Revised 1

I lay motionless on the carpet, with my ear pressed up against my bedroom door. The smell of the carpet, that distinctly sterile yet somehow also dusty smell, infiltrates my nostrils and stops to sit heavily in my lungs. I struggle to comprehend the distant voices; at first hushed and hurried but quickly growing louder. My mother’s voice travels the dark hallways to my room like lightening, disrupting the calm of a late school night, “You make me sick, I can’t believe I married you!” And like thunder, my father’s reply follows, “Believe me, if I had the chance to do it all again, we wouldn’t have gotten married!”

There were many nights like this. So many, in fact, that when I look back to this period in my life it is as if someone maliciously sucked the days out of my memories, leaving me with one elastic night that lords over my past like a thick, morning bayou mist.

For the better part of a year, 1999 to be exact, this turmoil bred “irreconcilable differences” in my parents’ marriage. Spring, summer and fall were all marred by venomous words and bitter actions. Christmas came and went without bringing joy or the present of normalcy. January was bitterly cold and in February, this saga of marital attrition came to an end.

It happened while I was at school so I can’t say I actually saw my dad moving out of my house and out of my life. When I got home, he was just moved out. My mother was in the kitchen chopping an unnecessary amount of onions. A quick inventory check revealed the kitchen table, family room sofas and my father’s desk to be missing. My brother noticed this as well. Having Down syndrome, the only way he found to express himself was to cry over the missing furniture, “Where is my sofa?” Though he couldn’t say it, he knew much more was missing. 

All I could do was watch my mom begin to chop another onion and envy the fact that my brother, apparently, was only upset over the missing furniture. It was the same envy I felt knowing he slept soundly through the many nights of yelling that continued to haunt me the next day and for the rest of my life.

 I stood in the doorway of the kitchen for what seemed like an eternity, too afraid to ask the obvious: did my dad really move out for good?

My mother, sensing me standing petrified waiting for something and no longer able to stand the weight of the silence stopped her compulsive dissection of onions and turned around to face me.

Tears glistened in her eyes. I wanted her to tell me she was crying because of the onions, that we were getting new furniture and that my dad would be joining us for dinner tonight. Instead, tears now rolling down her face, she strived to keep her voice emotionless, “John, I think we all knew this was coming. Your dad and I have decided to separate. He rented an apartment near the city and you guys will spend the weekends with him.”

With those words, I knew things would never be the same and I was terrified by the uncertainty of the future.

Life before the fighting and the separation was defined. Defined in that my mother was a stay-at-home mom from Nicaragua; my father was a corporate lawyer from upstate New York; my mother was married to my father; my parents had two children; we vacationed together and I was to attend catholic/private school followed by a prestigious college and finally University of Chicago Law school, just like my dad.

Now, this defined life I had known up until this point suddenly lay shattered. I never imagined a life in which my parents were divorced and the implications of this reality are still being discovered and understood.

The security I once felt with the façade of a seemingly normal family was stripped away a long time ago. Notions of marriage, love and family were forever altered; my sense of life direction and certainty in my destiny obscured by the chaos of it all.

And the shake-up was merely beginning. One weekend, after having spent it at my dad’s apartment and now being dropped off, my parents erupted into a huge argument. It ended with my mom storming out of the house, something she had never done before. My father came out from the room they were fighting in and called my over to the living room couch, whose innocuous floral pattern I will always remember. 

Searching for the words and struggling to hold back his emotions my father said, “John, I need to talk to you about something.” I had never seen my father anywhere close to crying and I worried over what it could be he needed to talk about. “John”, he said, barely audible, “your mom has been begging me to let you guys move to California.” I already knew the next words but I refused to believe them long after my mother, brother and I moved to California, three thousand miles away from my dad and everything else I had known.

As I sat in my window seat on the plane to California, I thought of how far away I was now traveling; how far away from everything I had ever known. In just one year, my life had gone from living with both of my parents to now moving cross-country away from one of my parents. And, as I sat there equating distance with change, I realized life is always going to take you somewhere unexpected so my best bet is to just sit back, enjoy the in-flight entertainment and embrace it.