as an adult if she hadn’t witnessed her parent’s struggles with money.  For better or for worse, she says, “I am happy with the way things turned out.”