Copper Classic (An Adventure with the Verbal Assault Squad) Part One...

Image Credit: Our Speeches

"I have three hints for becoming a good speaker, Charlie Brown. You must know when to stand up, when to speak up, and when to shut up."

So, I've begun my foray into the art of Forensics/Public Speaking. I gave five speeches in all, three on Friday between one and ten o'clock at night, and then two between six thirty in the morning Saturday and six pm that night. I did a lot of sitting around and talking with people, and we were all dressed in very fancy clothing. I felt quite classy.

Anyways, here is my oratory as promised. Sorry if it's a bit of a bummer. 

(Little side note, this is not meant to be offensive in any way to my parents or any others mentioned therein)

Once, two spoons in bed, 

now tined forks

across a granite table

and the knives they have hired.

This is a Billy Collins poem entitled Divorce. In his words, it seems that the knives are the ones that you should be worried about. It seems like they are the ones that are going to strike for the kill, but in my opinion, the forks are the ones that are more lethal. You don’t expect to be murdered with a fork, just like, as children, we never expect to have our families torn apart by lawyers and custody battles. By physical separations and the horrible truth that our parents aren’t going to be around much, because they have to work to keep a roof over our heads. Most of the time, if it happens when we are young, we never knew there was such a thing as divorce. We thought that mommy and daddy would stay together even though they were fighting, because that’s what mommy’s and daddy’s are supposed to do. At least, that’s what I thought. 

You see, for those of you who haven’t gone through this, it’s not just something that happens over night. I mean, my parents got their signed and sealed official divorce papers when I was eight years old. I’m nearly fifteen now, and the issues are far from over. It all starts months or years before the actual papers are signed. It starts with separation, both emotional and physical. Once the official order saying that the family can be split jaggedly down the middle is signed, there is the difficulty of relocation, as families often sell their home to pay for two separate, often much smaller homes. Many times, one parent goes to one state, and the other goes to a different state to live with relatives, further stretching and deepening the divide in the family. There is also the difficulty of moving on. When isn’t there a difficulty with moving on after something is removed from our lives, especially when it is removed brutally and without warning. These are the difficulties that I and many, many others have gone through and are still going through every single day. 

Most people think that separation starts when there is actually a physical distance between the members of the family when, in fact, the separation starts long before the physical distance is created. I’m not pretending to be an expert on this, but I do know how it has happened in my family and in the families of my friends. 

It starts with silence. It starts with things like family dinners that used to be boisterous, filled with conversation and laughter, suddenly becoming nothing more than the sounds of treacherous forks scraping plates. Happy things that used to occur every day happening every other day, then every other week, then ceasing to happen at all. This silence is the burning of the fuse, the harbinger of an explosion bigger than that which is caused by an atom bomb. Screaming matches that last hours, sometimes escalating to the point that violence becomes an entirely real option, for both the parents and the children. To make matters worse, as stated by Furstenburg in The Life Course of Children of Divorce, over 50% of North American children will watch the divorce of their parents, and half of those children will see the breakup of a second marriage as well. It was a world shattering moment when I found out that I might never see someone I love again. That I would wake up in the morning or eat dinner with one parent instead of two. In that moment, I realized my world would never be the same, and that was only the tip of the iceberg.

Then comes the physical division. It can come months after the papers are signed, or it can come the very next day. When my mom kicked my dad out, it was the day he came home from a business trip, and I didn’t even get to see him before he was gone. Weeks later, he came to pick us up, my younger sister and I, just to stay with him for a few days. All my life I had lived in a small house, no bigger than one story with two bedrooms, so I was used to having to share space, but we lived in the suburbs. I always felt comfortable and safe in my home, then my dad took my sister and I back to his new apartment. There was one bedroom and a living room that included the kitchen. My dad slept on the twin bed in the bedroom and my sister and I shared the pullout couch. 

The jump from the suburbs to living on Main Street, even in a safe little town like the one I live in, was startling. I don’t think that I slept while I was in his apartment, too afraid of the sounds coming from down below. Drunken bars crawlers, breaking glass, and the occasional wail of sirens. It was more than sheltered eight-year-old me who had never been out of the suburbs could handle. I still have vivid nightmares of the more dangerous moments there, a window shattered by a rock thrown from the street below, and the faces and voices of drunks stumbling through the hallways, banging on every door. 

Then there is the issue of moving from house to house. I go back and forth, sometimes regularly and sometimes not. I’ve had to learn to carry my life with me, because getting two of everything was not really realistic. I have often felt that I am never really at home. I’m just a guest of my own parents and their new spouses. I’ll be gone soon enough. Children like me are more nomadic than anything else, except we aren’t following food. We are following that old sense of safety that we used to get when we went home, desperately running back and forth between our parents’ houses, hoping beyond all hope that we will finally feel like we are home when we get there. The devotion between child and parent tugs us back and forth, stretching us until we are stretched so thin that something has got to give.

In Marriage, Divorce, and Children’s Adjustments, Psychologist Robert E. Emery said that children who have gone through divorce have, on average, twice as many psychological problems as those children who come from homes in which one of the parents has died. This is often because divorce removes children from an environment that they feel safe in and know well, causing them to feel endangered and out of place.

To the point of feeling endangered and out of place, children who have gone through a divorce, we often have difficulties letting people into our lives because we feel like we are opening ourselves up to the possibility of another situation in which someone we are close to or love is taken away from us. Children of divorce, according to the Journal of Marriage and Family, a National Health Publication, manifest speech impediments and social bonding disabilities three times as often as children whose parents have remained married. This often causes us to become social pariahs, unable to connect well with other children because we hold everything so deep inside within the brick and mortar walls of insecurity that we seem strange and unfriendly, when really we are just afraid that we are going to get close to others and then lose them, just like we have lost so many other things. 

Along with this insecurity that we feel, we often grapple with the idea of self worth. I have often thought that if my parents had really loved me, if they had really cared, then they would have stayed together and given me a chance to grow up happy and unburdened. Instead they divorced, both working full time, leaving me at eight years old to take care of my younger sister who was five. Things like that, they just make you feel like you are no better than the dirt stuck in the sole of a workman’s boot. They make you feel like life is just too hard to handle. Growing up with barely any attention from your parents and a sibling who is basically dependent upon you, it makes you tired. It makes you feel like you just want to be done with it all, and it’s highly possible to reach a point where ending your life seems like the best solution. It seems like the best way to escape the struggle of being alone. In the Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, it is said that the suicide rate in children of divorce is nearly twice as high as it is in children from normal homes. 

Now, I am not telling this to you to say that divorce is the worst possible thing that you can do as a parent. You have a right to be happy, and if that means leaving the person that you blindly loved enough to have children with, then do it, but don’t, and I’m begging you now, please don’t make your children grow up on their own. Don’t make your eight year old daughter give up play dates and summer activities to help her five year old sister learn how to dress herself. When, later in life, that same younger sister struggles with school, and your eight year old daughter is now eleven or twelve, but you can’t remember because you forgot her birthday again, she will be there to help her sister because she struggled through the same things, with no one there to help her.

I gave up much of my childhood to make sure my sister could have hers, and I never, ever, want another person to have to do the same. I never, ever want to have anyone else feel as alone and helpless as I felt, slowly bleeding from the blow to my heart, where the divorce, and the subsequent absence of my parents, stabbed me. Where the treacherous tined fork of divorce punctured and bruised me, stealing my childhood away, and nearly killing me through the vesicle of myself in the process. Really, it’s not the fork itself that is going to kill us, us children who are made to grow up far too soon. It is the wound that is left untended, because you, the parents, are not around. 

Well, thank you for reading. Hopefully this meant at least something to you, because it sure means a lot to me. Again, thank you, and have a nice day. Valete!

P.S. If that was a sever bummer, please click here in hopes that it will cheer you up.