Children of Divorce

I was recently contacted by my two stepsisters who I haven't heard of in about 15 years or so. They're not really my stepsisters I guess. When my dad married his second wife she had two daughters which I guess means they're not actually stepsisters because there's no blood relation whatsoever. However, we did spend an incredible amount of time together "growing up" and went through a lot together. Our parents basically got married one day after the break-up of a 13-year marriage to my mom and said "go and be sisters". I was about 5 years old at the time, and we ended up being 4 "sisters", all 3 years apart of each other. Our stepsisters were the oldest (11 at the time and quickly approaching her teenage years) and youngest ones (about 2 and of course the recipient of all the love from my dad which I'm sure made me jealous to no end, especially since I had been the "baby" up until that moment). As many children of divorced parents, we had to spend almost every weekend at my dad's place, which I hated for many reasons:

1. I hated having to interrupt my "regular" life, particularly on weekends. Every birthday party I was invited to or sleepover, or movie night, etc. I had to say no to because I was at my dad's and it was really far away from my mom's house.
2. I got an immersion into religion similar to the one in the movie Borat which has forever marked me. Suffice it to say I don't think it's fair for 9 year-olds to have to fast for hours and hours in some religious retreat, although that horrendous fast led me to try this famous puertorrican chicken for the first time (Fuentes BBQ) which I will forever be grateful for. Chicken never tasted so good in my whole goddamn life. All blasphemy is intentional for the purpose of making a point about how effective that religious immersion was...or not.
   
3. As much as I tried to love my Dad I resented the hell out of him for leaving my mom, my sister and me all alone to fend for ourselves. My mom was never the same after the divorce, and I know somehow deep down she looks at her life and wonders "what if". What if she had a happy marriage, what if her daughters had two parents who loved each other and didn't argue about money and schools and shots, etc.
4. No shopping -- while our Mom did her best to keep us up to date with all the latest fashions (sometimes spending way more than what she was supposed to), my Dad has always been a bit of a cheapskate and basically refused to buy us anything at all. And if he did ever end up buying us something it would be from the Air Force commissary store, and you know how fashionable those things can be. Think K-Mart in its really bad days. I remember one time I really fell in love with a phone which was like $30 and finally convinced him to buy it for me. I thought it had actually been a "no strings attached" purchase, but the next thing we know he sent the monthly check for my Mom (which was usually late and we always had to call him to remind him about it -- another thing we HATED to do) and he had deducted the $30 for the phone. He did something similar one time when he took us to get our shots before going back to school. I love my Dad dearly, but stuff like that just blew my mind. Today he doesn't quite shower us with generosity, but we can ask him for anything (which we usually don't out of habit) he'll help us out. Like when I was going to college I didn't think I'd be able to go to my school of choice because my financial aid package wasn't stellar, and he said he'd help me out as long as I pay the favor back by putting him in a nice senior home. :)
   
5. Nasty food -- my Mom and Dad have always been pretty good cooks. However, my Mom was more of a "puertorrican food" specialty chef whereas my Dad, being a gringo, was more about veggies like alfalfa sprouts and crap like that. The types of food that never go over well with minors. Furthermore, when it came to cereal, a childhood staple like no other, my Mom's house always had the best to offer - which at that age for me meant something extra sugary like Apple Jacks or Cocoa Pebbles. You know, the stuff that had "surprises" inside. But in my Dad's house we had nothing like that. Firstly because it would have to be some type of healthy cereal like Raisin Bran (which for a 5 year old kid means death) and then it wasn't even the original healthy cereal, it would be the carton-tasting imitation from the military store. Yuck.
   
6. And finally, and perhaps most importantly, as much as we tried to get along with our stepsisters and our stepmother, we just couldn't do it. We pretty much hated each other's guts. I don't really know where this hatred come from. You might of course assume I'd hate them because "they took my father away from our family", but I think it was lot more deeply-rooted than that. I think at their core, these were people that represented everything we were not...they were rude, confrontational, loud, and sometimes even vulgar. And we always wondered, did our Dad hate his life with us so much that he rejected it to be with someone so different from us? There was one story that makes this point particularly clear...one night my Dad and his wife had gone out to either a party or a dinner or I can't remember what. My sister had already gone off to college which means I must have been around 13 at the time and in my most angry days for sure. The three "sisters" (I was outnumbered 2:1 if you are following the story) decided we would watch one of those beauty pageants that are so popular in PR, either Miss Puerto Rico or Miss Universe or something like that. At some point (and I apologize as this will get somewhat nasty but only for a sec) someone farted. So the oldest stepsister turns to me thinking I was the author of the fart and said "you're such a pig". I can't even remember if I had been the one to fart or not, but I knew the following response would get the biggest rise out of her so I firmly responded "your mother's the pig". I guess that really struck a chord, because immediately she jumped off her seat and came over to me and started hitting me and kicking me like in one of those mob movies, I was on the floor curled into a ball trying to deal as best as I could with the blows...and mind you I was 6 years younger than her and probably about 100 lbs. lighter at the time since I weighed around 90 lbs those days! ("Peso pluma" as you would say in PR). As soon as I could escape her blows I went into the master bedroom and locked myself in. I started calling friends to come and get me out of that hell hole but the smart bitch decided to pick up the phone in the living room and put it really close the TV so that every time I tried to pick up the phone to call someone to come and get me all I got was the stupid Miss Universe pageant. So I had to stay there and wait till my Dad came back with his wife hours later and of course as luck would have it I was the one that got punished for the incident for being the one who "provoked it". That was probably the most extreme example of our dysfunctional relationship, but it's something I'll definitely never forget and don't wish for anyone to experience, especially with "family" for godsake.
   

I will always be marked by my parent's divorce - it has fortunately and unfortunately in great part defined my view of marriage, my view of kids, my view of happiness, everything. I'm sure it's probably affected every one of my relationships. One of the big things it has made me determine is that no matter what, I will fight for my marriage till the end, as I don't want to end up causing the heartbreak to my husband and my children that our divorce caused to us. I pretty much want the cycle to end with me. But is that an unreasonable point of view? Will I maybe end up in a situation where the best thing to do is not stay in my marriage but decide I will fight it against all odds even when it doesn't make sense anymore? Who knows. But I hope I never get to find out, and now that I have my precious Gabi I hope more than anything SHE doesn't get to find out. My husband is also a child of divorced parents, but somehow his experience was a very different one. Maybe because it happened so much later in his life. Don't get me wrong, I know it has marked his life as well, but I somehow wonder why it would have affected me so profoundly and it doesn't seem to have affected him as much. Is it because I am a woman and I lost my "father figure" early on in life? I hate to do the stereotypical psychological mumbo jumbo, but sometimes you just can't ignore these things.

So as you can see, these two separate emails that arrived this week woke up in me memories and feelings that had been buried deep inside for a while. And I probably would have never written about this particular topic on my blog except for the fact that I got the two emails and felt I needed somehow address my thoughts. I asked my dad what to do and he said just ignore them. In an amazing twist of fate, one of the step-sisters is actually living right here in Cincinnati. I have been struggling for the last 48 hours or so trying to decide whether I should respond to these emails or not. So far I'm trying to ignore them and hope that if by chance my two "step-sisters" stumble upon this blog they'll understand why their emails remain unanswered as of now.

It wasn't all bad though -- this "dual" life did introduce us to people and places we might have never discovered otherwise. For example, about one weekend every month we would go to the island of Culebra, where some of the most beautiful Puerto Rico scenery exists. These regular trips to Culebra I know are a big part of who I am. And I know I will always be a happier person if I'm around warm weather and the ocean. That's just the way it is. Another puertorrican jewel I discovered thanks to this dual life was the town of Patillas. Beautiful beaches and rivers and waterfalls and great small town living where you could go to the neighborhood store and buy gum for five cents.

BTW, my dad is currently married to his third wife, who I get along with beautifully. I also really admire and get along with her two children - one son and one daughter. The son doesn't live with them right now so I'm a bit estranged from him, but the daughter is a great, great young lady (I sound like an old person!). I've often wondered what has changed to make me get along with them so well; had I already given up the idea of getting our "family back together", had I matured significantly for the first time, did I actually think this new wife would make my dad happy, did I realize it wasn't my choice to make, did I realize my mom and dad were just never going to work out, or is my new step-family simply made up of nicer people?

Sadly, as much as my Dad and I love each other, we have never had one of those close parent-daughter relationships. Maybe that's why I was jealous of my step-sisters and step-mom, not because I didn't want my Dad to give others the love that was meant for me, but because I was grieving the close relationship we would probably never have as a result of the divorce...Dad and I talk on the phone every week, our conversations are casual but not comfortable, cordial but not intimate, like we are both afraid to have a REAL conversation. We never really talk about the past, perhaps wondering how we would start such difficult conversations...