You ask me what divorce feels like? Let me tell you. Imagine the perfect family with the perfect house and yard, when you walk in the front door and are greeted with the smells of crisp apples and spice: the perfect mother who is always home to take care of the children, the perfect father who is always home from work just after five o’clock at night, and the perfect children who never argue and fight. Even the dog is perfect, laying there on her bed; patiently waiting to be played with. That is not reality.

Divorce is a series of lies. That is how it starts. You string together a false reality, like a spider weaves a web; so intricate and delicate. Be careful. Do not become lost in the deceptions, like a needle within a haystack. My father asked me to lie to my mother on several occasions, and I did; until I could no longer separate the lies from the truth. Divorce is when you are constantly searching for the truth. Except when you think you finally have the truth, it quickly disappears. My mother and I were tired of living a life that was based off of lies. Divorce is putting the blame on someone else. Was it my fault? “No”, my parents say, instead, they blame one another.

Imagine a tennis match- back and forth it goes with each blow harder than the last. When will it stop? Divorce is a combination of emotions; anger, loss, hatred, and strangely enough, happiness. I remember the first time my parents said they were getting a divorce. That was also the first time I developed the feeling of hatred. It was not directed at either of my parents or a person; instead I hated a seven lettered word- Divorce.

Described by the Merriam-Webster Dictionary as “the action or an instance of legally dissolving a marriage” (Merriam-Webster), that is not what it means to me. Divorce was the dissolution of my life. The perfect family illusion was shattered. For the first year after the divorce, I just went through the everyday motions of life: eat, dress, shower, and sleep. I no longer felt anything.

Divorce is when you no longer have control over your own thoughts, what little control on my life that I had as an eight-year old was gone. Imagine this word as a puppeteer constantly pulling you in different directions. Ironically enough, divorce can also be associated with the feeling of happiness, while I felt hatred and numb, my mother was finally happy. 

Divorce is when you are constantly moving. Do I have enough clothes packed? Probably not. Mom’s, Dad’s, Mom’s, Dad’s, Mom’s, Aunt’s, Mom’s, Aunt’s, Mom’s, Aunt’s, Mom’s, Aunt’s. After a while, I quit going to my Dad’s house. After a while, I quit seeing my Dad. After a while, I quit seeing myself.

Divorce is to have hope that people will change. I wished that my Dad would change and quit lying me to, but more importantly to him. I wished that he would quit breaking promises to me. I wished that he would listen and pay attention to me as well. I wished my Mom and I could talk about my Dad without one of us storming off to another room. I wished that my parents would get back together, but that is not reality. Maybe we are better off a broken family.

Divorce is memories. Imagine yourself flipping through a photo album where you are trying to remember the good times, while trying to avoid the bad times. As Shannon Alder said, “Sometimes the best and worst times of your life can coincide. It is a talent of the soul to discover the joy in pain—thinking of moments you long for, and knowing you’ll never have them again. The beautiful ghosts of our past haunt us, and yet we still can’t decide if the pain they caused us outweighs the tender moments when they touched our soul” (Alder.) Divorce is a reflection back on your life. You are questioning “Where did it all go wrong?”, yet there is no simple answer or a right one. It is like looking into the mirror after you shower. You can make out your silhouette, but all the details are blurry.

Divorce is learning to move on. You start picking yourself up and try to repair the damage that was done. You start to realize you are going to be okay. You realize your parents are not getting back together, but that is okay. Divorce does not leave a person unchanged. In her book titled What Happened to Goodbye, Sarah Dessen describes how divorce affects a family; “In the real world, you couldn’t really just spilt a family down the middle, mom on one side, dad on the other, with the child equally divided between. It was like when you ripped a piece of paper into two: no matter how you tried, the seams never fit exactly right again. It was what you couldn’t see, those tiniest of pieces, those were lost in the severing, and their absence kept everything from being complete” (Dessen.)

To me, what Sarah Dessen was trying to say is that in a divorce you seem to lose pieces of yourself that you can never get back, you feel the absence of something; but you can never figure out what it is you are missing. Imagine a perfectly broken family with the perfectly imperfect house and yard, when you walk through the front door and are greeted with lies: that is reality.