Chapter 1

My entries thus far have been short and sweet, and maybe I’ve been leaving out the juicy details… it’s because this is so raw for me. It makes me feel very vulnerable, which is scary for most of us, to varying degrees. But I will paint a better picture for any who dare read this, starting today – the day I “divorced” my mother.

Let’s start with a flashback: it’s 1994, and I am 14 years old. My parents have spent most of my life fighting, but now it has come to a head and they are divorcing. I am the oldest, my brother 2 1/2 years behind me, and my sister 5 years younger than I. My dad is 38, my mom is 37 years old. They have been together for 16 years. Our parents have decided to sit us down and tell us, as a family, that they are splitting up. It is the first time in my life that I’ve seen my father cry. My mother cries all the time, so it is less shocking for us to see. But when dad cries, something is amiss. This isn’t the same as the nightly yelling and arguing we have grown so accustom to hearing from up in our bedrooms, where they assumed we were fast asleep. Shit just got real.

Our parents split fairly quickly – at least that’s how it seems to a kid of my age. Our mother moved into a mobile home right in town, so that we didn’t have to change schools or be far from our father. Which I learned was awful nice of her, so selfless, as it was difficult for her to be close to him and his family and all their judgments… (I wasn’t sure what that meant, but it was what she told me)

We split time between our parents’ houses, I believe it was 50/50. Dad kept the house because he could afford it. So that felt like home to me, more so than where mom had moved. And it wasn’t that mom’s house was bad, by any stretch of the imagination. It was comfortable, furnished, cozy, functional – all the things a home needs to be. We had great neighbors (God, I loved playing with all the kids in the park!), and a couple became long time friends! It was a piece of community we never had at Dad’s house, because his was on the edge of town, on a busy road. Not in a neighborhood.

What really became the issue, was not how mom’s house was, but rather how it felt to be there. She was struggling, emotionally. Anyone could see that, even a 14 year old girl. Maybe especially a 14 year old girl, with all her own emotions running rampant. Almost every time we had to spend time at her house, my mother would put my brother and sister in front of the tv, or let them play outside, while she took me all the way down the hall to the back of the mobile home where her bedroom was, and lock me in there with her so that she could cry to me about her marriage falling apart.

At first I tried to sit and listen, and I would console her, and tell her everything was going to be alright. And then, as it became more often, I started to feel like I had to fix it somehow, so that I could be free of the stress of the topics and the heavy feelings that were being laid on my shoulders. But there is no way for a child to fix a broken relationship, and even the 14 year old child knows this.

One time, I asked my father if it had to be this way, and couldn’t they work it all out? He replied to me that he hadn’t chosen the divorce, that my mother did. It was her choice to leave, and so he could not do anything about it. And he said it in the saddest of ways – not in the proud, WON’T do anything about it way. But in a truly solemn way that says they tried everything they knew how. He was a very loving and sensitive man.

After months and months of this, the stress of being in my mother’s presence had worn on me. I was now acting out. I was still the good girl, getting good grades in school, doing as I was told – but I started turning depressed in the after school hours, and I dreaded being at my mother’s house. We never knew what to expect from her day to day. She was no longer with our dad, but the yelling continued. At us instead now.

When I turned 15, I was apparently old enough to choose which parent I’d like to live with as a permanent address, and so I chose to live with my father. Anyone reading this right now could see why… but the one person who couldn’t see why, or understand it from a child’s perspective, was my mother. She hissed at me, saying that she hoped I was happy now, that I got exactly what I wanted, the nicer bigger house, and to live with the parent who had more money, and where I could do whatever I wanted without any oversight (this was confusing to me, because I had FAR more oversight at my father’s house than at my mother’s, and virtually nowhere to go, because: no license, no car, no neighborhood). Then she would switch entirely to pleading with me not to leave her, that she needed me there with her. And that really pained me – I almost changed my mind. I felt so much guilt that it was overwhelming. Until she changed her tune again, and let me have it, telling me that I was a selfish girl who cared about no one but herself and getting what she wanted.

And so, that is how my self image developed. When your mother tells you that you are selfish, you work the rest of your life trying to prove that you are not, by caring for everyone around you and putting yourself last… because if you do anything for yourself you feel crippling guilt. Your mother’s words echo in your head forever. Because, after all, mother knows best – right?