I remember standing by the stove in the kitchen with my older sister, looking up at my parents. I remember that there was something important they had to tell us. I remember they said that mom was going to live in a different house and that dad would stay in ours. But both houses, they said, we could always call home. I was four. My sister was seven. I had no idea why my mom was moving away. All I knew was that we were getting two houses and that sounded pretty cool to me. I remember my sister yelling at me for being excited and I couldn’t understand why.
I still find it crazy that I can even recall that moment from so long ago. I was just 4-years-old. And while the memory is fuzzy, it has always stuck with me. I didn’t know at the time that my parents' marriage was ending, that my mom was moving out and that things would never be the same. But, somehow, I think I sensed it. I think that even as a 4-year-old I could tell that something big was happening, something that I didn’t and couldn’t understand. We remember certain moments for a reason, even if that reason isn't clear at the time.
That reason is clear now. But, here’s what I am not going to do. I am not going to sit here and complain to you about the tragedy of growing up with divorced parents and how it made me resent my parents and made my life so hard because, honestly, that’s not true for me. Truth be told, I was pretty lucky as far as a kid with divorced parents goes. My parents had a rather civil divorce, at least in front of us they did. We traded off between my mom’s house and my dad’s house every week; they had no problem being in the same room and talking like adults, and in most cases they always put my sister and me first. I was lucky because I was too young to ever really see my parents together in the first place. Having divorced parents was my normal.
But I know that most people didn’t experience divorce the way I did. Some people had to watch their parents scream and fight and hurt each other or couldn’t even see one of their parents for months at a time or even at all. They grew up seeing their parents together and had to watch their marriage fall apart right in front of their eyes. And while I didn’t endure the extremity of divorce, it wasn’t always easy. Moving your life from one house to another every few days, splitting holidays and birthdays between two places, feeling different and lost because your friends’ parents were together and they could never really understand, or getting put in the middle of your parents' fights.
No matter the experience, all of those feelings are ones that any kid of divorce knows all too well. But I found that these were feelings and circumstances that only made me grow as a person and taught me valuable life lessons about adapting and understanding that there are things you can’t control and that our parents are just people. They are people just like us who make mistakes and struggle to figure out life and make relationships work. I learned that the only thing you can control in a difficult situation is what you make of it and how you choose to react by either dwelling on it and feeling sorry for yourself, or toughening up and learning to take life as it is and move on.
From an early age, I was able to understand differences in people and acceptance. Because at the time, I was different. Out of my friends, I was the only one with divorced parents, the only one who knew what it was like. I watched my friends whose families seemed so disgustingly perfect and normal and I felt I already had a much more interesting view on life. I learned to be open-minded.
While being a child of divorce comes with its hardships and frustrations, I can honestly say that it made me a more independent, strong and understanding person. I learned to be open-minded and roll with the punches and understand that in the end, our parents are really just people.
