At puberty, around 1968, Grace began to distance herself from her father. She was growing up and moving on in a normal way, establishing her own network of friends as well as pursuing activities usual to someone her age. Her father, however, was losing his surrogate marriage companion and he was angry and, as we shall see, vengeful. A month after she was allowed to begin dating at the age of sixteen, her father stormily announced that he wanted a divorce from Grace's mother and, in almost the same breath, told Grace he didn't love her anymore. Though he never repeated this statement, for years Grace felt devastated and perplexed by his outburst, which she felt should have been aimed at her mother.Only years later did she begin to understand that he was merely lashing out at her for leaving him in an empty marriage as she began to date. Almost overnight, he became critical of her in a way he had not been in the past, particular attacking her for any attempt she made to make herself more attractive and appealing. Perhaps far worse than that, for legal reasons he stayed in the house as the divorce proceeded, creating a strained situation which was only aggravated when both her parents, who weren't speaking to one another, made Grace their "confidant and courier," as she described it. She often refers to this grim situation as her first counseling job. Interestingly, her father announced that he wanted a divorce to end this marriage of nineteen years almost coincident with a lunar eclipse that occurred within two degrees of Grace's natal Moon, and squaring her Saturn, of course.
During the divorce process, and while her parents were living "separated" in the same house, her mother, in an attempt at revenge, took a lover. This was a grave mistake from a legal point of view, because, as the law stood in that time and place, it gave her husband leverage that allowed him to keep the bulk of their common wealth. Between the relatively small amount allotted to her and her naive mismanagement of it, in her later years it was a struggle for Grace's mother to make ends meet. Thus, the situation that began in 1971 played itself out agonizingly over many years. Grace and her siblings watched from afar as their father, distancing himself from them and rejecting their mother, built a new life for himself while their mother's prospects withered on the vine. Grace herself left home, moving as far away as she could possibly go and still be in the same country, as soon as she had finished high school in early 1974. Following after Grace's "great escape," as she called it, came a period of her life that coincides well with the repression and denial phase of a shadowed planet or in this case two of them, Mars and Saturn.