Personal Narrative: Growing Up With Divorced Parents

Growing up with divorced parents would have to be one of the hardest challenges I have faced, but it was also a blessing. My parents had announced their divorce when I was 11 years old, but before that my father lived in the basement for a couple years. After they announced their divorce, my father moved an hour away. Although my parents got joint custody, I only saw my father three days a week and every other weekend, that is, if he wasn’t out of town for work. Being young at the time made a huge impact on me, because I didn’t understand what was going on. All I knew was my dad no longer lived with us. Going over to friend’s houses was tough, because they all had “big happy families”. I would always get frustrated and wonder why my friend’s parents were still together, but mine weren’t.

Over the years, I learned to accept that things were always going to be different.

My mom picked up dancing and she joined a singles group as a coping mechanism. Every weekend I went to my father’s house, my mother was out either running a race or dancing with her single friends. After some weekends with my father I would come home to find my mom crying over the divorce. We would talk about how everything made her feel and how I felt. Watching my mother cry weekend after weekend wasn’t ideal, because now as the child I was playing the role of a parent. My mom started to grow more independent and stronger than I had ever seen before. My mother started dating which was a big step, but it was uncomfortable meet new strange men. My mom would bring her new boyfriends to family events and introduce everyone. After a couple months or years she would like a new guy and then after the break ups she would rejoin her singles

groups.

My father, on the other hand, hardly introduced us to his girlfriends unless they became serious. He introduced us to only one of his girlfriends named Whitney, who was about twenty years younger than my father. The age difference seemed large at first until we got to know her better. She occasionally came to family dinners and about 4 months after they started dating my father asked for our permission for her to live with us. She moved into the house and she seemed to fit into the family well, about a year later my father asked us kids how we felt about Whitney and my father getting married. At that point she was basically a part of the family. My father came to me for help on how to propose, after weeks of planning they were engaged.

On April 19th, 2014 my father got remarried, we flew to California for the wedding and I met her family for the first time. Her parents were also divorced, which just added to the amount of people I had to make good impressions on. After getting to know her family a little bit they seemed to be a really great group of people. I learned that one of my grandfathers is a movie producer, my grandma works in fashion marketing, and my other grandmother does house flips. Seeing how different my stepmom’s family was than mine was one of my favorite parts of margining into a new family. Growing up in a small town doesn’t expose you to the different types of people you may encounter, especially with family in law enforcement. The night of my father’s wedding I was happy to see him so happy, but it was also hard knowing that my father was going to be married to someone other than my mom. Over a year has passed since my father got remarried and everything seems to have fallen into place.