First Draft

            I've always hated change, ever since I was little. When my parents wanted to change the paint and carpet in our house I was hysterical. When I went to high school and my friends started to change I was really sad. When I went away to college I got horrible anxiety trying to adjust to my new life far away from home. When Facebook changed their layout or when twitter changed their timeline appearance I was furious. But eventually we all get used to change, and what we thought was a big deal then seems so trivial now. However, there was one night that was able to flip my life upside down and keep it that way.

            I had an amazing childhood with two parents that raised me to be the wonderful woman I am today J. I grew up in a city with a great community in the same house my whole childhood. I always had lots of great friends and worked hard in school. Life seemed to be going pretty well, despite the occasional drama once in a while. Then, one night when I was 16, I came home to overhear my parents arguing. This really didn’t faze me, since this was typical behavior since I could remember. My parents called my older brother, who is 10 years older than me with his own family at this point, to come over. My mom and dad sat us both down at the dining room table, and the rest is all a blur. They told us that they were separating. I just sat there crying while my brother yelled at them. My mom had been the one to make the decision. My brother and I just didn’t understand why she would do this to our family. What was so different now between my parents? They fought like they always did. My brother began questioning my mom and then suggested the idea of marriage counseling. They both decided to give it a try, but my dad left our house that night and didn’t return till a couple months later.

            My parents continued counseling for a couple months and then my dad moved back in. I think he was only back for a few weeks until my mom made her official decision. She admitted that she just didn’t love him anymore and there was nothing anyone could do to save their marriage. My brother and I were furious, thinking that she had just given up on our family. We resented her so much and our relationship with her began to deteriorate. My dad moved about 30 minutes away, so I didn’t see him nearly as much. That was just the beginning.

            Holidays were brutal after that. My dad has 4 children from his marriage prior to my mom. I have 10 nieces and nephews since all my siblings are much older than me. We were always all very close and spent every holiday and birthday together. After the separation, there was the issue of who to spend the holidays with. My mom doesn’t have any siblings or other family, so I would go to holidays on my dad’s side. I felt sad leaving her behind, but also like she deserved what she got. She was the one who made this decision and so she should have to live with the consequences, I thought. Maybe if she was alone and miserable, she would realize how much better life was with my dad, and then maybe our family could be normal again. My plan didn’t work, and she became resentful toward me and my brother. We fought so many times about how she felt she was being punished for years. We fired back about how difficult it was to deal with such a change, and how she basically destroyed everything we cared about. Because of the separation, our family slowly stopped spending time together.

            Not only was it hard to see my family wither away from the inside, but I was also worried about what other people would think. I was once so proud of my family, and now I didn’t see us as that same perfect happy family I once admired. I was so embarrassed to tell my friends that my parents were separating. I don’t know why I was so ashamed because I had plenty of friends whose parents weren’t together. I think it just all stemmed back to my hate for change. I was so comfortable in my life and my image and then it was suddenly disrupted. I didn’t want people to see me as the girl with divorced parents.  I finally had to tell them what was happening. It definitely wasn’t as big a deal as I made it out to be. We all quickly got used to my new life with just my mom at home (even though all my friends still missed seeing “Father Birth” around).

            Even though I started to feel more comfortable with the situation, my mom and I still weren’t on the best terms. It was so hard to see both of my parents miserable and sad. I never wanted to take sides. I finally understood where my mom was coming from after we had a long talk. I realized that things just didn’t work out, and I couldn’t blame anyone anymore.  I knew both of my parents still loved me and wanted the best for me, and that was enough.

            Just when I had begun to accept everything, my mom started dating someone after my freshman year of college. We found out she had been lying to my brother and I. She began to go out a lot more since I wasn’t home a lot. She would say that she was staying with friends on nights she didn’t come home. We found out that she had been staying with whom she called her “friend”, which was really the man she had been dating. My brother and I were appalled to hear news that our fifty-some year old mother was dating. We wanted nothing to do with some new strange man trying to infiltrate our family. On top of that, we found out he has 3 kids, all younger than me. I already had enough trust issues after my parents suddenly split, I wasn’t about to let these people in my life that I didn’t know anything about. My brother and I refused to meet them.

            From then on my mom tried to convince my brother and me to come meet this new part of her life. She brought it up every time we talked to her, and it was actually quite irritating. It begun to feel like that was all she ever cared about, and not about us. She began to spend holidays there and it came to the point where we rarely saw her. It wasn’t so bad for me since I am at school most of the time. My brother and mom went at it all the time though. He was tired of the way she had been acting toward our family. He was tired of the fact that she would barely see her grandkids anymore, and always seemed to have “prior engagements” when asked if she’d like to watch them. He was tired of the fact that every time she actually did come to a family party, she always seemed to have a headache or not feel well. And mostly, he was tired of the fact that all she seemed to care about was putting pressure on us to open up to this new man that WASN’T OUR FATHER. Let me just tell you that after 16+ years (26+ years for my brother) seeing your parents together, seeing your mom with someone new is not on the top of your list of things to do. She would use excuses such as “other kids are happy for their parents to meet someone new and be happy”, or “other kids deal with divorced parents, I don’t understand why you still aren’t over it”. The fact that she thought she could put a time frame on my grieving process is ludicrous. I was irate that she would dare compare me to “other kids”. I’m her daughter, and she should worry about how I feel. I think at almost 17 years old it’s a lot different to deal with divorcing parents than as a child. I knew what was going on. I couldn’t just adjust to some crazy new lifestyle when I was just beginning to build my OWN life and future. This website helps support my experience by describing different reactions to divorce by different age groups.

            At the same time we have to deal with all of this emotional drama from my mom, remember my parents are still in the process of a divorce. NO, this wasn’t a simple “split it down the middle and everyone’s happy” divorce. This process went on for FOUR years. My parents were at each other throats. Naturally, my dad was indignant toward my mother so he wanted to milk her for every cent she was worth, seeing as she was the primary source of income for our family. My mom felt it was unfair to see all of her hard earned money taken away from her. She would cry and complain to my brother and I about what “our father” was doing to her. We told each of them we didn’t want to get involved and that it was their problem to solve. As if seeing my parents hate each other to the point of tears wasn’t enough, I realized I actually HAD to care about this division of assets issue. It wasn’t just about them, it was about me too. My brother didn’t have to deal with nearly as much as I did, so I felt I didn’t have anyone to talk to that understood what I was going through.

            The realization that paying for college was a concern in this matter was unnerving. My mom is helping me pay my way through. She reminded me that I was 18 and my dad wasn’t obligated to help me financially. I knew my dad would help me, though. I mean he’s my dad, right? He loves me. My mom’s words got to me, though, and I began to get severe anxiety about money. I talked to my dad about the issue and he assured me that everything would be fine, but I was still so worried. I felt unstable and confused. After years of my dad not having much money, it felt weird to ask him for any. I am much more comfortable asking for money from my mom. And even with this reassurance, my mom still didn’t believe he would help. I’m guessing this is just because she wanted me to try to convince him not to pursue anymore payment from her. I HATED being in the middle of this money battle. I just wanted to know that I would still be taken care of.

            The division of assets issue didn’t just stop at my college payment. Spring of my sophomore year, I found out my mom had to sell our house; the house I had lived in my entire life. After 20 years, I had to say goodbye to the house I grew up in. It wasn’t the best house in the world. It was small and falling apart. There's dents in the walls where my brother punched, the stairway is half painted, the entire downstairs is drafty, the ugly borders my parents picked out are peeling off, there's stains on the carpet from when I spilled my drinks or when Claire spilled nail polish in my bedroom. It was always 100 degrees in my house even in the winter. When my friends would come over we said the house would trap us because we could never leave. But it was where I grew up; it is a part of me. It is home. I miss watching the world from my porch, and the sound each door makes, and the smell, and the creaky first step, and the full length mirror at the bottom of the stairs, and the old school pencil sharpener in the basement, and the little space in my room people used to crawl behind, and the slanted ceiling everyone would hit their head on, and riding my bike home from the park at sunset in middle school when my parents yelled at me to be home in 1 minute and I was close enough to do it. And I miss the feeling of knowing I can come home. This house was the last shred I had of my old life, when I had my family.

            I began to stay at my brother’s house after our house sold last summer. The first night I had to spend away, I broke down in tears. I felt like my world was shattered. I felt like I had no one to turn to. I felt like no one understood what I was going through. Even just typing this right now, I can almost feel the pain in my chest and the lump in my throat that I felt that night. That night was the culmination of everything that had been taken from me that year. We had to put my 18 year old dog (and best friend), Kali, down that January. My boyfriend and I broke up. My parents had officially divorced. My house wasn’t my house anymore. I felt so distant from my entire family. I felt like there was nowhere in the world I could go anymore to feel at home. My whole life seemed to change in an instant, and it was just, for lack of better description, hard.