I knew. I knew from the second my sister told me they were fighting. I knew what was coming when my mom asked me to meet her in the living room. I knew what my dad was going to say when he called my mom, and I knew I would never be the same person.

The worst feeling is when that carpet of childlike innocence you’ve had under your feet gets ripped away and you have nothing to catch you. It’s something that no matter how much you might prepare yourself, you just won’t be ready. I would’ve liked to think I knew everything about my parents; that I knew that things were getting better. Now that my parents have split, it is a lot more clear just how much they sheltered me from the truth of their relationship.

Let’s be honest, divorce is common. It happens more often now than ever before, either your parents are divorced or you know people whose parents are. Sometimes it’s obvious that they are going to split and sometimes you would’ve never seen it coming; the important thing to remember is that no divorce is the same.

My parents could’ve gotten a divorce when I was younger or when I was an adult; maybe it would’ve been easier that way. My parents officially were divorced on Nov. 16, 2022. It’s been a little over a year since and yet it still hurts just as much as it did the day we found out. I’ve learned it is not something that just gets better, it doesn’t just go away. Once you settle into your new normal it feels like everything will be okay, but when your parents start dating other people or when you say that you’re staying at either parents house; those memories and feelings come back just as hard. I feel like this wouldn’t be this way had I not seen them in love when I was younger. If I never saw my dad dancing with my mom in the kitchen, or watching them sing their duets of Cher and Sonny in the car. It’s these memories that hurt the most, the ones where I remember my family together and happy; It kills me to know that these moments are going to be nothing but memories.

I think for me personally going back to school right after we found out was difficult. I had just moved for the first time and had to say goodbye to my dad. The feelings that I felt during those moments are almost indescribable, it’s not easy to put into words what it feels like to do those things or to see them happen, so, I coped in the only way I knew how, I threw myself into school and people around me noticed that. My NEST teacher, Mrs. Gehrke said, “I think school became a place where you could control things more than you could outside of school. And so your leadership skills went through the roof around the same time and it just seemed like there was a need for control but you put it through really really positive avenues.”

I never really thought of it that way, but it’s true. I had been speaking to my school counselor at the time and they guided me into coming to terms with the fact that not everything can be in my control and that I can not choose how things will happen. Finding something to, not distract, but to channel those feelings into was most helpful for me.

Divorce is a complicated subject, it is not just your immediate family that is affected. Cousins won’t see their aunt or uncles anymore, speaking of one side of the family to the other becomes awkward. I am a family oriented person and having my two sides split in half was extremely difficult for me. I don’t think of myself as confrontational and it hurts to leave things off on a bad note. I spent much of my time trying to mend the relationships between my family members after the fallout of the divorce. I couldn’t change what happened but I felt like I owed it to everyone, including myself, to not allow the entire family to become estranged. I know we can’t have Thanksgiving dinners the same, or random Friday night barbecues; but I wanted to have my family back in some sort of piece. At this point, I feel more like a family than we were almost a year ago. Just spending time together again makes this whole situation feel a little less horrible. I think through all this the small things began to mean a lot more to me. 

You learn in English that a story has a resolution, the problem is solved. Divorce, and other events like it, don’t really get fixed, they don’t get solved. I was asked to talk about when it got better and I said that it doesn’t. Throughout everything, every moment my family won’t have again, I just had to learn to live with it.