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| 1 | At the age of ten, I was impervious to the reality of my parents. To me life was the mundane activities of scheduled waking and sleeping, school and play. My parents were the solid pillars my three brothers and I clung to for support. They were the source of our securities, the glue that held our worlds together. We lived in a modest little house on S.E. Brooklyn Street in Portland, Oregon. We were home owners which, according to some groups, is supposed to be more solid than renters. My mother worked days as a barber in downtown Portland, while my dad worked graveyard shift in the shipyard. We did not know a babysitter, as one of our parents was always present to wipe our runny noses, or to bandage a scraped knee. |
| 2 | I was born first, followed by my three brothers, all of us two years apart. My dad was of the mindset that a man is not a man until he produces a son. Being his first born, and a girl, I was a terrible blow to his weak ego. Living in an environment where reality was punishment, I slipped into a dream world where everything seemed romantic and perfect. My favorite stories were Grimm's fairytales. Every Saturday morning the stories were played out on the radio with all their magic, and I was an avid listener. I became an introverted loner dreaming my way through life, medicating reality with fantasy. |
| 3 | Then as suddenly, and without warning, as a violent destructive windstorm in the form of a funnel-shaped cloud sweeping down from nowhere, my fabricated world shattered when my dad moved our family of six into the house of a widow, his mistress with eight children, who would eventually become my stepmother. In what seemed like a matter of hours, I went from the oldest child in a family to somewhere in the middle of a bunch of dysfunctional strangers. This lady had six daughters and two sons. Overnight, I was transformed from Snow White to Cinderella with a bunch of ugly and mean stepsisters. My mother, a young woman of twenty-seven years, found the situation unbearable and moved out, leaving her four children behind. |
| 4 | Mother would visit on rare occasion. On one of her visits I overheard my dad tell her she was going to get her wish for Christmas, a divorce. But, there was a stipulation: she could have me because he had never wanted me, but she could not have his boys. The definition of a divorce for me then was chaos, pain, anger, desertion and rejection. |
| 5 | By the time my parents divorced, I was twelve years old, entering puberty. Being an insecure introvert, I found that living in the magic world of reverie did not protect me from the torments of my stepsisters. At the age of fifteen, I could no longer bear the abuse. I went upstairs, packed my rags into a brown paper shopping bag, and walked out. The public transit system transported me to Parkrose where my Aunt Goldie lived. Unannounced, I moved in. |
| 6 | For the first time in my life it seemed like I was in heaven. My Aunt Goldie was good to me. If she resented my presence, she never let me know. Now a teenager, I began to dream of that handsome prince who would come riding up on his white horse, sweep me off my feet, marry me, and live happily ever after. No wonder the first fifteen year old boy who showed an interest in me looked like that prince. |
| 7 | My mother married again. All four of us children were hoping we would all be a family once more. This would not happen. My mother was only interested in developing a secure relationship with her new husband, and he did not want a ready-made family. My brothers continued to live with our dad, and I lived with mother until I was eighteen. Through our forced separation, my brothers and I became strangers. |
| 8 | I married that boy who looked like a prince to get away from my mother and stepfather, and to have a home of my own. My eighteen year old husband was too young and inexperienced to know how to cope with my emotional problems. The Korean conflict took him off to war when I was twenty and pregnant with our first child. While in Japan he had an affair with a young lady. This put a distance in our relationship that never healed when he came back home to a wife, and a new little son. After fifteen years of a very turbulent relationship, he left me with six children. Now, I was divorced with no job experience, had a high school diploma, and a large family to support. |
| 9 | Death of my relationship was like the physical demise of my lover. Shock, denial, anger, isolation, bargaining, depression, and then after years, acceptance. I put a lot of energy into being the "perfect wife," and the "perfect mother." I felt as though I had been thrown to the hungry wolves with no support systems. Educating myself to become a nurse while working full time to support and raise my children as a single parent would be the most difficult task I would ever have to do. The educational process enabled me to grow and mature as an individual. I learned how to reach out and communicate building a support system. Helping others helped myself. I learned how to speak loud enough for people to hear my voice, how to survive as a female in a male dominated society, how to feel safe in a promiscuous community, how to turn a dysfunctional life into a functional family with structure. I learned how to buy a home in which to raise my children. I learned that reading, writing and continuing education accelerated my personal growth enabling me to earn a man-sized wage. Somewhere in this process, that insecure, introverted, depressed young woman who lived in a fantasy world, withered and died to her old self and was born anew into a new self confident mature adult. |
| 10 | After being single for ten years, I did marry again. This relationship also ended in divorce after a period of thirteen years. I have been single now again for the past nine years. Divorce is akin to a disease with a DNA code like that of a cancer. It infiltrates and penetrates generation after generation of progeny destroying the social structure of families. Social structures of countries have fallen waste to the destructive influences of divorce. |
| 11 | Divorce is the rupture of a spiritual and physical union between two committed persons who fall prey to the virus of discontent and selfishness. It is the dissolution of many dreams each held in ecstasy. It is the physical separation of human bonding, the severance of a life line, a break in the structure of a relationship embraced as a family. It is the disunion of the working and non-working parts of a close knit community. It is repudiation, the demise of unfulfilled goals and dreams. And, with it, there is always intractable pain.
Nominated by Tim Schell, Writing Instructor
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