Broken Part One: when you're older.

Something strange has been happening lately. I kind of blogged about it a little earlier, where I keep having these memories and happenstances pour over me, and my brain reels - producing words and sounds that make the memories string together.

I don't know why, but some well from somewhere inside me has opened up. I think it has to do with stirring the waters, giving someone else a chance to come in and why I'm having such a hard time with it all.

So. Since it's here, I feel it is right to pay attention to it. It's going to be a long series of words, this being just a first one. I might finish it here, I might not. It's incredibly personal. But stories are meant to be shared, just like life is meant to be shared.

I don't want to give this more attention than what it is though, so this is a good way to put it on paper and still do other things in life.

I listened to This American Life's newest podcast all the way through the other day. It was on Break Ups. It asked the question I keep asking... do you ever really get over someone you love? And the people on deck...some said you do, and some said there are people you'll always love in some capacity or another. But do you get over them? That's my question.

The second part of the podcast is what opened me up though. In 1987, All Things Considered interviewed an eight year old girl that wrote a letter to the Mayor concerning her parents divorce. She thought, "If anyone can help me find the answer, it's the Mayor."

The Mayor wrote back, "Thank you for the letter, I was saddened to learn of the difficult times you are having from your parent's divorce. I wish there was an easy solution to these problems, but there's not. Please remember that you are loved and that people care about you. All the best."

The radio guy said kindly and fatherly, "Did that help?"

"No."

"...Did you think he could fix it?"

"No."

"You just wanted some advice."

"Yes."

Anyways. Everyone should listen to it.
It's beautiful, really. They had her back on TAL as a 29 yr. old and they asked her about the whole interview from 1987. She ended saying something about how people make choices and we have to accept those choices and live with those choices. We live life based on choices other people made.

That's when something just...switched in me. That's when all of these memories I keep involuntarily having came together.

Mom and Dad got divorced when I was nine...or...eleven...or somewhere around the fourth grade, really.

It's crazy. It's crazy to look back and think of how. crushing. How crushing it is. How crushing it was, ha and the craziest part is that I was excited about it. Elated really, over our spaghetti dinner when they broke the news to us. After dinner I remember kicking my shoes off to run outside and play with our neighbors in the field behind our house and shouted "Our parents are getting divorced! That means two rooms! And two sets of horses!" I was a stupid little kid, but we'll blame it on the Babysitter's Club, Little Sister edition.

Eventually though, reality set in, all slow like. It's like finding out fairy tales aren't real. That everything you knew about love, isn't really true anymore. I ended up going to the emergency room several times convinced I was dying. Turns out, after miles and miles of bills from the trips my dad so gracefully and unwillingly took me on to University Hospital, and anxiety pills and growing up I found out I was just dealing with a broken heart, not actually dying, or crazy, thank goodness.

There's a lot I could fill in on the why and how all of that is, but that's not where I want to go with this. Just trust me, but you probably know as well from your own experience.

It is mindblowing though, how flippantly it is addressed. "Oh, my parents are divorced." But underneath that is a dark hole of love losing. Love lost. That'll do something to a person.

Anyways.

Forever I was left with questions.

My dad brought my mom flowers when she moved to the apartment with the birch trees and the creek out front. He would leave a card, and a teddy bear, or some new beautiful bouquet of fresh flowers on her car in the mornings. He called a couple times a week. He convinced her to go to marriage counseling.

They went to several different marriage counselors. Mom kept not liking them, so they'd switch to a new one. They went from Brett at our church, to another church, to a professional and then a psychologist. Turns out they weren't giving mom the answers she wanted, the "way out" I found out later. That's later though.

The biggest memory of the whole pulling apart was one morning before school.
My mother is blow drying her hair in their bathroom in their bedroom. The early sun poured through the small, high window in a way that filled the small eggshell yellow room. It rested on the side of my mom, illuminating her silhouette.

I leaned on the door frame, resting my cheek against the cool gloppy white gloss she had coated the trimmings with with a few weeks prior and waited, looking at the floor, looking up at her work, looking at the bird house wallpaper runner on the ceiling.
She stopped the hair dryer and picked up the curling iron. Here's my chance.

Rustling up the heavy words that terrified me, I said in an act of honesty, "Mom. Why are you getting divorced?"

The words left my mouth and set themselves halfway between my mother and myself, stale and plain.

Her eyes did a slow flicker down towards my face and then up again to the blonde hair curling around the hot iron.

She kept her gaze on the iron and said sort of empathetically, "Lauren, I told you. We just don't love each other anymore."
Silence.
"You'll understand when you are older. Are you ready for school?"