Thursday, March 17, 2011

Wait, what am I?

That post last night took me forever to write. Looking it over now, maybe I have almost as much in common with Children of Divorce as Adult Children of Divorce. It's not like I grew up feeling that everything was okay and then it was suddenly shattered. Maybe the difficulty in all this is that I'm somewhat both - I didn't have to contend with a step family growing up, and my college fund wasn't spent on lawyers, but I did spend time going back and forth between them, both physically and emotionally. I did feel responsible for protecting my sister. I was the confidant that both my parents unloaded on. Granted, it was not to the same degree as when they split for good: for example I knew growing up that my dad was sexually unhappy, because he told me so. But as an adult child he thought it was be just fine to exclaim to me how much his new wife loves to "screw his brains out." Are kids hearing that from their parents? Are other adults even hearing stuff like that?

Typing that out, typing all this out... there's such a deep sense of shame. It sounds so trashy. Looking at us I'm sure no one would have guessed our family was capable of this. We had 3 houses growing up, private schools all the way through college, church twice a week, and two forks at each place setting every dinner. I guess that's proof that economic status and fluency in proper social etiquette don't mean anything at all about character.

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