One of the most life shaking experiences I have had was going through my parents divorce. When I was in 9th grade my parents sat my siblings, Mary and Max, down to tell us that they were selling our home and getting a divorce. At the time I felt like this was going to ruin me. I had no idea that someday I would be able to look back on this negative experience and be thankful it happened.
Just like most divorces, you can always see it coming. My parents knew about a year and half before they sat us down that this was coming, due to the fact they both started to act different. They started trying to convince us that the other one was the sole reason as to why things were not perfect anymore. Being young, my siblings and I did not know what to think. We would hear all these awful things about my Father only to have him turn around and tell us horrible things about my Mother. We felt like we did not know the truth, it was like being stuck in a cave. My parents kept my siblings and I in a cave chained to their lies. The only things that kept us listening to them was the fact that we could not deal with what Plato would call our “shadow”. In this sense our shadow was dealing with the fact that our parents were not to be trusted.
Our parents seemed to devote all of their time with us to talking crap on the other one. For my 16th birthday my Father was going to buy me a new car, when my Mother heard of this she ran out and bought me a car. Although I am very thankful for the car and how faithful it has been to me, she bought the car with missing pieces. This did not matter because she can forever say she bought it and that my Father did not. They used my siblings and I to get back at one another. This was hard to take since we were young and just wanted a normal family.
Once we moved out of our house and the divorce was finalized, it took a second to get adjusted to everything. My parents decided to have split custody, so my brother and I were forced to live out of a suitcase and sleep on couches. After about a year of doing this I became very ill. The doctor told my parents that moving back and forth would not be ideal for my health so I would need to pick a parent to live with full time. Naturally our parents bombarded us with false accusations of the other one. Finally my brother and I made a decision, one that still haunts me today, we decided to live with my Father.
Moving in with my Father was my light. The truth of what happened between my parents slowly started to unravel. I realized what it was like to basically be my Mother. My father made us do everything! He would come home everyday upset from work and would go off the deep end if there were one thing out of order in the house. It was like walking on eggshells. This was something I had never realized while growing up. I suppose I noticed it because my Mother was not there for him to take his anger out on. This is not to say that my Mother was innocent when it came to whom to blame for the divorce. She had her fair share of crazy antics that slowly drove my Father away, like I always tell them it takes two to sign divorce papers.
When I finally saw what had happened between my parents, I felt I understood the divorce more. I became more aware of how my parents acted and treated not only each other but also other people. Seeing the truth behind my parents divorce has been a blessing, not only has it helped me get over what happened but it also helped me to understand people and situations in life. It has given me a life skill. Even more so than that it helped me become closer with my siblings and form an even stronger family bond with them.
Although I have seen the light to my parents divorce and now understand what were lies and what were truths, I still seem to get sucked into the drama it still causes in the family. I see why Plato talks about how the prisoner after seeing the light returns. For me I return because it is my family. If someone is hurting someone I love when they do not deserve it I stand up for them. I feel that this is not a bad reason to return as long as I remember who tells the truth and who does not.
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You tell this story in such a way that it's clear you've done a great deal of processing and evaluating. I especially appreciate how many angles you look at the issue from. On the one hand, just being aware of and going through the experience presented you with many of these perspectives, and you've done a noble job both of breaking down what was behind everything you experienced, and of putting back together the series of consequences that all had, and --more importantly-- how this all helped you learn an important "life skill" as you put it.
Besides how beneficial a "life skill" with this much depth of perception and range of meaning can be, I'm particularly interesting in where and how you use that skill. Family is one of the most fundamental facts of life. As a result, knowing the truth of those facts rather than the shadows helps us understand one of life's most fundamental truths. I believe that this truth extends not just to our direct relatives, but to the essential people in our life, whether they be our closest friends or communities that we are members of. Technically, we're all part of the community of the country will live in, and at a larger level, to the community of humanity: and so this fundamental truth may intersect everything that connects us to anyone in the world.
I've elaborated this much because I'm very curious to know your subjective definition "family" (i.e. not merely as objective relatives, but that higher bond that WE make, like what you have with your siblings-- in Plato's metaphor, this would be the "sun" or light in your life). Every skill has an object, like the object of medicine is to heal bodies, the object of farming is to grow food, or the object of architecture is to build buildings. So, in terms of your life skill, what is the object of building true family? How do you do it and what does that mean, both as an idea and as a way of life?
One of the best movies I've seen related to your experiences on this topic is "Darjeeling Limited". The three brothers go on an intense journey to learn this skill, and I think the first place they get to---at the end of the movie--- is how they have to learn that skill *together*. That means A LOT, and the lessons that form out of this about family, as an ultimate ideal, may be quintessential to what it means to live a good life, all the more when aspects of our upbringing may have been as shadowed and corrupt as what you've related. "Little Miss Sunshine" is another good family-movie for this kind of topic. On the level of friends who become family, the movie "Dream with the Fishes" (one of my all-time favorites) would also be an excellent choice. Let me know if you'd like to discuss any of these and thanks for opening up here! This is great.
Hi,
ReplyDeleteI think that divorce is both a symptom of problems in our society, as well as a cause to even more problems. We live in a superficial world where everything is easy to get and no one takes promises seriously anymore.
i believe that as much as divorce affect the parents, it also affect the children involve and i am really glad that you were able to be strong to go through the divorce of your parents specialy going through the lies they have to put you through.
thanks for sharing your story