The Cost

Fourteen-year-old, neurodivergent Haylee thought her mother might as well be driving their Suburban to another world. Instead, Haylee stared and wept goodbye to her beloved Chicago and dreaded moving to Salem, Massachusetts.

Divorce is tough enough, but leaving her father in Chicago issued waves of guilt, since Haylee was the only member of the family who knew the dark secret. Meeting new peers made her nauseated. How can she possibly handle her parents’ divorce if her entire world has to change, too?

Laurie S. Pittman knows divorce in a three-dimensional way.

Forget the 30 years of experience, prior to her retirement where she worked as a licensed psychologist helping families navigate the throes of divorce. Instead, her empathy parents and children runs deep. At the age of five, she and her older sister witnessed their parents struggle through a perpetuating, toxic dogfight that lasted for decades. Ever recalling how bitter her parents’ divorce was, Laurie longed to break the fourth generation of marriage failure. Adding salt to old wounds, Laurie learned in her late forties, the father of her three beautiful daughters wished to divorce her after twenty-three years of marriage. The request shattered her hopes of breaking the fourth generation of separated/divorced parenting. Instead, Laurie would now be a parent navigating the grief process, financial fears and confused/hurt children. Ultimately, Laurie learned an important truth that divorce ends a marriage, but, the family unit can remain intact if adults can put the focus on the children, so that the children are not used as pawns for manipulating or even venting the unfinished business of muddied feelings.

Laurie’s prior writing experience is her dissertation, ＂Attachment Issues, Self-Esteem, and Sense of Symbolic Immortality: Are Their Differences between Couples Not in Treatment vs. Couples in Marriage Therapy?＂ UMI Dissertation Services from ProQuest Company; September 15, 2007: Union Institute & University, Cincinnati, Ohio.

Laurie was a guest speaker at the International Symposium in Caja Marca, Peru, and she won the local pageant, Miss Cumberland Valley, of the Miss America Pageant in 1980 and won Miss Congeniality in the Miss Pennsylvania Pageant. She also won the Gould Award for Acting in 1979 as well as the Winfield-Davidson Walkley Prize for Forensic Declamation in 1977 while attending Dickinson College for her undergraduate degree. She also was interviewed for a radio program about drug and alcohol issues for loved ones who love a problem drinker in 1994.

Laurie holds a Bachelor’s Degree (1980) in Political Science and Dramatic Literature from Dickinson College; a Master’s Degree (1993) in Clinical Psychology from Millersville University; and a Ph.D. of Philosophy with a concentration in Clinical Psychology (2008) from Union Institute & University, Cincinnati, Ohio. Laurie resides in East Berlin, Pennsylvania where she enjoys the bucolic scenery as well as woodsy animals, geese and ducks.