Season of Sadness, Season of Joy

This is the season of happy-talk, jingle bells and laughing all the way, but it weighs heavily on my mind.

Less religious than commercial, it has become a time of manufactured joy and, like the canned laughter of a witless sitcom, its bells jingle a hollow tone for those the season has abandoned.

To them it’s a time of magnified loss, of loneliness and of an emptiness that can never be satisfied. The reason isn’t death but divorce and the children left behind.

One can accept the finality of death, though its impact may linger, but to know a parent has rejected you and remains out there somewhere, alive but unconcerned with your existence, is almost unbearable. I know.

Picture this small boy in his own season of despair, his father gone, wandering with his angry mother through a department store at Christmas. See him observe the families around him, see him wonder at their wholeness, see him recede within himself, hear him cry.

I was that 6-year-old and the parting of my own parents has created within me a distrust of all the ho-ho-ho that others can somehow believe and absorb without cynicism. I can’t.

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The reason I mention it today is because of a series of interviews I had with some children of divorced parents. The meeting took place several weeks ago under the auspices of Rainbows, a nonprofit organization that helps young people and adults deal with loss.

I’ve been meaning to write about it ever since, but the impact was too personal and, like a little boy afraid of the dark, I was afraid of my own memories. And while the Christmas season may seem like the worst of times to air the anguish, it may also be the best of times.

Why hold the pain for a less obvious season?

I was introduced to Rainbows by Marilyn Scott, its volunteer director of services in Southern California. We met at St. Anthony School in San Gabriel where the three children I interviewed are students.

Rainbows offers many services to restore a sense of wholeness to those who have suffered loss and to assure them they aren’t alone. My quest, possibly to restore my own wholeness, was to talk to children of divorce.

Shattered marriages have become a plague of our times, tripling from 1970 to 1990. Every 13 seconds in America, someone gets divorced. We celebrate relationships but not commitment, and the result is pain and a sense of emptiness in our children.

I bring you three of them: Monique, age 8, Christina, 11, and Eddie, 13.

They wish more than anything that their families were intact and they reveal with a sweetness that claws at the heart the memories of the shattering that abruptly changed their lives.

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“They fought all the time and my mom hit me when I tried to get them to stop,” says Monique, a beautiful, dark-eyed little girl. “When daddy left, I went to my room and cried. I wish they were together again. . . .”

“One day my daddy didn’t come home. I miss him so much.” This is Christina, a quiet, serious girl. “When they fought, me and my sister would go into our room and lock the door. I feel sad when someone’s parents get divorced. I don’t want them to go through what I went through.”

“I was only a year old when they separated.” Eddie, a bright, articulate boy. “My only memory is of them together, watching me play and laughing. My mom hasn’t been happy since. She remarried and divorced again. It made me angry because I knew it would hurt us. I wish we could be happy again. . . .”

All three live, as I did, with their mothers. As I spoke with them I sensed a reaching back to a time when everything was right, before the schisms that forever altered their lives.

“Kids wonder why parents don’t want them,” Marilyn Scott said. “They carry so much in their hearts.”

Rainbows is trying to minimize the effect that loss will have on the children of divorce through special counseling at schools, churches and synagogues. Some studies indicate that the impact is minimal, others that it’s immense.

I don’t believe that broken homes necessarily produce serial killers. But I do know that I’m sitting here listening to Christmas music being played on a radio and I’m filled with a loneliness I’ve never been able to shake.

Al Martinez’s column appears Tuesdays and Fridays. He can be reached online at al.martinez@latimes.com