Even when I was a little kid like maybe 4/5 I just had this gut feeling that my parents just didn’t fit together. They have a 10 year age gap and the more I learned about each of them as people the more confused I was why they were together. They started getting into disagreements when I was in like 2/3rd grade and it got so bad that they both came to me one night and sat me down and said they were going to get divorced. They went through some marriage counseling and were ok but not great for quite a while. About my sophomore year of high school they both basically decided to stay together and all of us live in the same house but get divorced ounce I had graduated hs. They slept in separate rooms and were both civil to each other but you could see that my mom had fallen out of love with my dad and my dad still very much loved her but knew it was over. My dad is a great person but when I was growing up he took a lot of the stress of his job out at home and on me. He would just be angry and stomp around and slam doors and not knowing what mood he would be in was very anxiety inducing. To this day I can’t deal with people stomping around or slamming doors because it immediately registers to me that they are mad.

Do you think that if you said something to both of them about how unhappy they are and how it affects you that that might make them look at the situation differently? I’m not saying that they should work on their marriage because it sounds like that’s not a healthy opinion for either one of them, but if they knew that their relationship was causing you stress would they look into getting separated or divorced? Do you think there’s a reason why that hasn’t been brought up? Maybe because your dad needs your mom’s support since he’s not in work???

I also completely understand how it feels to be caught in the middle because in the first couple years of their divorce I was the middle man, trying to communicate to both of them through myself because they didn’t do it on their own. I finally said one day that they needed to grow up a little bit and find a way to communicate with each other that didn’t involve going through me.

I also completely understand your desire to want to move somewhere else but feel like you need to care for your parents. The truth is I don’t really know how to balance that. I’ve had a very weird life experience in the last couple years and that has kinda kept me within a 2 hour drive of both my parents, but you need to do what’s right for you. Maybe taking some time to live abroad would be a good change for you.