My head was spinning in search of a solution. The number one rule for any AKOD is to take a step back. I was supposed to let my parents work out their own issues but I couldn’t control the urge to somehow find a way to take control of the situation and mend my broken family back together. Alternatively, my brother seemed to accept the situation. Not to say that he wasn’t devastated by the news, but his approach at first was more “go with the flow.”
We reacted differently, perhaps because I was the older sibling. Maybe girls think differently or because my brother and I had different personalities. Growing up, I always pushed for my way without even knowing what my way was. I always attributed the quality to the normal behavior of a spoiled teenage girl. I am the more dominant child. My brother is docile, more laid back by nature.
I asked him how he remained so calm during a time of such chaos. He seemed to accept the situation without knowing all the pieces to the puzzle or answers to the countless questions that the divorce raised. By nature, I needed answers: Why? Was your life that bad? Is this devastation necessary?
There are many things our parents won’t discuss with us. Maybe those things are inappropriate; maybe our parents are ashamed of what we will think. Knowing that I was mature enough to hear the entire situation between my parents (so that I could try to solve something or just simply understand) was driving me crazy. There were so many unknowns about what really happened, where their marriage really went wrong. Were there more secrets?
I have been in relationships myself. I have experienced rejection. I have replayed every moment of that relationship in my head, looking in retrospect for signs of where it really went wrong. I have pictured whether a relationship could have been saved if I had just done one thing differently before the connection went cold; before we hit a point of no return.
Imagine the difficulty in replaying an entire relationship that you don’t know the intimacies of. All I had to work with was my perception of parts of the relationship that I was allowed to see, and I wasn’t even paying all that much attention. My head was spinning because the relationship I analyzed (and re-analyzed) was not my own, it was that of my parents.
I started to reevaluate each parent through the eyes of a spouse and not just their child.
My brother looked at me and said that he didn’t feel the same as I did, in his heart he trusted that my parents would work the situation out and everything would be okay. We were their children. My brother called it blind faith.
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