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Like Father Like Daughter

“You’re mother and I are getting divorced.”

I was in shock. I couldn’t believe that my family, the ‘perfect’ four children, two parents family, had been ripped apart by these simple words.

The teachers at my small private school had always described my family as “The Brady Bunch.” We were seemingly perfectly happy and were always all together. Every morning we all arrived at our school and hopped out of the family van, our blonde hair bobbing as we skipped into the school. Our parents were there for every sports game we played, every play we starred in, and every academic thing we did.

That was all about to change. Sixteen years of living a perfect family life and now it was over. My parents left us with empty promises of, “We will still be a family,” and “Nothing will ever change.” It was all a lie.

I stormed up to my bedroom and slammed the door. The wind from the motion blew the pictures off of my wall: pictures of my family smiling at the beach, playing in the back yard, and posing in front of our lit up Christmas tree. I picked them up ripped the rest of them off of the wall and shoved them into a KSwiss shoe box and threw it into my closet. I couldn’t think about the fun our family used to have.

I grabbed my composition book and started angrily scribbling away. I wrote about how I hated my parents, how selfish they were being, and what the hell was I going to do now that I was a divorced kid. After writing out my angers I flipped through the rest of my journal. It was full of proclamations of my love for this boy and that boy, hatred for my teachers, and gossip about my best friends. I hated how shallow I sounded. Up until this divorce nothing bad had happened to me, but I lived my life like a traumatized teenager. In a fit of rage I grabbed every notebook and journal in my room and shoved it into my pink plastic butterfly trash can. I grabbed the trash can and brought the entire thing to the dumpster and left it there, a gift for the garbage men the next morning.

Looking back, I wish that I had never thrown away those journals. While they were immature and shallow and by no means wonderful pieces of writing, they were a piece of me and my writing. There are times when I wish I could go to my closet and grab my journal box and flip back to the entries about my first crush, first kiss, and even fights with friends. But I can’t. Now I keep everything I write; stupid little limericks scribbled on syllabuses, quick rants about my roommates, and long entries about an inspirational thing I experienced during my day.

A few months later Tarin, my sister, and I were driving home in the family van. She was digging in the glove department for some change so that we could go to Sonic and get slushes. Instead she found a small blue notebook, filled with my dad’s handwriting. She had found his journal.

I pulled over and parked behind a red Volkswagen and grabbed it from her. She stared at me, in disgust that I was going to betray my dad’s trust and read his journal. I didn’t care. I wanted to know how he felt about the entire divorce situation. At least I thought I did.

I was skimming through the thin, slanted, black words until I came across something that made me sick. There, in the same handwriting that had written sick notes, signed permission slips and birthday cards, and scribbled notes on lunch bags, was written five words I will never forget reading. “My wife cheated on me.”

I literally almost vomited. I couldn’t even drive home. How could my dad keep something like this from us, from his own children? Needless to say, all the anger I had about the divorce was immediately transferred to my mother. But, I was left with thinking, “how could my dad hide something like this?”

The answer was clearly in front of me. He could hide it so well because he wrote about it. He wrote about it in a place where he expected it was going to remain private forever. He could freely write what he thought and felt and no one would see it. Strangely, I was inspired by this event to restart my writing hobby.

Reading that my mother wasn’t the woman I had grown up admiring, was not the thing that I thought would trigger my happiness. But, it was. Not at first. At first, I was angry. I wrote about my anger daily, and was able to hide it from my family, who assumed that I was still just a little mixed up from the divorce.