Unlike the innocent childhood rites of passage that bring about a sense of pride and accomplishment, children who live through their parents’ divorce often experience an abrupt passage from childhood to premature adulthood. The hard and jagged rock of a parents’ divorce deeply and profoundly impacts a child even beyond what others see or notice.

I was inspired to re-read The Lord of the Rings specifically through the lens of this experience, especially since Frodo is also the “Ring-bearer.” I finished this project recently and I wanted to share my reflections with you here.

The movie Hope Gap recently appeared in my Amazon Prime Video recommendations, with the synopsis being that Edward (Bill Nighy) suddenly announces that he is divorcing Grace (Annette Bening) after almost thirty years. Being a child of divorce, I was quite intrigued to see how the movie approached the matter, so I broke my habit of never paying extra for movies on Amazon to find out.

If your parents are divorced or have split up, you’re not alone. While family breakdown can impact a child’s life in several noticeable ways - such as being more likely to grow up in poverty, more likely to drop out of school, and more likely to experience emotional or behavioral problems - it’s harder to see the invisible wounds that can last into adulthood. But these wounds are no less real...

Between Two Worlds is not a hateful attack against parents who did divorce (and neither is this review), but it is a strong cautionary warning to those who seek to minimize or invalidate the wounds of adult children of divorce, wounds that deserve recognition, validation, and most importantly, compassionate understanding so that healing can begin. Because after all, adult children of divorce deserve no less of a quality life than any other human being. But this realization can be hard for an adult child of divorce to embrace because they have often been asked to sacrifice or settle on their own expectations for their lives, starting from the moment of their parents’ divorce.