Ross and I finally watched The Squid and the Whale last night. To give you a brief summary, it follows a family at the very beginning of the parents getting a divorce. Jeff Daniels stars as the pretentious and somewhat pathetic father who likes to tell people to stop being “difficult.” Laura Linney plays his ex-wife who, I imagine after years of being put down and driven slowly mad, asks for a divorce. There was nothing similar in the specifics of this family’s experience with divorce to that of my family’s, but I thought the movie did a great job bringing out the overall feelings of awkwardness, loyalty, rebellion, and forced independence that comes along with the dissolution of a marriage that involves kids.
My parents divorced when I was 12. It’s a strange epxerience, to put it mildly, but I understand my feeling about it much better now, taking a look from 12 years away. I just realized that my parents have been divorced for half of my life. Anyway, one of the reason’s I think it was so hard for me was that I needed to mourn the loss of this family, or my parents’ relationship, while they were still around. But it’s kind of hard to say to my completely unglued mother that I wish she and my father would get back together-I knew it would just send her into another emotional spiral. Meanwhile, I found it hard to burst my dad’s very dense bubble of excitement for his new life that rendered him deaf and blind to all things emotionally complicated and uncomfortable.
I kept being told that we were still a family. We weren’t. I knew that it was ok that weren’t still a family, I just wish someone would have been honest with me about it. I was also confused by the fact that we kept being told that it had nothing to do with us, while the arrangements following their separation had *everything* to do with us.
I found it difficult to be around both of my parents for many years following their split. I would rather die than be told that I was anything like one of them, but would react with fierce loyalty and defensiveness if one of them ever said anything bad about the other. While I was still connected to them in superficial ways (they knew what was going on at school, heard about boyfriends, etc.), I knew that things would never be the same and I was pretty much on my own. My parents both remarried around 3 years after they split. I don’t know why, but that kind of sealed the deal for me-they were starting their new lives and it was time for me to start mine. I would always love them, but I was done looking to them for advice or guidance. I was 15.
I’ve never asked my parents what I was like throughout the divorce. It’s funny that that last sentence implies that the process is over. I don’t think you ever stop going through a divorce when you have children-in our case it seems like things are just as uncomfortable as ever, despite the fact that over a decade has gone by. I feel like my siblings and I are faced with more responsiblity than most when it comes to our parents. We have to “handle” them a lot more, I guess, making sure that everyone gets equal time with us, particularly at holidays. Luckily, we’ve all acquired amazing significant others who have either been through the experience, or are just wonderfully understanding and supportive (See Hubs, Bonus Sister, and Bonus Brother). Anyway, I hope I wasn’t a total sh*t to them while working through this, even though sometimes they were sh*ts to me.
I don’t really know the point of this entry, other than I finally found an inspiration for articulating how I felt about everything. Thanks, Jeff Daniels.
