lie no. 19 | 05.15.19

I discovered my dad’s affair when I was 23 and he had stage IV colon cancer. I lied to my mom about it for the next five years. Ultimately, their 30-plus-year marriage ended in divorce.

That’s the big secret, just a dressed-up lie that cheated us all. It’s neither novel, nor unique in nature; not even new information to some of you. It just took me a while to forgive myself for the role I played in it all. And that’s OK.

No one really talks about the impact divorce has on the kids once they’re past some invisible cutoff age—at least not in any of the places I’ve spent a lot of time and energy refusing to look.

Nor does anyone talk about grief when your loss is something as intangible as your family, pieces of yourself, your past.

Divorce is supposed to be easier on adult children.

That’s the biggest lie of them all.

I didn’t have many friends with divorced parents growing up. The statistics started to flip the older we got, the further we got from home.

The few I did have had pretty similar experiences, at least as far as I knew. For the most part, it wasn’t talked about, and even then only in whispers.

My basic understanding of how divorces went down played out a lot like we see on TV and in movies even nowadays.

When my friends’ parents sat them down one day for a conversation they never wanted to have, they used their best inside voices to break the news—and everyone’s hearts—as gently as possible.

Together, their parents would explain how much they still loved each other; how it was just in a different way now! How they will, of course, always love their kids; how that kind of love will never change or fade! How it wasn’t the kids’ fault; it was no one’s fault!

Some of my friends even got M&Ms to sweeten the bitter news. 

Then they got two houses, two bedrooms! They got two Christmases, two birthdays. The luckiest of the lot even got two new families, two sets of friends.

I don’t mean to belittle or romanticize their experiences. I’m sure having two of everything is never half as much fun as it looks. Worse, having two of everything probably feels a lot more like having nothing at all most of the time.

I know these friends of mine had to choose between their parents a lot, pick sides, even though no one ever asked them to. Pick-A-Parent is a game no one ever wants to play and no one ever wins.

I also know I never saw the half of it. I never saw the drama, the betrayal, the heartbreak, the tears, the sadness, the shouting, the name-calling, the fault, the guilt, the blame, the shame, the fear. All the off-script moments happened behind closed doors, probably two of them.

It sucks when your parents get divorced, no matter how old you are, no matter the circumstances.

I know now, of course, there’s no such thing as fairy tales, endings or otherwise, but I still believed in them with my whole heart as a kid. And perception has an unfortunate way of becoming reality.

For some reason, adult children of divorcing parents are treated like, well, adults throughout the process.

My parents didn’t sit me down, together or apart, to tell me when their marriage ended. I didn’t know the last time we were all together as a family would be the last time. 

Maybe my little brother knew—he’d held his pointer finger up to his mouth, urging me not to say anything as he jumped out of our moving speedboat in open waters on a busy holiday weekend, swam to shore and booked the first flight out he could get. I’d become a pro at keeping secrets by then, even taking on the blame for things I didn’t do. The rest of us went out for pizza and beers and watched my parents fight after we docked the boat and knew my brother was safe.

My parents didn’t tell me how it wouldn’t change the fact that they still love each other, or how, of course, they’d always love me and my brother. The latter I never once doubted, the former I wasn’t so sure about. And I definitely questioned if someone who lies for five years to loved ones actually deserves love. My answer: a hard no.

They didn’t tell me it wasn’t my fault, or how it was no one’s fault. This was a full-fledged, active fault zone. My fingerprints were all over the fault lines. I pled guilty to charges no one filed against me, locked myself up and threw away the key. It never even occurred to me until recently that I could just let myself out of my own false imprisonment. 

As a kid I had an infamous response when asked if I was ready to come out of timeout, if I’d had enough time to think about whatever it was I’d done to end up there—which was usually running my mouth. My answer: a hard no, I’d need more time. 

The irony’s no longer lost on me—I ended up back there, in a self-imposed, grown-up timeout, this time for keeping my mouth shut.

I didn’t get two of anything when, at 31, my parents’ divorce was finalized. I got half of a family, sometimes less, never more. I didn’t even get M&Ms.

The worst thing I didn’t get, I never gave myself: permission to grieve.

It bears repeating: It sucks when your parents get divorced, no matter how old you are, no matter the circumstances. Remembering that parents are humans, too, adult children are still the kids and trying to understand that everyone’s doing the best they can, goes a long way.

At a writing workshop I attended a few weeks back, one of the prompts given was about forgiveness. 

Who or what did we need to forgive and what would it look like if we forgave? 

That’s an easy one. I’ve got that story memorized.

I started writing about my dad. The words didn’t pour out of me like they usually did, an uncomfortable feeling when writing something as simple as the story of your life. 

I felt stuck. It felt forced. It felt like a lie.

It felt like a lie because it was a lie. So I tried again, only this time I wrote the truth.

I’d forgiven my father for the affair not long after he came clean to me, or at least as clean as he was capable of coming back then.

I’d forgiven him after he accidentally sent me a text intended for his now-wife shortly after when I considered how awkward that must’ve been on his end.

I’d forgiven him for the treasure trove of lies I’d uncovered, coded and analyzed over the years from dozens of sources—calendars, flight logs, credit card statements, PI reports—when I understood he had never left that trail for me to find. (Hello, future researcher!)

Then, a few years later, I forgave him again after I handed my amateur detective work to him, desperate to feel seen or heard, only to be asked if it was the only copy. [Child, please.]

I’d forgiven him every time I had to drop everything to take care of my mom, adding supportive spouse to the growing list of hats I wore. Once I realized I had a choice in the matter, that it wasn’t him punishing me, I was grateful for the chances to help out when I could. Now even more so for those opportunities I had to see what compassion, grief and asking for help looks like.

Most recently, I forgave him for teaching me (by example) to always look for shortcuts around the hard stuff rather than taking the longer, tougher way through it, then admitting when it got hard and asking for help. Escape routes of choice: work and sarcasm.

When I put my pen down, I stared in awe at this trail of forgiveness I’d been leaving in my wake, leaving in the past all along.

I was in awe of my bravery, my empathy, my maturity, my desire to protect the people I loved, my unconditional love, even in the face of betrayal.

Contrary to everything I believed, I’d actually been forgiving my father for his transgressions all along. It wasn’t my inability to forgive him that’s been holding me back. It was about me. I’d never forgiven myself nor let myself grieve all I had lost.

It was all I could do to not yell PLOT TWIST! at the top of my lungs in that moment. Although, where better than in a room full of writers, I suppose.

I’d been trying so hard for so long to rationalize my way out of everything that’s happened, to rationalize my family back together. I was exhausted. 

That’s when I tried something radical I’d never seriously considered before: I tried to understand, rather than rationalize, and in the process I forgave myself. 

I forgave myself for not seeing the strength and grace in my mom’s ability to ask for help when she needed it. I forgave myself for years of trying to convince her otherwise. I forgave myself for sticking to the script, for not always being all things to all people.

I forgave myself once I admitted how ashamed I’d been for so long—lying to family, friends and colleagues. I forgave myself for finally admitting I’m not sure I did make the right choice way back then.

But one thing is for certain: I did the best I could with what I had at the time. We all did.

I forgave myself for all the times my 23-year-old self’s best didn’t align with the higher expectations I have for myself now, 12 years of hindsight later.

I thought I’d always be the girl who caught her dad cheating. The girl who lied to her mom, and everyone else, all those years. The girl who’s parents got divorced because of it all. The girl incapable of ever getting over it all. The girl who couldn’t be trusted with love and therefore didn’t deserve it. The girl who punished herself by actually believing all of that.

I started realizing, instead, I was a girl who hadn’t yet learned it’s just as important to grieve the unseen losses as it is the physical ones. A girl who hadn’t yet learned loss hurts like hell regardless of its shape and size. A girl who hadn’t yet learned grief wasn’t a weakness or something else to fail. A girl who hadn’t yet learned sitting with your grief is a sign of strength. A girl who didn’t know any better at the time.

When I started forgiving myself, I stopped believing in the worst fairy tale never written (thank god).

There’s no cutoff age for grieving the loss of your family, the loss of what used to be, the loss of something you can’t see.