I was five years old, sitting on my mother’s lap, when I asked her if my bride doll could come with us on the airplane. She told me no, there wouldn’t be room. She promised she’d send the doll to me later. She promised she loved me and would see me soon. Then my father took my hand, put me in a taxi with my three younger siblings, and we flew from Boston to Oregon to start a new life with our grandparents.

I didn’t understand, at five, that I was saying goodbye to my mother for good. I thought I was going on a trip. I remember looking out the back window of the taxi as we crossed a long bridge, some instinct in me already trying to memorize what I was leaving behind. I wouldn’t see my mother again until I was twenty-one years old, married, with one child and another on the way.

My parents’ divorce wasn’t loud, from what I could ever piece together. There was no screaming I remember, no courtroom drama a five-year-old could latch onto and make sense of. There was simply a decision, made by two people who were, as they both told me identically for the rest of my life, “just too young and couldn’t make it.” My father was seventeen when they married, my mother sixteen. And then there was a taxi, an airplane, and a father trying to nurse his own broken heart while four children under six looked to him for answers he didn’t have.

This is the part about divorce that doesn’t always make it into the conversation: children don’t experience the reasons for a divorce. They experience the absence that follows it. I didn’t understand incompatibility, or being too young, or whatever adult calculus led to that decision. I understood that my mother said she’d send my doll, and she didn’t. I understood that she said she loved me, and then there was no phone call, no letter, no visit for sixteen years. A child doesn’t file that under “complicated grown-up circumstances.” A child files it under abandonment, and then spends years, sometimes decades, trying to refile it as something less painful.

When I finally did see my mother again at twenty-one, one of the first things I asked her after all those years, after everything else that had happened to me in between, was about that doll. It seems like such a small thing to have carried for sixteen years. But it wasn’t really about the doll. It was about whether the promise, and by extension the love behind it, had ever been real. She didn’t remember it. She said if she’d known then, she would have sent it. Part of me wanted to believe her. Most of me had heard “but you know I love you” so many times, from so many adults, that the words had stopped holding any water at all.

What I didn’t understand until much later, well into my own marriage, sitting across from a counselor because my temper and my jealousy were starting to cost me the husband and family I’d fought so hard to build, was how much of my adult pain was still rooted in that original divorce. My counselor helped me see that a great deal of my anger came from two places at once: being abandoned by my biological mother, and being punished, later, by the mother who raised me. Both wounds were tangled together, and I hadn’t been able to tell where one ended and the other began. It took months of work to even start separating them.

If you are the child of divorced parents, even if it happened decades ago, even if everyone around you insists you should be “over it” by now, I want you to know that the weight you carried was real. It doesn’t matter if the divorce was handled about as well as a divorce can be handled. It doesn’t matter if both parents genuinely loved you and never said an unkind word about each other, which mine never did. A child who is moved, split, or left behind still absorbs a lesson no child should have to learn: that love can leave, and that promises don’t always get kept, even by the people who are supposed to keep them most.

I don’t say any of this to blame my parents. I came to understand, as an adult, how frightened and unprepared they both were, how young they truly were themselves. But understanding them didn’t erase what that five-year-old girl absorbed on the way to the airport. Healing meant learning to hold both truths at once: my parents did the best they could with what they had, and the divorce left a wound in me that took decades and real professional help to even name, let alone close.

If you are watching your own children go through a divorce right now, or if you are still carrying the weight of your own parents’ split from years ago, please know this: naming the loss doesn’t mean blaming anyone. It just means finally giving that child inside you the acknowledgment she never got that what happened mattered, that the absence was real, and that it’s never too late to grieve it properly.

What objects or memories served as your anchor during difficult chapters of your youth? Share your thoughts in the comments below.