Blood runs thickest when tested with tear-stricken times and heavy-weighted shoulders.
   

 In February 2011, I witnessed the greatest trial of my faith—of my strength and of my soul—in the family that I was so desperately born into.  If you have ever seen the work of a wedge, you’d notice the deep pressure that eventually splits one object into two—like a butcher’s knife going down with heavy swing for the chop—and you’d realize the same thing was occurring within my family, laying down like a lamb at the slaughter house.  Each side tugging and pulling at the end of a wishbone, grasping according to his or her own agenda, and somehow I ended up with the short end of the stick.

Divorce.  It’s really an ugly word when it comes down to it—bitter on the tongue with a foul aftertaste that leaves your mouth puckered and face twisted.  Even spoken, the word sounds nothing less than a hiss from the jaws of a vile and wicked serpent.  At the time, I was not oblivious.  I had heard the hiss before—spread around through hushed tones in the hallways about some other kid, some other life.  I just never thought it would speak to me.  I never imagined that my family would fall prey to it.  Then again, I had heard the shouts, the curses, the sobs late at night after the clock had decided that I should already be asleep—dreaming in a land more peaceful than the turmoil heard between thin walls—but I wasn’t.  I heard the hiss, and I knew.
     

I’m not sure at what point the thread unraveled—when everything reached its height, when the scissors finally came down and cut it in two—I just know that I ended up with a string wrapped around each wrist, pulling in opposite directions.  I don’t remember asking to be at the center—often times I think the weight was a little too much for my skinny twelve-year-old shoulders to bear—but I don’t think it was intentional.  That’s just what family is for—a shoulder to lean on, a hand to pick you up, an ear to listen—and that’s what I became.  I went from parent to parent, hearing her version then his, but I refused to take a side—that was not my role. It was not my turn to cry. 
     

In some sort of messed up way, I feel like that strengthened the relationship I have with my mother and the one I share with my father.  I’m not saying I believe their actions were right, but I have learned to no longer resent them for their faults or the position in which I was placed.  They both needed help, and it just so happened that was manifested in their daughter.  To me, that’s family—knowing your best and worst and loving you all the same.  It’s when thoughts shift from I to we, from me to us. 
   

 To me, it seems ironic that the supposed month of love was when it was all finalized.  I spent Valentine’s Day that year in Divorce Court, and at that time, I didn’t feel the love.  But now I don’t think that divorce strips away the love between two people, between a family.  I believe it’s still there.  Sometimes I think my parents still love each other—just differently this time, better.  I think they make better friends than spouses. And though divorce might’ve torn them apart, I think it also brought them together.  They still talk to each other even though they have separate lives now, and we all still spend holidays together because, in fact, we are family. And perhaps that’s the even greater irony: that though my family is separated, we are still whole.
    

  I’m sure there are some things I still don’t know or understand about it all, but I do know that I have my father’s chin and my mother’s eyes, that my family is dysfunctional and confusing, but that it works for me.  Like a scar, the wound is still there—the experience has left its mark, one that will be with me all my life—but it has healed.  I know that blood runs thickest when tested.  And I believe in being separate and whole.