GCD or “Grown Children of Divorce”

Understanding your negative belief systems, where they came from and why they are formed is never easy.

It is a life long process, the motherfucking onion of life, peeling away layer after layer.

My mom was always my best friend. She is a delightful person, funny, consoling and kind. She would have and probably did give the shirt off her back if it meant helping me.

I not only love her now, but back then, I adored her.

 

My Dad and I, back in the day, were never close. It was a methodical relationship with the same questions, forced hugs, and I always thought if it weren’t for my mom, he would not even know me.

 

So of course I plunged to her behalf, an adult woman gone through divorce herself, was going to protect her best friend and mother. It wasn’t until that one day, months after I left a note asking my Dad to never contact me again, these thoughts would start to irritate me.

 

Like, why did I get a divorce for my own fucking parents? My mom told me she wanted one and I offered up my services readily. Or did I?

Why did her own best friend tell me I could never have the life of my choosing, that my mother would never have it?

She had said the word free, and that church guy had used, whats that word, oh, codependent?

These were all new revelations that for that the first time, I couldn’t go to her about.

 

Why was I always protecting her? From who and for what? Wasn’t I the grown child experiencing the heartbreaking gun fire of a divorce the one who needed protecting?

So, why was I intercepting letters so gross and horrendous from my father?

They weren’t written to me. They were written to her. And yet, the entire family would uproot any day she received one, certain she was too weak to handle its content.

Could that be, well sick?

Could my own mother actually not have all the answers? Maybe she was as sick as he was but I was too codependent on her love and affection to see it?

 

And there, there was the day my mother pivoted from Entity to an actual person.

What does one do with this when the questions don’t stop coming and the answers never seem to show up.

At least, without hurting her or me in the process. I so hated hurting her.

 

Then, I got to see my father in a clearer light, objectively and as a husband, not a father.

I had not known the difference, my own pain was over issues with him that had occurred in their marriage, not specific to me at all.

It was information no adult child should have ever had, so who did that make me?

 

The greater the relationship with my father deepened, the more it became real to me, the father away she seemed to be.

 

I can now see that was the beginning of much needed understanding as to the life I had created and why. It was the first moment of clarity, amongst upheaval, shame and denial when I allowed myself to see what was broken inside of me and why.

 

It was allowing myself a search all on my own and being without her, the most beloved relationship I ever have had. I couldn’t have both. I had to give up one.

It was a price that nearly killed me.

If I were to tell the truth, the price of not having her is a void I don’t know how to fill, a road map without a destination.

I don’t want you to confuse death as a bad or good thing.

Death is a transformation of its own. I have died again and again and again.

How can I know tomorrow’s chapter if I’m stuck on the page I’m on?

So, you let it die.

You turn the page and before you know it, the person you could feel crying a room away is a stranger, so you must look in the mirror and die.

But, at least its real. I know the reflection, for all the good and bad, there is no longer confusion.

It’s just me.

The reflection is finally a mirror instead of a painting, a portrait of a woman I had only known inside of me, instead of a separate person, an identity entirely separate on its own.

I had for my whole adult life not known the real difference.

And I wonder why I choose codependent relationships, especially with females?

But, oh God how I miss those paintings.