Sometimes it’s hard to be around my brother. I get the overwhelming urge to grab him and hug and just tell him to cry. Just please cry. I want to tell him that I was going through it too. I was just down the hallway. Why did he have to shut himself away behind a glowing orange computer screen and angry music? Punching holes in walls, scratching to get out –get out of this house, this life, this pain. We could’ve been a team – a united front against the terror that was raging itself upon our home.

There are some days, some dates that are singed upon your brain. You close your eyes and the numbers dance. Impressed black on white, white on black, in big block letters. 5-1-87 I see. May 1, 1987. MAY FIRST NINETEEN HUNDRED EIGHTY SEVEN.

I thought I had a great memory. I never forget a face; I know just about every phone number of my childhood friends. But lately T will be telling me something that happened in junior high and I’ll have zero recollection of it. Was I even there?

I don’t think about those years very often, so I guess it never really struck me – all the blank spaces. The black spots. They started that day. But that day, that day I remember like crystal.

It was fifth grade field day. I was a skinny, shiny, happy ten-year-old. I was popular, I was smart, I was loved.

My dad said he has to talk to us. I sat on the floor, leaning against the ottoman – dirty and exhausted from a day of Earth Ball and relay races. I held a Time-Life series book on frogs on my lap. Tracing the big yellow-green eyes with my finger. My dad sat in the orange rocking chair – the one my mom nursed us in. The one my brother and I would squeeze into and rock back hard making it tip over. My mom sat curled up on the end of the couch and my brother stood between them. I’m moving out, he said. I’m leaving. The rest is like a film negative – flipped, exposed, in pieces. Running upstairs, slamming doors mother crying quietly. Brother with clinched fists and ruddy cheeks. Sobbing into the belly of Spot, my stuffed puppy. His stomach was stained yellow from those tears, those and how many others.

When I was 16 I would’ve told you my parents’ split didn’t affect me that much. I’d dealt with it, it was over, I was done with it. 

Fast-forward eight years. Fast forward through my failings with "men." My useless attempt to separate myself from sex. To be a sexual being without attachment. My search for control. My longing to be loved unconditionally by a man. To ensure his forever partnership. My habit of fleeing relationships, of pushing people away, ensuring one simple outcome: No one will ever leave me. They can’t. I’ll just leave first.

And it sounds so stupid. So Psych 101, doesn’t it? It’s been 13 and a half years. I should be over it. I should have worked past it by now. But I haven’t, and according to a new book The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce by Judith Wallerstein, I might not ever get over it.

It’s the cover story in Time this week - What Divorce Does to Kids.
They’re just now talking about this? They’re just now stopping to think that perhaps the pain doesn’t end with adolescence? That it never ends? That you will never know the horror of what it’s like to realize, with an adult’s full understanding, that your father stopped loving your mother. This beautiful, amazing, kind, luminous woman. This woman who would lay her arm over a railroad track to pluck a butterfly trapped in the steel beams. This woman who loved him and worked for him and smiled pretty for him. This fucking wonderful person and you just got sick of her? What’s wrong with you? Daddy, when you look at me, how can you not see her? We have the same smile. The same laugh. Our eyes sparkle in the same way. When you look at me, how can you not see your bride?

Then why do you still love me? If I get fat, will you stop loving me too? If I do something that embarrasses you, will you shun me as you shunned her? Will you go find another daughter? A prettier one, a smarter one, a cooler one? Because that’s what you did. Look at what you’ve done to us. Grab your son. Look at him in the eye. Tell me you can’t see the pain there! Tell me you can’t see him beseeching you for approval, for recognition, for love. Begging you to tell him why you left him. Tell me you can’t see it you fucking bastard.

Stop.

I’m getting carried away. Forgive me.

In a way I’m overreaching. I’m saying things I know aren’t true. I know in my head that they’re false. My soul however, scatters everywhere, coming up with horrific tales and scenarios.

This book’s chief finding is that children take a long ass time to get over a divorce. In fact:
Its most harmful and profound effects tend to show up as the children reach maturity and struggle to form their own adult relationships. They’re gun-shy. The slightest conflict sends them running. Expecting disaster, they create disaster. "They look for love in strange places," Wallerstein says. "They make terrible errors of judgement in whom they choose." 

I circled this and starred it and practically wanted to yelp when I read it. Do you want me to make a list of my lapses in judgement? Of how many friendships I’ve bailed out of, how many times I just don’t call back or ignore it hoping it will go away? It’ll be a long list, but I can do it.

My brother never wants to marry. The separation was a lot harder on him. I know this now. Now that I have the full story. The real scoop about what went on. It was a bad TNT movie, it really was. But the part that makes me go down low, into that small space in my chest, is the fact that my mother suffered this. She suffered the ramifications of divorce on two adolescents. On a young boy filled with rage. A boy desperate for acceptance from his father and getting the ultimate, the ultimate rejection.

My brother, his girlfriend and I drove up north to visit my paternal grandmother over Labor Day. Her 90th birthday. My dad’s two brothers were there, as well as two of my three male cousins. They’re both divorced. My two uncles? One of them is divorced. My grandfather started this horrid trend. Perhaps it’s not too unrealistic of my brother to assume he’ll get divorced if he marries. After all, look at the legacy he has to live up to.

He thinks that everyone gets divorced. That it just happens, and it’s unavoidable and that I should better well believe my marriage will end in divorce, and should therefore prepare for that ultimate outcome going into it. He thinks I’m idealistic and stupid and naïve for thinking otherwise.

We are simply two sides of the divorce coin. I turned starry-eyed, longing for the fairy tale. He hardened his heart.

We’re not bouncing back. We’re not dealing with it well. We’re young adults afraid of love, of marriage, of abandonment. And my parents had a "good" divorce. I cringe to think what would’ve become of us had there been yelling, hitting, missed child support payments. I cringe.

Are any of you children of divorce? Did you read the Time articles? Wanna talk about it?

(And just think, yesterday I thought I had nothing to say and now I can’t shut-up.)