Surrounded by Wolves

When I was 12 years old my parents filed for divorce. Unlike what most people think it did not bother me since I was glad they were getting away from each other. Most people act as if divorce is traumatic on a child – it isn’t. From as long as I can remember they had hated each other to the point were later in the marriage they both slept in separate rooms. My dad was a doctor so he had to work very hard to maintain a lifestyle that my mom wanted to live under. She was a painter but didn’t sell anything since she was still going to school and taking care of me and my two brothers. I think dad resented the fact that she did art because according to my brother Ernie he thought she was having an affair with her art instructor. If I were him I would have been suspicious and angry too since it's fishy that a female student would take private lessons at her instructor's home.

Since dad was a Pediatrician he was under a lot of stress having to make rounds in hospitals and having to take care of children and on top of that he hated children intensely. If you have semi-normal parents a divorce can go through fairly smoothly. If you have two parents screaming at each other at home and in public it is hard to get comfortable at home.This of course is disappointing since home is where you are suppose to feel protected. My brother Ernie went through the most since at that time he started hanging with the wrong people, skipping school and failing classes and doing drugs like marijuana, shrooms and acid. It wasn't because of family problems but rather a need to fit in somewhere, somehow.

My brother Tommy is unique in the sense that I don’t think it bothered him much. He is stoic and can go through a lot without it affecting him. He is the strongest of the three of us. I don’t think Ernie opposed the divorce since when he was a teenager dad would tell him he was nothing and a piece of shit. One time they were going to have a fist fight outside but thankfully everyone stopped it. I remember Mom was going to call the police but Tommy stopped and I was just there watching. Everything was spinning and that was really the scariest day of my life. So the divorce was something to look forward to. We grew up with a need to feel masculine and I think that machismo came from our view of our dad. Displaying any sort of emotions was for wimps and was only reserved for my mom.

Mom was very social and sensitive to the world and people around her. I think I was comfortable with my mom because she was so extroverted and I was to myself more. It was hard to get to know my dad since he was always busy reading medical journals and just wanted to avoid everybody. I remember when I was little I just wanted him to talk to me but instead I would watch him in his chair on the porch read his medical journals so diligently. He would do this for hours on end. When they were both separated all they seemed to do was bad mouth each other and want to make the other look like the villain. In the end both ended up looking pretty shitty. Mom got the alimony, dad ended up living in a dingy apartment and lost his family and we became another statistic among the 60% of failed marriages in America. I have learned to never get married and never have kids since somewhere along the way these things will be used as a weapon against me whether it’s through alimony, manipulation or using a kid to resent the other parent.