Divorce is a huge part of a majority of our generation’s lives. Looking back on the rise and fall of my parents marriage, the bad outweighs the good. A certain kind of paranoia rushes over me. Suddenly I feel five again. I live on 16th avenue and my dad lets me skip school and the only thing we do all day is listen to the 1968 version of Glen Campbell’s “Wichita Lineman,” and eat Chinese food. I remember marriage. I remember writing on the walls and baby corn and naps on the couch. The first time I got the chicken pox. I remember it all so well and I was so small, not aware of the feelings that consumed me the way they did others. The curls on my head grew, a long with my mother and father. It was the prime of my childhood. It was the constant reassurance that I was loved - and it came unconditional. It did not have any rules. It breathed on it’s own. It swallowed up every fiber in my body, structuring me, molding me as I am now.
Even though my parents love for each other failed, the love they had for me did not. Seven years later now, and things are a lot more clear than before. When divorce happened, when I didn’t know much about it other than the fact that is bad, forbidden; “a sin.” I look back it now as a small chapter in the life that I will and have been leading. My love for my parents has never altered. It’s stayed healthy since I was small. The disbelief I went through when it happened was normal but even then I knew that everything essentially happens for a reason. I didn’t want to have something that I knew I had no control over rule my life, but I did. Let’s face it: Divorce is hard. It’s hard for anyone. It’s hard even when it’s supposed to be the, “easiest way out.” My parents didn’t pick the easiest way out, but they picked the fastest way out. I’m sure there are things that I don’t know about the way it ended, and I’m not sure if I’ll ever know, but if there is something I do know it’s that it makes sense now.
When it happened it was completely beyond my understanding. I didn’t see how it was possible to love someone with your whole entire life and then one day not have it be enough. I didn’t understand what it meant to live in a whole different home after it happened, from being picked up on the weekends with a different parent, two christmases, two family birthday parties, two cakes, it was too much. I was young and I didn’t want to understand. Screw understanding. I was 10, I was 11, I didn’t need to be blaming myself but I did.
It’s important now that I recognize the struggle they went through as human beings, as responsible parents, to keep their marriage alive as long as they could for their only daughter. After all my terrible adolescence and misunderstanding that eventually turned into teen angst, something inside me switched on. It said, everything happens for a reason. You need to stop blaming yourself, your parents even, just let things happens the way they are supposed to happen. That was the day I began to live for what’s going on right now, not the past, and not even the future. I knew that whatever kind of life I was going to live one day was going to be a great one; a life without regrets, without tension, and I most definitely wouldn’t be asking myself, “What if?”
