title: Divorce Is Not the End of the World: Zoe's and Evan's Coping Guide for Kids
author:  Zoe Stern 
description: Ellen Sue Stern is the founder of Expecting Change Workshops, President of Stern Literary Enterprises, a Celebrity Ambassador for the National MS Society, and the author of twenty books. Her writing has been featured in <i>Self, Women's Day, Marie Claire, Sports Illustrated,</i> WebMd, Match.com, and CNN.com.
zlib_text: 
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  Zoe McCourt was sixteen when she met the boy who would change her life. She'd
  grown up in the mountains of West Virginia, the oldest of four. By the time
  she was twelve, her father had already run off with the wife of another man.
  
  
  
  
  
  Even then, Zoe hadn't considered it any great loss. Her daddy was a short-
  tempered, moody man who preferred drinking beer with the boys or banging his
  neighbor's wife rather than seeing to his own.
  
  
  
  
  
  Still, it was hard, since most weeks he had at least brought home a paycheck.
  
  
  
  
  
  Her mother was a thin, nervous woman who smoked too much and compensated for
  her husband's desertion by replacing him, with some regularity, with
  boyfriends cut from the same cloth as Bobby Lee McCourt. They made her happy
  in the short term, angry and sad in the long, but she'd never been able to do
  without a man for more than a month straight in any case.
  
  
  
  
  
  Crystal McCourt had raised her brood in a double-wide, slotted into a lot in
  the Hills