Personal Narrative: Growing Up In A Split Home

In the Spring of 2011, my parents got a divorce. I was thirteen years old and it was one of the most difficult things I have ever had to experience. I can remember like it was yesterday when my mother sat me down and confessed the tragic news. Going through something that horrific, I would never wish divorce on anyone. Being a child of divorce, I went though the divorce differently than my mother and father did. With both parents being separated in different homes, I had to choose who I wanted to stay with on the nightly. It was a bad situation because both parents were going through such a destructive time, yet both desired always to be with my sister and I. That was the most painful and challenging decision I would have to daily make. I never

My parents divorced when I was about seven years old, and my mom became the custodial parent. As my younger sister and brother, and I could adapt to always going back and forth between our parent’s. The challenging thing about having divorced parents is meeting their new significant other, which I have met multiple of them. Another thing is meeting my parent’s significant other’s children. Each person I met was nice, and if I was meeting a toddler, they were energetic. Although, each time I did meet these people, I was usually very distant and dramatic.

Thus far, the information I have learned this week has truly altered the way I view the world around me, and has caused me to reanalyze different experiences from my past. For example, as stated in the textbook, “4 out of every 10 marriages… will eventually end in divorce,” (Newman, p.7). When my parents announced their divorce, I blamed myself, as most young kids do. At the time, all my close friends had parents who were still together. This made me feel like an outcast, and for years I refused to tell anyone that my parents were divorced. To this day I still struggle with it and I would always think about what my siblings and I could have done differently. Using a sociological imagination allows me to look at the bigger picture and realize that divorce is very common and nobody in my family is to blame.

During chapter one the two things that stuck out me was nature vs nurture and correlation is not causation because I can easily associate this to my childhood growing up. When I was a baby I lived with my birth parents for a few months. My birth parents had a few issues, including bipolar, drugs and alcohol addiction, violence, which lead them to prison and treatment. Not long after they were sent I was put into foster care. At 18 months old I was adopted. I grew up in a huge family in a protective home, where I was taught many life lessons by my parent and siblings. Growing in a huge family was beneficial for me because I always had someone to rely on and help me through rough patches. They taught me and show me how to be a better person than

Hardships are a somewhat unavoidable fate waiting to throw unpredictable circumstances your way, thankfully it is in these moments that we reflect on the past to better our future.

I was raised in an untraditional home. My mother was a teenage parent and my father was older with two children of his own when I was born. Eventually I would have three more siblings join the family. My parents struggled tremendously to care for six children, which forced them to worked several jobs each to provide the necessitates. Providing health care for a family of eight was beyond what my parents could afford even while working two job each, however state medical assistance made sure we each had the care we needed. My parents demanding work load shifted the responsibility of caring for my siblings on me. The financial stress my parents faced continued as I approached college. My decision on which undergraduate university I would attend

Today, many kids are the children of divorced parents and it isn't uncommon anymore. Usually parents are civil with one another for the sake of the children. However, I was the victim of two very uncivil parents, both who refused to admit their own faults to one another and then went on to speak badly of the other to my younger sisters and I.

As I was growing up I assumed I would have the responsibility of a child until I moved out of my parents house. I figured when I moved out it would be because I was going to college. I never expected I would move out of my parents house at the age of 16 to move in with my grandmother after I promised my grandfather I would take care of her.

My mother had to decide whether she wanted to put her life on hold for her two children. She had to rationalize staying in our hometown as a single mother, or moving in with her parents to give her children a better life. She deliberated the outcome of both possibilities and assured herself that moving in with her parents would be the right choice.

When I was three years old we moved to our current home in Hartford South Dakota. The only thing that was left for our to keep in our new home was an old Piano. After a few weeks of being settled in my mom would often be kept up at night with people being loud out side. She described the voices sounding like they were always just right outside our house on the street. She would just try to ignore it and go back to sleep. But one night they voices were way louder, but they conversations weren't so clear where she could make out what they were saying. It was mostly mumbling. She got out of bed and looked out side but there was no one outside, but voices got quieter. That is when she noticed it sounded as if they were coming from the vent on the floor, like from the down stairs. By brother, who was 7 or 8 at the time had his room in the basement so she thought to her self maybe he just had something playing in him room, would be very weird at this time of night, but its a possibility.

My parents were never legally married, but were together for about ten years or maybe more. I never really gave much thought to the idea of them not being married, but once when I was in first grade a

“Divorce”. I had overheard this word in my household growing up but I turned a blind eye, grasping on to any sliver of hope. That hope was shattered one ominous morning before school when the doorbell rang that impacted my life forever. My parents had been fighting more than usual, and action was finally being taken. I wasn’t certain of what was happening, but when I looked out the window and saw two men in police uniforms, I knew this laconically confirmed the word I feared most. Experiencing my parent’s divorce at the young age of thirteen shaped the person I am today, and influenced my perspective on life.

Three years ago, my parents decided it would be best if they split up. My brothers and I didn’t understand, and we didn’t agree. We were hurt, and everything seemed to be crumbling down around us. It was an extremely emotional time for all of us, and it was then that I realized who was really there for me. My family, my friends, and faith in God is what really helped my through the hard times of my parents’ divorce.

Witnessing loss of love between parents, having parents break their marriage commitment, adjusting to going back and forth between two different households, and the daily absence of one parent while living with the other, all create a challenging new family circumstance in which to live. In the personal history of the boy or girl, parental divorce is a watershed event. Life that follows is significantly changed from how life was before (Pinkhardt 2011).

Devastated, I ran to my room gushing my eyes out. All these emotions going through my head of how my life would be without my parents in the same room or even house. From what I remember it all started about mid-June, the weeks before that were crucial. My parents would always argue over how to deal with a situation between me and my brother, Skyler. They hardly spoke to one another, but when they did they would just start bickering. I remember, one night after dinner they both went into ''their'' room with the door locked yelling at one another. Skyler and I didn’t know what to do, so we went downstairs and tried to figure out what was going to happen. With a scared tone I asked if mom and dad were going to get a divorce?" He answered back '' No, they love each other, they wouldn’t do that to us." That following night, was a school night everything was quiet except for my crying. I couldn’t sleep; all I was thinking about how it's going to affect my family.