We are in the Middle of a Divorce!

Selena Lim
9:00 a.m.

Family life is full of major and minor crises -- the ups and downs of health, success and failure in career, marriage, and divorce -- and all kinds of characters. It is tied to places and events and histories. With all of these felt details, life etches itself into memory and personality. It's difficult to imagine anything more nourishing to the soul.                  

-Anonymous

  At a certain point of one's life, one must grow up. With maturity and wisdom comes hardships and errors. The most impacting event in my life was experiencing the divorce of my seemingly close family. We consist of a picture book family: two almost identical twin sisters with a loving mother and an over protective father. Even now when I look at back, the divorce could not have been predicted. In almost every picture we took together, my sister and I stood or sat side by side, me on the right with my dad standing behind me and Jessi on the left with my mom standing behind her, each face lit up with a wide smile and a twinkle in our eyes. In one specific picture we took in front of a fountain in Philadelphia, Jessi is wearing a light sea water blue dress with little dark blue, light purple, and pink flowers added to liven it up, over a crisp white tee-shirt. The pink straps of the Tweetybird bag is slightly visible from her shoulders. The sunlight gleams only on the left side of her petite body while she looks blankly at the man taking the picture. Beside her to the right is my mom very fashionably wearing her thick framed sunglasses. She is wearing a three-quarter long navy blue shirt. Her gray sweater is tied over her hips which naturally leads down to her legs, covered in her favorite pair of blue jeans. On her right wrist is a watch that matches the one on my dad's left wrist. My dad is wearing a reddish orange Ralph Lauren polo shirt with sand colored trousers. All the way on the right is me dressed similarly to Jessi except that my dress is pink and it has purple and dark pink flowers on it. Still, I have the same straps poking out over my shoulders and our hairs are tied in exactly the same way. Although times like these are pleasant to reminisce, underneath the exterior we had rough nights. I probably blocked memories out for some time but I remember fights between my parents would get so rough that my mom or dad would leave. In my mom's opinion, my dad was irresponsible and wasted his time drinking with his friends. He loved going out but failed to fully contribute in our lives because he worked six days a week. My dad thought that my mom should spend more time at home. She always went out with her friends during the day and night. In the end, it was my mom who filed for divorce.
    In the beginning of our sixth grade, my family moved to a qauint and quiet little town in New Jersey. My dad and mom barely saw each other except a few hours before they went to sleep. Both of them ran their own social lives and could not stand each other. Near the end of the second semester, my parents got into a huge regretful fight and it turned mildly violent. For the next couple of days she did not return home. When she finally did, my dad slept on the couch and they mever exchanged a word. A couple of weeks later, my mom took my sister and I to a very elegant restaurant. All the adults were sipping their wine and chattering softly. Did you ever have those kinds of feelings when you just know something bad is going to happen? It is a very ominous and sepulchral feeling full of suspense and curiosity. You hope that it is going to be anything but the words "I'm dying." I guess "Your father and I are getting a divorce," is not as bad as death but to us, it was much worse. The realization that it was our mom who suggested it first was more disheartening. The end of the night was full of tears and yelling mostly from us to our mom. We refused to talk to her calmly but still we had to keep this secret from the rest of our family.
    By the end of the year we had made many friends but only one best friend. Her name is Pola and without her, my sister and I probably could not have expressed our deep sorrows with anyone. My mom understood when we told Pola because even after less than a year, she was like our sister. Pola encouraged us to stay true to our real selves, however her calm words could not restrain us. In middle school We became people who I never wish to see again. The counter part of me was a bad girl who skipped class, stole things for the fun of it, and talked rudely to adults. Bad choices lead to bad results and by eight grade we learned. Jessi and I, with three of our friends skipped school. We were caught because a girl said she saw me walking to school and suddenly disappearing. Everyone was extremely worried and even the police were called to look for us. Our friend's mom knew that her daughter had not gone to school and suspected that she had something to do with it. She snuck back into the house and caught us. Our friend's mom personally drove us to school. We were subjected to two days of in-school suspension. The windowless, in-school suspension room is horrible. Ten desks and chairs are squeezed into a tiny cramped room that looks as if it can fit only three at the most. The teachers, who I liked to think of as guards, were strict and would not let us even step outside to strech. The little room is connected to the music room so we heard singing and amateur skills on the instruments all day. A single breath is heard by the whole room and whenever someone yawned, it was impossible for it not to cause a chain effect. The room is located in the same hallway as the home economics class and the cafeteria so occasionally the smell of food would cause our stomachs to beg to be fed. These painful days were enough we thought, but the principal believed it would be better to make examples out of us by practically announcing to the whole school that we had tried to skip school but had failed. Our teachers and peers would not stop talking about it until we graduated from middle school. To this day, one of the in-school suspension teacher who is also a science teachers refers to Jessi and I as "The infamous Lim sisters."
    Enduring these school tortures were nothing compared to the disappointed looks on our parents' faces. The first thing they said to us that day after school was that they were worried out of their minds. Skipping school and punishment was not as important as our safety was to them. The tears slid down my mom's cheek as she scolded us and held us. All she could do was ask "Is this all because of me?" She had knownn how negatively effected we were with the divorce. That day, she promised to come and see us every week if possible even though she lived pretty far away and had a business to run. My dad on the other hand was not so lenient. He castigated us and repeatedly had to walk away and take a breath before coming back to speak his mind. He understood that we had troubles coping but did not see that as an excuse to skip school. The two of us had to issue official apologies to our teachers and to the parents of our friends. Since then, I have been leading a positive path in my life. Within two years I was able to raise my school marks from Cs and Ds to As and Bs. I have become a better person and do not judge people by what they do. I have come to understand some of the reasons why people may do what they do. If they are as lucky as me, they eventually will rise above their difficulties. Most imporantly, I learned that even after the divorce, the school skipping, the yelling, the punishment, we are still a family and nothing can break us apart.