*Joy A. Dryer, Ph.D.  is a Psychologist/Psychoanalyst and Divorce Consultant/Mediator with a private practice for over 30 years in NYC and Poughkeepsie, New York.  To make comments, or to get more information, contact Dr. Dryer at jdryerphd@gmail.com  or go to www.divorcecoachny.com.

If you were a child of divorcing parents, you would want the power to get your parents back together; to be a complete family again. Warren Adler’s page-turner sequel, The War of the Roses – The Children, drives hard to this conclusion. Reading it, we root for the Children taking power with whatever tools available, no matter how incendiary, foolhardy or destructive.

Adler’s characters live out a divorce’s difficulties and pains. The adults, acting more like children, juggle their own wounds and stabbing truths, while the Children’s pain, at first, seems forgotten. But the pain is there, embedded in Adler’s masterful use of metaphor, which both illuminates broad themes, and captures characters in specific conflicts. Delicious paradoxes are revealed as each character verbally spouts principles by which they say they live. But each character’s actions belie any moral intent. Lies replace Truth. Reality drowns Principles. Betrayal wins over Fidelity. Everyone has Secrets and no one is Transparent until forced to be at the end.

Candy bars, for example, unravel Truth at the book’s beginning and end. Stolen “Milky Way” candies, as metaphor, universalize the themes of separation and attachment. The Milky Way is Earth’s galactic home, and Adler flags for us that the Children’s universe is about to spin out of control. In fact, Adler not only shows the disintegration of relationships, but also contends that divorce itself has a corrosive effect on the next generation.  So we ask as we read, what can be done about the pain of divorce?

Since Adler’s book was first released in 2004, new divorce laws around the country have attempted to lessen the pain of the process. In New York State, where I practice, the 2010 no-fault divorce law eliminated a divorcing couple’s need to show ‘cause’, or ‘grounds’, such as adultery. Couples can now choose a shared “alternative” divorce process, a client-centered divorce by retaining a mediator or collaborative divorce professionals, instead of a win-lose litigating attorney (like divorce attorney Franken in the book).  A couple like Victoria and Josh would be likely, and wise, to seek a marriage counselor’s help in choosing to try to reconcile, or to move toward separation and/or divorce.

We know that marital conflict negatively affects children’s adjustment, and divorce specifically increases risk for children, as the high drama of The War of the Roses – The Children underlines. However, several factors make today’s divorce more humane, where both adults’ and kids’ voices are heard by all, for example: choosing a non-court mediation or collaborative divorce process, and parents providing physical warmth and affection, while holding appropriate expectations for their kids. [For more information, see research esp. by Joan B. Kelly, Ph.D.]

In the end, I believe that this book is also about the importance of attachment—how and why people want and need one another. Unlike the Rose’s namesake—the 15^th century civil “War of the Roses” in England—there need not be winners “crowned” and losers “slaughtered” in a 21^st century divorce. It is possible to divorce in today’s world, while also recognizing that we all have basically the same longings and wishes, to be seen and heard and recognized and loved for who we are.