My parents got divorced when I was 13 years old, which is arguably the worst possible time for parents to get divorced. An awkward, depression-prone pre-teen, my increasing angst was engaged in the constant struggle for an outlet, and I had more friends on the Dave Matthews Band message boards I frequented than I did in real life. But one of the things you learn when you are a tween and your parents sit you down in the living room and tell you they want to end their lives together is that, contrary to what the TV and the radio and Tiger Beat tell you, the world does not actually revolve around you. Beside the credenza on the cheap embroidered couch my parents told me and my sister that they were separating, and instantly the focal point of our intimate family life shifted. Immediately our lives had very little to do with the small victories of childhood—the straight-A report cards and carpools and birthday parties—and everything to do with the fact that my parents did not love each other anymore.
This is an earth-shattering realization to have at 13, when every single event in your tiny universe is divided into two opposite camps: everything is either the best thing ever or the worst thing ever. How simple and black and white life is at 13! How simple it was to forget, to resent, that the pottery project I made in art class was meaningless next to the reconstruction of a solid family unit. It is like worrying about what to wear to a funeral. The details and minor accomplishments and joys of childhood were continually eclipsed by the larger picture—mainly, that our small, quiet, suburban life would never be the same again.
In college I would become maniacally selfish, perhaps in an attempt to make up for those years when the dissolution of my parents’ marriage wavered on the court docket. In 2001, tweendom ceased to be about Britney Spears and began to be about what to make for my little sister for dinner because my father, wholly obsessed with his job, was running late again.
I always made spaghetti: I was 13 and didn’t know how to cook anything else.
***
Looking back, I don’t know how my parents kept it together for almost 15 years. My mother was 24 when she had me—just two years older than I am now—and my father’s passion for teaching and education reform often demanded the attention my mother wished he’d give to us. When I was two and three and four, my father used to wake me up at dawn before leaving for work. We’d take quiet walks around our city neighborhood, the sound of chattering birds and garbage trucks scoring our steps. I was young, but I have a distinct memory of these sunrise strolls, because it is one of the only times I can recall when the child/parent dynamic between us was pure, unencumbered by the demands divorce would eventually thrust upon it.
In the living room when my parents told us it was over I did not say a word. My sister—who was nine, sparked like a firecracker and proudly wore her heart for all to see—shot straight up on stick legs, locked her hands on her hips and demanded after letting out a wail, “BUT WHAT WILL MY FRIENDS THINK?” I did not even cry, just listened stoically and then ran up to my room to record the event in my private Livejournal. I had the feeling that the detailed recollections of that night would be very valuable to me some day. Of course, they were valuable to me then, as I was beginning to discern writing as a necessary outlet for all that angst, but I wouldn’t know it for years to come. Analysis, the attempt to wrap this messy time in our lives into a coherent narrative, is possible only in retrospect. “They finally did it,” reads my diary entry from that night. “My family has completely fallen apart.”
***
What I remember most about the beginning of my parents’ separate lives is how important time suddenly became. They did not have a scorebook but one would have served them well, as every second spent with one parent was obsessively documented by the other. My parents collected these moments like precious jewels, hoarding them, unleashing the wrath of their unfair distribution on my sister and me only when the time was right. My mother stopped calling us, claiming she didn’t want to “intrude,” but even at that tender age we recognized her actions as a passive-aggressive grab for attention. My father got the house and with it by default came my sister and me, because the house was close to school, to our friends, and included the bedrooms we’d proudly decorated with posters and Ikea furniture. There was no court battle, no batch of subpoenas–custody was settled behind closed doors, and since my Dad worked in our school district, it just made sense for him to keep living there. My mother moved to an apartment in a part of Philadelphia 20 minutes from our school district, and on school nights when we came home grumpy and exhausted by math tests and field hockey practice and play rehearsal, we simply didn’t want to make the trip to my mother’s apartment, where we did not have rooms of our own but instead slept on the lumpy living room couch.
We didn’t realize it until much later, but the fact is that my mother kept careful track of every night we canceled on her, of every plan we made with our father that did not offer a counterpart with room for her: the fact is that our parents were playing a game that we were not, one where seconds were precious and every moment spent with the other parent was a narrow betrayal. As these betrayals built and collected and grew into the fractures that threatened our relationship during my teen years, I remained essentially clueless. I just wanted to know which parent would drive me to the mall. I was young and selfish and I had all the time in the world, and I wanted to spend most of it away from my father, who did not like my attitude or my red-lipsticked friends, and away from my mother, who siphoned cruelty from small gestures, whose own hurt over the divorce manifested itself in clinging desperately to one of my arms while my father yanked stoically on the other.
***
For our part, my sister and I did not handle our parents’ divorce or eventual remarriage to other people with any modicum of grace. Spoiled and angry, we put up a fight at every curve: my sister, always resistant to change and obsessed with the opinion of her friends, spent middle school going to great pains to obscure the fact that my parents divorced at all. She did not even tell her friends my father was getting remarried until a few days before the actual ceremony. I reacted quietly, indirectly, smoking cigarettes and shoplifting, acting out in all of the stereotypically teenaged ways. In 10th grade, I wrote a short story so devastating and unhinged in its depiction of my feelings about my family that my English teacher insisted we have a private meeting to discuss it. In the story I appeared injured, bursting with despair: I wrote about storming out of the bride’s maid dress fitting, about missing my mother but not knowing how to tell her. My teacher made wrinkles appear in her forehead and touched my hand for a long time.
With Catholic inhibition and emotional frigidity sewn deep, my father performed the logistics of remarriage slowly and sneakily. The evidence of my stepmother’s impending presence in our household began to surface in small ways. One day—suddenly—her silverware appeared in our kitchen drawers. Knickknacks that smelled of potpourri and proudly declared “Home is where the heart is!” showed up on the walls next to paintings my mother had hung. I did not want to leave my room, for fear I’d trip over a new living room rug, or come face-to-face with a Victorian piece of embroidery boasting, “Welcome to our home.” My sister and I made those first few months after the remarriage miserable for everyone, lavishing in the monetary bribes my stepmother offered while refusing to treat her like a member of our family. We did not let her accompany my father to school events because we were ashamed; on a vacation to Europe financed by her ever-generous family, I smashed a bottle of wine on the hotel room floor and told her that I hated her. Many nights, I stole the car so that I could cry by myself on dark stretches of thick-wooded roads. My father threw himself into work, my mother kept refusing to call. We loved them but we were too damaged to say it. I did not invite my mother to my graduation party; my sister would never let her friends see the inside of my mother’s apartment. We hurt our parents out of spite, because we thought they deserved it. We hurt them because we were lost and scared; crying into our fists at the wedding seemed like the only thing we could do.
My sister and I were too entitled by the safety of our upbringing prior to the divorce to understand sacrifice, to just shut up and go to sleep in the place that hurt our parents the least. The struggle, it seemed, was that we were always hurting at least one of them, whether we meant to or not. It is a very powerful thing to realize at 13 that you have the ability to hurt your parents, that your actions impact them just as much as theirs do you. Because of this, we recognized our parents as actual human beings far earlier than most kids do: humans who cry and ache and act out of spite, humans who err. We loved them like people, not like parents. I don’t know if that made things better or worse.
***
What all of the counting and keeping track taught us was that love bears an arresting resemblance to need, and that both could be measured in mathematical terms, in numbers with sums that add up to a finite amount of affection. If someone had asked us which parent we preferred at that time, we would have laughed and brushed the question off just like any other kid, but in the back of our heads was the nagging knowledge that our parents could have answered that question easily, with confidence. The results changed week to week, but the answer to “Which parent do you love more?” was always the one who had amassed more time-jewels, the one whose house we’d slept at the most.
Now that we are adults it is not unusual to recognize that our parents needed us then, but as kids the notion tasted strange in our mouths, like a spice from a far off country. It felt perfectly natural for us to need them—we were far too young to take care of ourselves—but every time they expressed their need for us, an expression amplified by the subtle competition that brewed between them, we were taken aback. What value could we provide them, with our loud music and selfish demands and angsty door slamming?
The value, of course, was love and connection, things we took for granted but our parents desperately sought in our every word. They needed to hear “I love you” just as frequently as we did. But we were careful with our phrases and our gestures, their divorce a thorn in our side that we believed authorized us to behave poorly and without regret. We leveraged the guilt they suffered and used it to our advantage: it felt like, after all we had been through, we deserved that little victory. It took us far too long to realize that the divorce wasn’t our punishment, but actually theirs: we had not lost anything, just watched helplessly as it divided in half. For them, it had all been subtraction.
***
It has been eight years since the divorce, and we are still learning to love each other in immeasurable ways. As we grow older it feels much less strange to acknowledge and love our parents as people. My mother no longer keeps tally of the phone calls I make to her. I tell my parents I love them every time we speak. This June, my stepmother had a child with my father, a dough-cheeked baby girl who screeches happily when she hears my voice on the phone. When she is old enough to speak, she will call my mother “Aunt Michele.”
I went back to Pennsylvania a few months ago because I missed my parents and I missed the East Coast. My father, mother, stepmother and I all had dinner together, Chinese food eaten buffet style at the dining room table while my baby sister cooed from her high chair. Where previously there would have been awkwardness and resentment, there was just the desire to relish in time spent together. Our family has added and subtracted, divided and multiplied, but it’s no matter—we’re not keeping score any longer.
(Images via)
Great piece. I feel hugged.
[...] is an updated version of “Long Division,” which originally appeared on this [...]