This started out as a comment on a youtube video
I never really had the formal talk. I was only six and I saw my dad get in a car. Echoing in my mind were the harsh words of my grandmother: "Your daddy doesn't want to live with you mommy anymore." I cried countless times, I remember navy blue rooms with yellow light from the doorway and convulsing over my soggy pillowcase. I guess some part of me understood. That was my first heartbreak. Years later right before hit a wall with my happiness, my dad took me on the back of his bike down to Virginia Beach, I cried that day as he asked me if I knew why, the day he explained that my mother felt her religion had failed her, that her mother had failed her, how she had failed herself.
That was the day It began to heal, though two years before I had wept behind a temple as a blonde and foreign woman married my father, from whom I had carried the torch of raising my younger siblings. Nobody noticed. my grandma said nothing but "come on" as she took me back to the cars. I think she saw.
That night was a party for everyone but me. My cousins excited to have a new set of kids, my aunts, and uncles happy to see two divorced people finally get the spouse they needed after they had fallen in love in a few weeks in California. I just drowned myself in cake and held so dearly to my dad as everyone around us dance in my new grandparent's backyard. They went on, me resenting her, her trying her best until eventually I was ready for her and she was miserable. I have compassion for her but the way she argues with my dad and makes me feel almost as weak as my own mind does, keeps me at my Mothers house.
