Nowadays, many kids experience the reality of having a broken family. Divorce is now more common than it ever has been before. And depending on what age you were when you went through this, it can affect you differently. Not just with how children cope with the fact of having divorced parents, but also it shapes the way we go through our own relationships later in life. Despite divorce being common in most families, there are still many families out there that are blessed with having normal relationships with their families per say. That doesn't go to say that each family doesn't go through their own issues, but it's much better than living in two places at once. For those that don't have divorced parents, this may be a good chance to learn and understand better for those that do.

I was very young when my parents got divorced. So young many would probably question whether it truly had much impact on my life, but trust me, it does. I was about two or three years old when my parents broke it off and that was the easy part. Growing up was easy enough for a kid whose parents weren't together anymore. All the decisions were made for me. I didn't have to worry about anything regarding my parents or who I stayed with the majority of the time because that choice was already made for me, which made it easy to deal with. It wasn't until I was about thirteen or fourteen when these decisions were passed onto me that I started to feel the impact of the divorce.

It's hard trying to decide who you want to stay with, who you would rather spend more time with. You feel as though you are stepping on egg shells most of the time. As you get older you realize that you don't have a home, you have homes. You spend every other weekend at your dad's/mom's, not counting the visits where you stay for weeks at a time during holidays and the summer. You are on a constant move, it feels like, from one house to the other. You didn't notice it before, but it definitely starts to take a toll now. You feel as though you live out of a suitcase now that you're older. You realize that the responsibility of this divorce doesn't just fall on your parent's shoulders, but yours as well. And with them being divorced while I was so young was almost bittersweet. The pain didn't hit me until years later when I had to break my own parent's hearts when I couldn't decide who to live with.

But it doesn't just affect the emotions you have between your parents, it also triggers the fear of getting into relationships. All you see now in today's society is divorce, or lack of relationships, and people waiting longer to get into relationships. You fear these things because you wonder if this is how it's going to be in the end of every relationship. Is this what I have to look forward to?

You see your friends go through the same things as well with their parents. Some people's parents get divorced later in life, which affects them immediately. It almost always causes resentment. I've seen it. I've seen it happen to all my friends and my coworkers. It creates a mistrust between your family, almost as if to say "What went wrong?" And then you question whether you had something to do with it. Blaming yourself is just as common with divorce that equally affects relationships later in life. A part of you gets taken away, a chance to have a whole family. It hurts, not that it's anyone's fault. It happens sometimes. People fall out of love, but that doesn't mean that the pain is only limited to the parents.

The truth about growing up with divorced parents is that the pain never ends. You learn and grow from it. You gain experience throughout the pain and you learn more about your parents than you ever thought you would have before. The main thing to realize is that we have seen love fail and it is important for people that have never experienced that to know that. We have seen it fail up close and to the ones we care the most about. That doesn't mean that love won't conquer again, but it sets a fear deep inside that we will end up the same way. It's also important to know that none of this could have been avoided. It happens and continues to happen everyday. The best truth to realize is that you should not be defined by the weight of the pain you carry from divorced parents. It hurts, but one thing that people from divorced families will always do, is persevere.