Things You’ll Know If You’re A Child Of Divorced Parents

Yeah, so we’re probably all messed up headcases with Daddy issues, but hey it’s happening to one in three of us so at least there’s safety in numbers.

Anyway, who gives a monkeys about your parents’ marriage when you’ve got Snake II on your phone?

**All the tumult and domestic heartbreak in your difficult childhood (LOL, you didn’t really care) has made you a total imp at getting what you want (and possibly now you think about it, quite a messed up person to date). You got your ears pierced before everyone else by convincing Dad (always silly Dad) that you needed them for your school project on the Egyptians and days off sick (read: eating Nutella) because you ‘just felt sad’.

Even if your parents were half good at pretending to like each other, a lot of your key teenage wardrobe staples were just vengeance purchases. Like those Jane Norman stilettos you wangled by telling Mum that Dad said women who wore heels were too opinionated. And the Punkyfish zip-up you reported Dad ‘probably wouldn’t buy you because he doesn’t love you as much as his new kids.’

If you acquired a lot of step-rellies late in life, you’ll have attended, at some point, a tedious family gathering where you were required to eat finger food and make small talk with lots of random people who don’t fully like you yet. Then, suddenly a Gosling bright light fills the room as some breathtakingly handsome man walks in and starts flirting your socks off.

Then, just as you’re building up to a number-swap, Auntie Wassername totters over to deliver the devastating news that you are in fact step-cousins. Brilliant.

As a kid, teachers stared at you through the classroom window pitying your broken-home status, while outside in the playground you were lording it over your mates like a pampered little shit. If you were a real primary school arse, you brought BOTH sets of mum and dad presents in for show and tell. Plus, you were the talk of the town when Dad picked you up in his mid-life crisis Mazda.

You could not have cared less if your parents slept in the same bed when you were playing Snake II on your guilt-phone, or jangling your guilt-bangles in their well-adjusted faces.

Your rentals might have hit the pause button on the rumpy pumpy shortly after you were born, but don’t forget these crazy cats are children of the sexual revolution. They invented free love. If you’re the lucky spawn of married rents, they might tell you so after a few too many chardonnays at Sheryl’s dinner party. Dad might gyrate his hips and say something awful like, ‘I’m still groovy, aren’t I?’, but that’s the worst it’s going to get.

Now they’ve divorced and taken their finger off the pause button, they’ve become a lot more lackadaisical about sex. There’s now a very real possibility you’ll see Viv from the Post Office in her sex vest – or worse, Juan Carlos from Salsa’s belly button beard.

**While all your friends lazily trundle home to prepare themselves for a few piss-easy days of sitting in front of the telly and stuffing Lindors into their gobs, you’re busy gearing up for a fiasco of epic proportions. First you’ve got to clear your bank account buying poorly thought out presents for your army of relatives, then you well and truly bankrupt yourself tearing across the country to see them.

If you’re lucky, you’ll get dibs on a passing tray of smoked salmon bilinis at Step-Great-Auntie Caroline’s, before hot-footing it to Dad’s for the second half of Father Ted. Invariably, the parent who lost out on Christmas day will be cheesed off about it and do something guilt trippy and depressing like only buy a turkey crown because ‘there’s no point cooking a big turkey this year’. Then it’s back to house number two for a dessert of trifle and emotional blackmail. Bliss.

Follow Lucy on Twitter @lucyannhancock

Picture: Rex

This article originally appeared on The Debrief.