A few months back my wife and I picked up a book called The Switching Hour: Kids of Divorce Say Good-bye Again. It sat on the shelf like so many other books that we have, waiting for our “after wedding” life to settle down so that we may take some time to enjoy life with a little reading. A few weeks back I was looking through our books and I saw The Switching Hour. I immediately picked it up and started reading.

Each chapter in this book starts out with a child’s letter to a family member. I will tell you right now, they are tear jerker letters. If you dont feel a sense of sorrow for these children, then you have no heart. Now I will readily agree that I think the author probably went through a huge stack of letters and found the most profound, emotional letters she could to help drive her point across. I get that. It worked. It kept me reading and thinking about my own situation. Point well taken.

This book goes through the process as a child sees it as they switch from one household to another. As they say good-bye to a Mom or Dad, friends, step-family, and material possessions. The world as they had known it is gone. They now need to re-adjust to a whole new world. New expectations, new responsibilities, new friends, new churches, new beds, and possibly new parents. They hope and pray that the life as they knew it will return, but in almost all cases, it wont. This is their new normal. Two houses. Two sets of parents. Two lives. Being with one parent but missing the other. Evon O. Flesberg takes us through their journey with  7 wonderfully written and captivating chapters and at the end of each one, gives us a bit of advice on how to help our children deal with the situation at hand. She keeps it real and she keeps it to the point.

This book opened my eyes to their world but its not the end of my journey into theirs. It has shown me that I can do so much more to ease not only the switching hour for my children but their whole experience with living a double life. It has taught me that I can make the difference for them. That I can make their life as “normal’ as they expect it to be. It has taught me not to stop here. Not to take their lives for granted. To reach out and listen to them and their cries for normalcy. I can make the difference for them. I will make the difference for them. I promise.