My parents split up on New Years Eve 2000. The "real millenium change", for all those buzzrapers back in 1999 who felt the need to point out that our calendar started with the Year 1, not 0. Numerology aside, it made for a shitty NYE. My brother showed up unexpectedly at the party I was attending. I thought he wanted to smoke some pot, but he just told me to get in the car. The entire ride home, I kept yelling at him that we could have got high inside the party. Finally, when we pulled into the driveway, he shut me up.
It turns out my mother had woken up around midnight and caught my father on the telephone with another woman. Confronted, he came clean about the affair, packed a quick bag, and headed off to god knows where. They'd been married for twenty-five years.
We spent the next few hours comforting my mother as she told us way more about their relationship than I ever wanted to know. In the morning, my father showed up for more of his things. I remember he sort of shook and cried as he hugged my brother and I. He seemed pretty pathetic.
When you're an adult and your parents divorce, no one gives you very much room to grieve. More than anything really, you're suddenly expected to flip roles and become the caregiver, to nurse your emotionally frazzled parents back to health. As far as tragedies go, it's not a very sexy one. I wouldn't write a song about, not unless I was in one of those really terrible emo bands with the wrist-cutting and the haircuts.
I'm quick to recognize that things could have been much worse. Everyone was still alive, and though they were acting a bit erratic, more or less my parents were ok. As my brother is fond of pointing out, if we'd been 12 years old, this probably would have fucked us up pretty good.
But still, at 18 and away from home for the first time, the dissolution of my parent's marriage sort of took the ground out from under me. In the years leading up to high school graduation, I worked hard to untie myself from the stabilizing forces in my life. I quit believing in God or attending church. I blasted my nervous system with hallucinogens. Although I made good grades in school, I didn't have any professional aspirations or take much pride in scholastic accomplishments. When it came time for college I picked one far away, and was excited about setting on my own, an empty vessel in uncharted waters.
What a crock of shit. I'd lived in the same house my entire life, had the same friends. I'd never wanted for anything or worried about money. If I'd managed to turn myself into a blank canvas, it was only because I was sitting atop the rock-solid sturdiness of the easel that had been my upper middle class life. I'd wanted to run as far from our boring little house as possible, but when I turned around and saw that house on fire, well, I wasn't so sure anymore.
The truth is, you can be 13 or 30, and something like divorce is still going to fuck you up. I think I spent the rest of my time in college sort of reeling from the shock. I pledged a fraternity, all too grateful for the opportunity for mindless conformity mixed with hedonism. I avoided home. If my parents would argue about who was supposed to pay tuition or rent, I'd just work it out some other way. I partied too much and studied too little. I was less than nice to some very nice girls.
But I graduated, and when I felt brave enough to face my family again it turned out everyone had landed on their feet. My parents both married people who were the polar opposite of each other, and I realized how different they'd been all along. My father married the woman he cheated with, and while this bothered me for a long time, I eventually just caved and formed a relationship with her.
There are still some things I'm unhappy about. I mourn the loss of the home I grew up in; it still bothers me to think of some other family living in our house. And when I approach my parents seeking life or career advice, and get two divergent answers, it shakes me up a bit.
But there is a shadow side to everything. They managed to sell the house before the market collapsed and made out like bandits. And two opinions are better than one, n'est pas?
Statistically speaking, children of divorce are more likely to end up that way themselves. This is not how I want my life to turn out. But while my parents may have done me a disservice in terms of statistics, I think I probably learned way more about life watching their marriage dissolve than I would have if they'd just decided to pretend for another twenty-five years.
Like a lot of people, I think they just got married because they were about that age and it seemed like the thing to do. When they started to feel unhappy, they just ignored it, burying themselves in their work, hobbies, child-rearing, white wine, etc... But a person can only repress so much.
You can call me cocky for saying I'm sure I won't make the same mistakes, but, I'm sure I won't make the same mistakes. I've learned too much from theirs. I'm calling it a hard-won confidence.
