Like Chris Huhne's son Peter, I was devastated when my mother and father divorced I had forgotten all of this until I read the heartbreaking texts between Chris Huhne and his then 18-year-old son Peter this week. That these exchanges ever made it into public view says all that you need to know about the absolutely deranged nature of divorce and what it can do to a family. Peter, just to say, I'm thinking of you and I love you very much. It would be great to talk to you, Dad." "**** off," came the reply. Happy Christmas. Well I hate you, so **** off. When Peter won a place at Oxford to study languages - as the unedifying details of his parents" relationship unfold, it seems incredible that the young man even managed to pass his A‑levels - his father texted to congratulate him. "Leave me alone," he replied. You have no place in my life and no right to be proud... Don't contact me again, you make me feel sick. He called his father a "pathetic loser" and a "joke," a "fat piece of ****" and "autistic." Shortly after my own mother and father were granted their decree nisi (and thankfully, they were adult enough never to sink to the depths of Huhne and his ex-wife, Vicky Pryce), I remember a minor storm in the newspapers after a rector told his parishioners that divorcing parents should face abuse inquiries. Reverend Roger Smith of Suffolk wrote in a newsletter that "children can put up with most things - drunkenness, violence, illness, etc - but the one thing they cannot survive is their parents" divorce. Divorce causes children to fail at school, to become drug addicts, to become criminals. We hear a lot about child abusers these days. My view is that, when a judge issues a divorce decree where children are involved, both parents should be investigated for child abuse - not physical, but mental and spiritual... I expect parents to suffer for their children. I thought the drug addiction and abuse stuff was a bit much - but otherwise, I hallelujahed along with Mr Smith. Like Peter Huhne, I may technically have been an adult, but that didn't mean I thought my parents should stop treating me as their child. Even when I was out working in the real world, I expected them to continue to suffer for me, be it bailing me out of a financial crisis or pretending that all was right in their marriage. In my mind, they were not human beings with pasts, flaws and imperfections - they were Mum and Dad, infallible, to the point that I could kid myself that their own lives had only started when mine had. Some friends suggested that my mother and father had at least had the good grace to wait until I was an adult before divorcing. I disagreed entirely. In a way, my relatively advanced age made it seem worse. I had spent much of my childhood smugly watching as the families of classmates fell apart, while thinking of the nuclear unit I belonged to and how lucky we were. Suddenly, it all felt like a sham. With hindsight, I realise that I was kidding myself. For how long before that ruined Sunday afternoon had I known that all was not well between my parents? A decade, probably. It wasn't anything obvious. It was the absence of things, I suppose, that had done it: the fact that they didn't ever kiss or cuddle; that they appeared at times to be no more than passing acquaintances, rather than husband and wife. I lashed out at my mother because I thought that divorce was the end of the world, but when I think back, I only wish they had done it sooner, before I had had time to absorb their relationship patterns and make them my own. From them, I picked up a simmering passive aggression that would take over a decade to iron out. Even now, engaged to be married and about to have my own family, I still occasionally feel a little like damaged goods; that it would be better for my other half if I ran away to join the circus. But I also think that divorce teaches an important lesson everyone has to learn at some point: that parents are not perfect, just people, and that they can be ocean‑going idiots, just as you can. They can be idiots before the divorce and during the divorce, seeing your adulthood as an excuse to offload on you all manner of information that they really shouldn't - such as the time when one asked the other to take some speeding points. Like Peter Huhne, I initially sided with the party I perceived to be wronged. But during the months that followed, I calmed down and had proper conversations with my mother and realised that there are two sides to every story. The relationship had been dead in the water for some time; my dad was hardly whiter than white himself. He had been a largely absent father, not pulling his weight financially or parentally; she had felt alone, ignored and unsupported for many years. In the end, my parents were far better apart than they were together. It would have seemed remarkable at one point that I could write this, but I am closer to both my mother and my father for knowing them as the fascinating, flawed human beings that they are. It is possibly true, too, that I have become a better person as a result; certainly I think I will be a better wife for it. For I never want to get divorced. The sins of the parents do not always have to be visited on the child.