Ryanself's Blog

My parents are getting divorced

What are you supposed to do when you’ve been married for just over a year and your primary role models dissolve into anger and bickering after 36 years of marriage and three kids?

Are we all so unassailable? I wouldn’t have gotten married if I thought it was temporary. Obviously. I believe – strongly, so strongly believe – that I am with the person who will be my guiding light for the rest of my life. God I am lucky.
And yet didn’t my parents speak the same words, pledge the same vows? I suppose they did. And for what. My dad seems to be “losing his fastball,” as they say, and my mom…is as vindictive and angry as ever. Comments suggest a number of possibilities about her past, about her various complexes, but all I know is the angry, bitter woman I came to know lo these past years.
I keep hearing about how divorce at this age isn’t supposed to affect me; I’m an adult and long past those stereotypical feelings of blaming myself. But I don’t blame myself at all. Instead I sit and ponder my Dad in an empty apartment eating Ramen noodles and Celeste pizzas (because he never learned how to cook) and my Mom sitting in an empty house watching her TV, wishing she had the couch she ceded to her former love of her life, because she never learned to talk to anyone about what she’s really feeling.
Neither one ever really learned to talk to anyone. When I walked into my parents’ house (old house) on Sunday, a part of me seriously thought I’d find my Dad dead. Of suicide, heart disease, heartache, something. I don’t know these people alive in this context.
I don’t know when I ever will.

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