I Knew Finally That Somehow My Life Was Worth Living
18 minute read
This story was written by an anonymous contributor at 40 years old. His parents divorced when he was 9 years old. He gave permission for his story to be shared.
HIS STORY
I don't know. I still don't know.
In 1950, the United States of America entered the Korean War. A newlywed Catholic man in the city of New York joined the Army, left his new bride, fought in the Far East, won a Purple Heart, and returned home with a bad case of shell shock and mysterious brain cancer.
His family opposed the marriage for ethnic reasons and so disowned him. He fathered three daughters with his bride, but their stormy marriage ended when he succumbed to brain cancer barely two years after the birth of the youngest daughter.
The widow embraced a tyrannical and acrimonious parenting style. That youngest daughter went to a university on the other side of the state, earned a bachelor's degree, and met a young man. He came from a local intact Catholic family with several brothers, possibly with some alcohol problems, served for four years in the Navy, returned home, and met this young woman.
After a few years of various activities, they moved to Virginia Beach, where he started a job as a civilian mechanic for the Navy. They deluded the state into registering them as married but apparently never celebrated a sacramental wedding. When an unusual series of severe snowstorms struck the city, she conceived me, their firstborn son.
I thought that I had an idyllic childhood with two loving parents and three wonderful younger siblings. My mother took care of us children at home while my father worked as a civilian for the Navy. We went to Mass at the local Catholic parish every Sunday. In time, I attended the local public school and earned good grades.
They seemingly had no friends and almost never engaged in any social encounters insofar as I saw. I expected to emulate my father when I attained adulthood, and he encouraged and affirmed my chosen career path, which ultimately I followed, even though it didn't match his career.
Each summer, our family spent a week or so in the city of New York, visiting my maternal grandmother, her parents, and sometimes a few of her relatives. We never visited the family of my father, and they rarely conversed on the telephone or sent letters or packages. Apparently, my mother thought that a married man should have no contact with his family of origin.
As the United States of America achieved victory in the Cold War, the Navy began to prepare for major downsizing. My father wanted to continue his career with the Navy, so he occasionally took evening, overnight, and weekend shifts instead of or in addition to his normal daytime shift and trained for several alternative positions.
This change clearly upset my mother. I noticed an increase in acrimony, but I heard that parents sometimes disagree, so I didn't recognize any major problems. The idea of parents separating for a reason other than military deployment or death simply never entered my mind. Regardless, my father increased his alcohol consumption and on rare occasions engaged in mildly regretful behavior while drunk. Meanwhile, my newborn youngest sister experienced a series of worrisome health problems, beginning with a somewhat low birth weight, which my mother later attributed to stress from marital discord.
One summer, we went to the city of New York as usual, but my father stayed in Virginia Beach and worked at his job and repaired the house. Our vacation lasted not for one or two weeks but for four or five weeks. When we returned, I noticed that he hadn't mowed the lawn. After our return, my father mowed the lawn, and normal family life seemingly resumed. But a week or two later, he loaded his car with a rather large quantity of clothes and some other things and departed. He never returned.
What happened? I didn't know. I thought of perhaps a business trip or a sea voyage with the Navy or even in the merchant marine. But the hours turned to days and weeks and months and years. Strangely, cash began to appear in our mailbox on Navy paydays. My father must have sent it, so he probably went not far away, but confusingly, he didn't see, speak, or play with me anymore. And my mother used appalling language to describe him in his absence. Her spoken rationale for the separation made no sense in the context of my knowledge of my father. But one oft-repeated reason struck me: My father hated me and wanted to do terrible things to me
HOW THE DIVORCE MADE HIM FEEL
Initially, little in my life changed with the absence of my father. We continued to live in the same house, to engage in the same type of activities, and to attend Mass every Sunday. I progressed from elementary school to middle school and knew nobody in my new class. I vented my anger at the alleged hatred of my father mostly through yelling despicable insults at the wind.
But as the firstborn son, I carried an obligation to my younger siblings to defend the honor and reputation of my family. Within the first year, I determined to conceal the shameful separation and never mentioned it to anybody. I never invited anyone to my house, and when I received invitations to social engagements, I always declined, lest I incur an obligation to reciprocate and thus risk revealing the absence of my father.
As a consequence, I developed few friendships in middle school, none of them close. If pressed for information about my father, I generally responded that he works on ships and that they go out to sea a lot and that he doesn't say much about his job.
The departure of my father from the family home left me, a nine-year-old boy, as the man of the house, implicitly responsible for providing my mother with the technical assistance, financial resources, muscle power, and emotional support to run a household.
In this role, I barely tried and failed miserably. I perhaps wanted to mow the lawn, but I couldn't even find a way into the garage to access the lawnmower, which as a child I wasn't allowed to use. I knew not how to fulfill this necessary role. Instead, after bumbling for a year or two, my mother developed a relationship with another man.
This new man took an interest in my family and genuinely tried to support me and better our lives whenever he experienced sobriety. Unfortunately, he often drank alcohol to excess and sometimes erupted in a drunken rage. Nevertheless, he capably fulfilled the duties of "man of the house" at which I failed completely. I still dreaded this new relationship because it both destroyed any potential for restoration of my father and brought the outbursts of alcohol-fueled rage into the house. But I could not deny my relative inadequacies as man of the house. Nor did I appreciate the trauma to come.
Increasingly, meanwhile, I began to wonder why my father suddenly hated me enough to abandon the family. In reality, he neither hated me nor tried to destroy my life nor wished me ill. But I had no means of knowing that my father didn't hate me. I ultimately concluded that I did something so reprehensible, so horrific, so despicable--something that no other child ever did--that it caused my previously loving father to hate me irreversibly. But what? I tried to remember but failed to identify the deed of mine that caused this separation.
Some time amid this situation, the state courts finalized the legal divorce between my father and my mother. The settlement made minor changes to the status quo but unleashed the opportunity for a new period of dysfunction and chaos. It began with cohabitation and fornication and culminated in another fake marriage. They deceived the state into accepting them as married but never received the sacrament of holy matrimony (nor any Catholic marriage preparation, however inadequate).
The drunken fits of rage gradually increased in frequency and intensity with the passing of the years, and this new man frequently insulted my mother, my siblings, and me even before they deluded the state into considering them married. Although he acted quite pleasantly and helpfully when sober, that sobriety came progressively less frequently. When drunk, his behavior varied from fits of rage to repeating verbal insults to urinating around the house to snoring semi-consciousness.
For all of these problems, I increasingly blamed myself. I accepted his insults as factual truths about my nature, my character, my identity. I thought that if only I didn't exist, then my family would revert to a peaceful, healthy state. I blamed myself for the departure of my father, for this abusive relationship, for his drunkenness, for the fits of rage, fights, and discord. I began to see this man as an innocent victim, as a tool with which I tortured my family. But I was too stupid, too malicious, too evil-hearted, too oblivious to identify and to reform the attitudes and the behaviors of mine that caused all of these problems.
Meanwhile, in middle school, I made little effort, and my grades plunged. I misbehaved frequently but rarely got caught. With the chaos at home, I continued to avoid friendships. In time, I passed from middle school to high school. I aspired to win admittance to a university to pursue my chosen career, and my mother and my father long earlier endorsed this goal.
Moreover, the prospect of traveling far away to attend a university represented an honorable escape from a profoundly unhappy home life, one that my younger siblings ultimately followed. Therefore, I began to put more effort into increasingly rigorous academic schoolwork and enrolled in several extracurricular activities.
But I still tried to avoid developing friendships, lest people come to know my shameful and awful family situation, or, worse, my malign influence ruin their lives too. Meanwhile, my prayer life utterly collapsed except continued attendance at Mass on Sunday (which I valued principally as an hour-long escape from almost incessant conflict) and at the mandatory but almost worthless religious education classes, which culminated in the sacrament of confirmation.
The situation at home deteriorated into unpredictable episodes of property destruction and criminal violence about which I never told anyone. I used school as a refuge from the chaos at home and trained myself to think only about the academic course material and not about the home situation while at school or on school buses.
At home, I tried to study but internalized the loud insults and assumed blame for the violence. The man of the house often dredged up minor incidents from years earlier and used them to taunt me for weeks on end. I erected numerous barriers in my mind to keep the problems as secret as possible. I tried to minimize the requests of my family. I imposed painful punishments on myself for causing the wrath and for failing to stop it.
Despite my improving grades, I still sometimes slipped back into those bad middle-school habits and fell short. I wanted to leave the family on honorable terms that set a good example for my younger siblings and so end the drunkenness and trauma.
Meanwhile, my already gravely awful self-image darkened still more. I tried to avoid social relationships in general, but once I reached the eleventh grade, numerous students saw me as a classmate in several classes during the school day and in extracurricular activities. Hence, peers began to capture me into their social networks, even if only for potential help with unrelentingly rigorous school classes and activities.
Insofar as I knew, everyone in the high school (or more properly, those who took advanced classes in preparation for university admission) except my sister and I all came from intact, functional, loving families. I began to think that my malevolence extended well beyond my family throughout the community like a sort of malicious, quasi-spiritual, almost demonic Rube Goldberg machine that I alone triggered with my misdeeds. And I couldn't find a way to stop triggering it. Meanwhile, in my worldview, everyone else in my life simply, effortlessly, and unfailingly avoided all the intuitively obvious misbehavior with which I continually drove my family into ever deeper dysfunction. Of course, this self-perception was utterly insane.
With the maelstrom at home continuing to intensify still further, I tried to reveal nothing and continued to decline all invitations for social interaction and even study groups outside the school day. Even so, people noticed something not right, including deep-seated pessimism and low self-esteem.
School teachers occasionally questioned me discreetly about my home situation, but I invariably identified myself as the only problem. I feared that if people learned the truth, then the state would take my siblings away to my father, who would torture, abuse, and abandon them as another manifestation of my malignity. Even if that didn't happen, I wanted people to think highly of my sister and my younger siblings.
Nevertheless, somehow, despite my concealment and aloofness, I managed to fall very unintentionally into a particularly helpful support network. My classmates treated me kindly and tried to encourage me, but I began to suspect (almost certainly wrongly) that they did so not from charity or amity but from fear of my malevolence. I don't know what my classmates knew, thought, or said of me in my absence.
Nowadays, I can see the hand of God working through the situation for my benefit. One day as a struggled through classes and contemplated the premature end of my wretched life, I turned, exasperated, to a particularly widely admired girl, who somehow made acing schoolwork appear easy. She smiled at me and softly spoke the best advice I have ever received in a single word: "Pray."
I should have followed, but I came to perceive the attitude of the man of the house on a drunken rampage as a mere shadow of the wrath with which God the Father intended to punish me eternally for my sins in causing all the trouble in my family and into the wider community. And I thought that that man forgave more easily than God. I feared that even attempting to pray only would provoke more intense wrath from God. Obviously, I suffered from horribly warped misconceptions and denial of the mercy of God.
I can relate still more horrible episodes from those years. But this essay has gone too long. The city police finally removed the man of the house after another drunken violent rampage, and he faced trial for felony assault charges. This outcome confused me as I saw him as an innocent victim, a tool of my malevolence, akin to an ax in the hand of an ax murderer, an automaton without sufficient capacity to choose less harmful actions.
Although we expected him to return with even worse violence, he only engaged in occasional harassment, and I never saw him again outside the courtroom. Although he held a good job, his alcohol consumption, expensive toys, and property destruction made him a net drain on household finances. My younger brother assumed the role of man of the house, keeping the cars in good repair, mowing the lawn, fixing broken stuff, and warding away a series of suitors. A divorce ultimately followed sometime later but changed nothing.
Despite my manifest insanity and with tremendous unsolicited encouragement from that peer support network, I applied to a prestigious university in the Northeast. The university accepted me, much to my surprise, and my high school graduated me, so I went to higher education with even a partial scholarship.
HOW HIS PARENTS' DIVORCE HAS IMPACTED HIM
I arrived on a university campus where I knew nobody. I intended to try to earn a degree and if possible to learn how to behave as a professional man. Although I suspected insurmountable academic challenges, the rigorous high school curriculum prepared me well.
Many years of intentional social avoidance, however, left me with very poor social skills. A deep depression haunted and engulfed me, and I often struggled to summon the willpower to complete the most basic tasks. The intense moral darkness that characterizes the American university scene eroded my already warped sense of right and wrong. I mistook sophistries for sapience and tried in vain to find the logical coherence of the incoherent nonsense of the day.
I concluded that I was simply too stupid for the university scene despite grades high enough to earn a bachelor's and master's degree. Hearing of the concept of "microaggressions," small, often unconscious actions with supposedly enormous potential to degrade entire cultures, made me fear participating in society, lest my already manifest malign influence ruin more and more lives.
And in a notorious "party school" culture, complete with alcohol abuse and widespread sexual improprieties, misery enveloped the lives of many students (and failed ex-students who continued to live in the community). My goal of training myself to act as an upright young American professional found no obvious solution. I frequently planned ways of ending my earthly life and proceeding immediately to Hell, which, I imagined, would bring relief and healing and joy to everyone around me. I just wanted to take as few other, innocent souls with me to Hell as possible.
Because I arrived from a household that always went to Mass on Sunday (and probably unconsciously because my father unfailingly took me to Mass on Sunday when he still lived with me), I mostly continued that habit on campus. Early in my university years, I somehow by the grace of God got sucked into the small Catholic community on this enormous campus.
At first, I went principally because it offered free food close to my dormitory. The food stopped, but for some not articulable reason, I kept going anyway. When I withdrew and ceased attending these functions, some fellow students noticed me on campus and goaded me into returning. These messages that I heard resonated in my heart and in my mind but contrasted sharply with almost every other influence in my life. I thought that I was just too stupid to understand the logical coherence between the message of the Church and that of the larger university community.
And I had no parents, no father to whom I might turn for help or even just emotional support in navigating this strange world. The upbeat, emotionally charged events managed if only briefly and partially to interrupt the thick fog of severe depression and constant negative self-talk. Somehow through those long and severely awful years, Jesus Christ through His Church gave me the will to live. But over many years, I adopted the actions and attitudes of the culture and a lifestyle of constant grave sin. And it wasn't just the despair and depression.
One April evening of my final year on that campus, I entered a large but otherwise empty university classroom, where I encountered a Catholic priest. He immediately began the sacrament of confession, "Father, forgive you, for you have sinned. It has been ___ months since your last confession. But that was not a good confession. In fact, you've never made a good confession." I did nothing to prepare for this encounter, but he was right. I couldn't identify sin in my life.
After so many years of university indoctrination, I wondered whether twitching the wrong way in an elevator was a grave sin, whereas killing a baby was a good deed. I never had a father to teach me manly virtue. I didn't know how to behave. I certainly didn't want to repeat any role in the trauma the unfolded over several years in my home, and I thought that God couldn't forgive me until I identified the sins of mine that precipitated the problems and restored the happy marriage of my parents, all without His divine assistance. And even if I managed that impossible task, then God probably would decline mercy and send me to Hell eternally anyway. Or so I erroneously thought.
Instead of requiring me to list my sins, however, the priest listed and described my sins for me; I said only, "Yes, Father," when asked to assent. He then led me through a primitive act of contrition. At this time, I fully expected to hear him berate me as irredeemable, but he instead pronounced the words of absolution.
He then reiterated and reemphasized that because God forgave me my sins, if I die immediately through no fault of my own, then I would go ultimately and eternally to Heaven. So for once, Jesus Christ, my God in the person of His priest gave me hope, set me free, and directed me on the right Way through this miraculous encounter. And although the deep depression quickly resumed, the suicidal impulses never returned. I knew then finally that somehow my life was worth living.
I ultimately graduated, left the world of academia, moved halfway across the country, and somehow managed to find a job. I tried to stop those habits of sin that I confessed. I joined a Catholic parish and began the practice of regular confession. I tried to follow a severely disciplined lifestyle. Initially, I expected to fail at my job, and I still feared that my malign influence would ruin the lives of my colleagues and particularly might destroy their marriages.
But as the months and years unfolded, events realized non of my fears. I kept my job, my colleagues did not turn into abusive alcoholics, their marriages didn't fail, and my fears slowly began to subside. With still no real social life, I began to seek answers to the deeper questions of life, obvious answers that everyone else already knew intuitively (or at least they so understood in the era of Christendom). Eventually, I quit the self-harm, and the depression gradually began to lift.
But even as I accepted the willingness of God to forgive my own sins, I still blamed myself entirely for the divorce of my parents and for the abusive relationship that followed. And as much as I wanted to marry, I had no positive male role models to follow. I only slowly after several years began to build a limited social life. I imagined that a married man confines his human interactions to the family of his wife and those minimally necessary to provide for his wife and children, as I observed as a small boy. Anything more, I presumed, constituted infidelity.
In conformity with this supposed societal expectation, I avoided conversations with persons whom I knew or suspected to be married. Of course, that meant that I had no even observational experience of healthy family life. And I never even dated a woman. In fact, I still haven't gone on a first date yet, even at my advanced age.
Eventually, more than twenty years after the separation, I found a telephone number for my father on the Internet and reestablished contact. I quickly found that he doesn't hate me, doesn't wish ill upon me, and doesn't even blame me for the separation, which, I now appreciate if only slightly, hurts him terribly.
I began to question whether perhaps I wasn't entirely and exclusively at fault. Then I wondered whether forgiving my parents for their separation necessarily entailed assuming the blame and guilt. I still struggle with these concepts. And I wish that I had performed better as an older brother to my siblings. Living a thousand miles away prevents my mother from running my life and interfering with my finances. But it also separates me from my sister and her family and from my brother and his family and from my youngest sister, also still unmarried. Hearing my mother repeatedly propose divorce to my siblings pains me greatly, and I regularly inveigh against the wretched idea.
And although I began to build a somewhat normal social life, I still avoid revealing the true state of my parents' marital status. I don't really have any close friendships. I try to avoid imposing burdens on people, asking for favors, or interfering in their private lives. I still struggle with negative self-talk, especially regarding interpersonal relationships. Nevertheless, I have one particular rather outgoing married friend, who has shared with me the joys of family life as he rears and educates his many children. I still look at faithful husbands with awe, and I struggle to attain to the maturity that they displayed even as teenagers. I recognize the great good of fatherhood. But I doubt that I ever will attain to the qualities and character necessary to start a family. Or even try.
ADVICE TO SOMEONE WHOSE PARENTS HAVE DIVORCED OR SEPARATED
This wound doesn't heal. It only gets worse with time. This is your cross, so take up your cross and follow Jesus. You cannot control your parents and their relationship (really, you can't), but you still can attempt to minimize and control secondary wounds. But how?
First, get to confession. Even if you single-handedly caused the divorce (and assuredly you did not, but even then), then God wants to forgive you and awaits you in the confessional. Moreover, confessions are secret, and Saint Jan Nepomucký even died as a martyr in defense of the seal of the confessional. So don't worry about your parents or anyone else learning what you confess. (You may try to schedule your confession so that your parents aren't nearby and cannot overhear, but rest assured, Father will not tell them.)
If you cannot make the confession schedule, call the parish office or just visit when you can and dare to inquire. Try to find an "examination of conscience" sheet to help you to prepare. If you cannot find one or do not understand the vocabulary, do not fear. Just enter the confessional and say, "Father, forgive me, for I have sinned. It has been (number) months since my last confession. I don't know what behavior is and is not sinful, so please help me."
If your parish doesn't help, then try a different parish; you can confess at any parish or anywhere else you may encounter a Catholic priest. And Church law requires confession at least once per year and whenever conscious of mortal sin, but many bishops encourage confession at least monthly, even weekly. It is perfectly okay to decline meeting your parents' new partners. It is okay to not attend family events for a bit if it will hurt you. You need to focus on your healing, not keeping your parents happy. Seek Christ, even when it is so hard and even if you are angry.
Second, pray every day, prayer brings you in communion with God. If your situation allows, pray in silence before the Blessed Sacrament exposed in adoration. A former youth minister at my current parish recommended an hour of contemplative prayer every day in addition to daily Mass and more. You may find that schedule too daunting or impossible to sustain in the face of your other obligations. But pray every day at least ten or twenty minutes.
Try to find a quiet space. If you cannot get to the local parish church, then pray in your room or in your backyard, stop at a local park en route to or from school, pray on the school bus, or wherever else you can find to make your sacred space. Saint Karol Józef Wojtyła, an orphaned slave of the Nazis, prayed daily at a cemetery in Kraków, where he learned of Saint Faustina Kowalska and the devotion to Divine Mercy. Just as that now-famous icon says, trust in Jesus. He will deliver you in the end, and he can assist you even now.
Third, get to church every Sunday and on any other day when the opportunity arises. If you have access to the Internet, a parish bulletin, or another resource, then try to follow the daily Mass readings. If you can go to Mass then go thither, regardless of how abandoned or awful or unlovable you may perceive yourself. Never miss church on Sunday.
God sent you a message in His Word, Jesus Christ, and in his word, the Scriptures. You have only to absorb the message. And remember that God did not forsake you; he never forsook His own Son. When on Good Friday, Jesus cries, "My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?," He in is excruciating agony does not despair of the presence of His Father; rather, He invites those within the range of His voice to join him in praying Psalm 22, He does not finish the psalm vocally because those in earshot already know the psalm because of their familiarity with this poetry of King David and also because he lacks the oxygen to continue; the crucified die of asphyxiation as they gradually lose the strength necessary to inhale. But Psalm 22 ends with a prediction of resurrection. You too should learn the Scriptures. And you too will flourish one day in a way that seems unimaginable now.
This isn't easy, and your life always will be complicated, confusing, and difficult. But sustain hope and persevere to the end and you will triumph, even if you cannot foresee any such possibility. Remember, God loves you.
HOW TO HELP YOUNG PEOPLE FROM DIVORCED OR SEPARATED FAMILIES
Stop divorce before it happens. Help people to understand the sacramental and indissoluble nature of holy matrimony. Try to identify, assist, and coach troubled couples. Teach people the laws of nature and of nature's God, recognition of which almost has vanished in our society. Start early, even before serious dating begins.
Outlaw pornography. Restore the Comstock act and enforce it.
Remember that these teens and young adults exist on every part of the socioeconomic scale in America today. Although dysfunctional households pervade the underclass, many aspiring young professionals and housewives suffer from dysfunctional families of origin. And some of us never publicly acknowledge it because we don't want to bring further discredit upon ourselves and our families.
Tragically, statistics now show that most American teenagers lack parents and survive in dysfunctional homes or otherwise lack stable home life. They need examples of healthy marriages, and with the suppression of good history and classical literature and moral instruction from public education, they also may need an introduction to the concept of genuine marital life.
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