Worse, then better.

When it happened it was chaos in the house, arguments all the time. I was 17 at the time I believe, and remember one night I heard my dad call my mother a cunt while I was trying to sleep, next thing I knew I threw him into a cabinet and we beat the piss out of eachother, but forgave and forgot.

It held me back quite a bit too. My mom got ownership of basically every possession, but my dad got the house. When they were together they were fairly financially unstable (that's not to say anything negative, they both worked and they worked hard, but we weren't exactly a rich family), so I found myself splitting 80% of my paychecks to give to each of them, so my dad can start getting new furnature for the house, and so my mom could make rent and pay bills without sinking in debt. During this time I was trying to save for college, and couldn't remember the math but basically a full year of saving from work would only amount to a single semester of college, so I took what I had saved already and decided to buy a half pound of weed to sell for profit. At the time I wasn't smoking anymore, so 100% of the weed was profit.

I did that for several months, and that allowed me to get back up on my feet and create a decent savings. By the time I was ready for college at the end of the year, my mother met a great guy and they married not too long after, and my dad met an awesome woman who moved in with him after a short period too, both were divorced with children as well, so the days of me helping financially were finally behind me.

I'm finishing my studies this December, currently running my own little business, and haven't even seen pot since those days. My mother has been happily married to an amazing guy for 3 years now, and my father and his girlfriend have been together around the same amount of time, both couldn't be happier, which makes me smile to see. With both of them having a new spouse, they all make enough money to support themselves, and me if I'm stuck in a bad situation.

So things will almost always start out rough, but that doesn't mean it's always going to be a bad thing. I look at each parent and see them happier as they are now then they were back before the divorce.