divorce –

Is it easier to cope with divorce as a child or as an adult? I have referenced several times, my parents divorce in 2011 and glossed over the effects it’s had on me. To be able to sit here and even write about it is a feat in and of itself. For years I was frozen by the trauma that had ensued and felt silly for even being upset when so many people go through the same thing and, sometimes even worse. So many people have serious trauma in their lives that make my story seem stupid.

I knew my parents were going to get divorced before they ever said anything. My brother and I had both moved out of the house. When I’d visit my parents during the months previously, everything was always a little off. I ignored it because I was barely even an adult and just starting to get my feet wet in the world. I still needed them to be my parents and I was still childish in that I didn’t want to accept they aren’t superheros. They’re imperfect people, like everyone else.

My parents had asked me home to dinner one August day before my senior year of college. They said they needed to talk to my brother and I. Whenever they did this one can be assured it wasn’t going to be anything good. I remember standing in the kitchen while my dad cooked dinner, asking him what they wanted to tell us. I don’t remember what he said, but I had asked if they were getting divorced. He asked me what if that’s what it was? I don’t know how I responded. My mom came home shortly after.

The table was set, my brother and I sat across from each other, my dad to my right and my mom to my left. The meal was awkward until my dad finally said the words through restrained tears, they were getting divorced. They said it wasn’t our fault and even then, I don’t know why they said that. I guess that’s just what people say. My mom sat with wet cheeks and my brother just stared at his food. My mom and my brother don’t talk about their feelings. I don’t know how the rest of the meal went. The next three years are a bit fuzzy.

So I went back to school and pretended like nothing was happening. I was on the crew team and threw myself into my fitness and my studies. I didn’t want to think about all  the pain I felt inside. I wanted to believe that because I knew it was coming, I had already made peace and accepted it. I hadn’t made peace. I didn’t accept it. When I didn’t have practice or school, I was going out to the club and getting black out drunk.

I stopped going home to visit because it was too hard. At school I could escape everything and pretend like nothing was wrong. I didn’t need to be in the turmoil but it didn’t stop the train wreck from occurring anyway. What started off as a mutual decision between my parents quickly became a war zone for every other member of my family. Suddenly, my family members were full of venom speaking about my parents as if I wasn’t there. As if they weren’t my parents and the people who had taken care of me and loved me my whole life. As if I still didn’t love them. I never knew my mom’s family hated my dad and vise versa with my dad’s family hating my mom. On the off chance I did go home no one said a word about what had happened and we all ignored the elephant in the room. I couldn’t understand how we could all sit there and not say anything. I couldn’t understand how everyone else was perfectly OK and I wasn’t. I couldn’t understand why I was the only one falling apart.

My aunt by marriage, would begin spreading rumors about my mothers infidelity. She was my mother’s best friend. My aunt would further go on to criticize my father’s parenting and I would receive texts and calls from my dad asking if I thought he was a bad father. I was mad at him, but I still loved him and I found it difficult to balance my anger at him and the reality that I was seeing both my father and my mother at their weakest points. My aunt’s words would eventually erupt on the first father’s day after my grandfather’s passing when they didn’t show up. My dad would have strong words with them. My dad and my uncle haven’t spoken to each other since. They never come to family functions anymore or if they do, the sit in the corner and speak to no one.

There was no one to talk to. I blamed my father for the whole thing and stopped talking to him. He had moved in with another woman several months after that conversation at the dinner table. When we did speak I was too angry and in too much pain and our conversations were full of yelling and crying as we both learned to cope with our new realties.  My father coping with his guilt and me wanting to blame someone for my pain instead of accepting it wasn’t either of their faults, but both.

I wasn’t nice to his girlfriend because I blamed her too. My mother moved in with her parents and stopped eating. She took antidepressants to numb her own sorrow and was emotionally unavailable at this time. My brother was going through his own divorce with his psychotic ex-wife and had his own issues to deal with. Of course I have friends, who’s parents got divorced in childhood. They could relate, but they couldn’t fully comprehend what was going on in my head. It was as if I was lost and alone in the woods with the fog was so dense, you couldn’t see the trees in front of you.

I started going out more and got involved with a  group of friends who were into partying, drugs and heavy drinking. I never did anything stronger than weed and mostly drank in excess. I didn’t think it was problematic because I’d only drink when I was out or at a party, but I was out or at a party every weekend and I was drinking to the point of blacking out. I had suffered from panic attacks as a teenager that had subsided, but they had come back with vengeance to the point of causing me to completely pass out in class, as I internalized and buried my stress.

I was seeing this guy Jake at the time and wanted desperately to feel some sort of love, though I didn’t know it at the time. Jake was also in an awful life spot and was a fan of heavy drinking, smoking a lot of weed and also cocaine. I had told him to not do cocaine around me. I was severely depressed but knew enough to stay away from that downward spiral. One night at a party I got mad at him for doing cocaine. I embarrassed myself, yelling at him and slamming doors in a drunken rage at a strangers house. I found myself in a closet, crying and called AnnaBelle who asked if I wanted her to come pick me up. I said I was fine and not to.  I wasn’t fine. She didn’t know I was in a closet. I walked home in the frozen winter at 5 in the morning. I sat on the couch when I got home and just cried. When AnnaBelle woke up, she asked if I was ok and all I could say was no. I hadn’t slept yet. This moment always stands out in my head as a complete personification of everything that was happening. My parents told me they were getting divorced in August, it was about December or January by this point.

After that, I stopped drinking so much but still probably too much. I wasn’t smoking a lot of pot because I was an NCAA athlete and subject to random drug testing. Crew was the only steady, consistent thing I had at this point and very likely the only thing that kept me from falling completely off the deep end. It offered me an escape, a natural high to numb how I felt.

I graduated college in the spring of 2011. I didn’t walk because I didn’t know how to cope with having both my parents in the same room when everything was still so raw. To be fair, I have been angry over this. I was the first person in my family to graduate college and I was really proud of that and felt bad for wanting to celebrate that. With everything that had been going on, I didn’t really think about what I was going to do after college. Frankly, I didn’t really care what happened anyway. I guess I had always thought I would move back home but I didn’t have a home anymore. Most of my friends and team mates would mostly stop talking to me during the summer and the year following. I still wasn’t talking to my family, but would begin talking to them again in the year that followed. I was mad that I had no one to help me as I started to face the real world post college and realizing my life was starting. I was mostly still numb, but I felt completely isolated and abandoned.

In the following August, my lease was up and AnnaBelle was moving in with her boyfriend and I had to find a place to live and someone to live with, because I made minimum wage working 2 jobs; Kmart and a burger joint. I put an ad on Craigslist and this girl Melanie found me and said she was from Seattle. We signed a lease and she sent me money to help me move in, before we ever met in person. I figured since she lent me money she was probably a real person at least. Melanie would become one of my best friends and one of the main players that helped me out of the emotional ocean I was drowning in. It wasn’t anything she ever did or said in particular but rather because she’s kind of bossy and would always drag me out of the house to go do stuff; listen to music, cook outs with her friends, and other miscellaneous activities that seemed at the time so insignificant. What it was doing though, was showing me how to feel something again and how to re-connect to the world again.

At some point, I got a better job at a real estate company (the same company that would fired me 3 and a half years later). I started making more money and was better able to support myself. I started talking to my dad again. My mom moved into her own apartment. I looked at myself in the mirror one day and didn’t recognize who I saw. I probably hadn’t really looked at myself in about a year in a half, but there I was. I had gained a lot of weight. My hair hung in an overgrown, split end mess. My face was round, pale and lacked any luster. I wondered how I had managed to look so old, so fast. I always thought of myself as pretty decent looking, but this person in the mirror was not anyone I knew.

I started taking care of myself. Melanie encouraged me to take the negative energy I felt and put it towards something positive. I started painting. I was writing again. I started running. I adopted a vegetarian lifestyle. I was smoking a lot of weed still, but I was starting to move forward again. I was starting to unthaw.

The lasting effects of the divorce, are still being discovered. I still can’t really tolerate the holidays. I enjoyed them so much as a child when my brothers and I would run around my grandma’s house, playing in the basement with our new toys and trying our best to cause trouble without getting in trouble. Christmas time brings out my inner humbug because seeing other people with their families that all get along is a painful reminder of what I don’t have anymore. A painful reminder of how my family has been fractured.

I tend to be extremely cynical about relationships now. I haven’t had a significant relationship since my parents got divorced and I tend to take the approach it isn’t going to last anyway. In the words of OutKast – Nothing lasts forever, then what makes love the exception? The happily ever after motif, Disney likes to stuff down our throats isn’t a reality. There’s no such thing as “the one”. Love is a choice and relationships require you to trust that someone else is always going to choose you and I simply can’t. I haven’t see it work. I don’t mean to suggest or comment on anyone else’s relationships – more power to you for having that in your life. I’m jealous of that companionship.

But for all the ways my parent’s divorce has negatively impacted my life, I have to admit there has been significant opportunities for growth because of it. I never would’ve discovered painting if I hadn’t felt so terrible inside. I wouldn’t have been forced to stand on my own two feet. I feel extremely capable and confident in myself to be able to go after the things I want in my life. I never would’ve moved to Florida and started this whole new chapter in my life.

Perhaps the best thing to have come from the turmoil, is my relationship with my dad. Prior too, my dad and I didn’t really speak to each other to begin with. I think my dad didn’t know how to relate to me – because I’m a girl, because I like theatre, because I was in marching band, because I’m bleeding heart, liberal, tree hugger. My mom would serve as an impetus between he and I, relaying any important information about my life to him. With my mom no longer in the picture between he and I, if we expected to have a relationship with each other we would have to talk to each other. Our conversations weren’t always positive. We have had to share a lot of truth between each other and learn to understand each other as individuals. We have had to learn how to respect each other for who we are. He and I are to a point that I would call him a good friend now. I don’t talk to him everyday, like I do with my mom, but that’s just fine. My dad and I are still a little awkward in conversations but we are getting there and that’s a beautiful thing.

I don’t know if it’s easier to deal with divorce as a kid. I think in some ways it can be because you can be ignorant. You’re ignorant to the venom that your family spews. You don’t really understand how relationships work anyway. As an adult, you have a little more understanding how relationships are but then your entire life feels like it’s being rewritten. When my family wouldn’t talk about my mom, it was as if she never existed. It was as if my entire life didn’t happen, as if we didn’t have many years of happiness and joy with each other.  This episode of the Twilight Zone was agonizing.

My parents divorce forced me into adulthood a lot faster than I had planned on. It was the hardest thing I’ve had to cope with. It’s been a lesson in forgiveness and understanding. In many ways, I’m still coping with the trauma of the events and my families inability to handle stressful situations. I’m in a better place than I was 6 years ago and while it’s caused me some internal conflicts I need to overcome, there has been a lot of beauty to come from trauma, as is often the case. I have tried multiple times to write this story and each time, the emotional drainage of having to replay these events in my head has overwhelmed me. It’s a testament that life goes on, that I can sit here and write this story and be able to publish it. My family is weird now, but we are finding normalcy and working towards repairing the damage that’s been done.

-Neptune