My
parents were married
five years before I was born. They both went to
college and have
always had good jobs. I have
never seen them
fight, not even
quietly.
We
lived in
suburbia, albeit
Detroit suburbia, which has a
unique flavor compared to "average" suburbia. My parents
talked to us, whenever we got in trouble, and tried
extremely hard to be
rational rather than
tyrannical with us
most of the time.
I was a
teenage rebel, which in this
area also carries some
extreme connotations. I did them all. I was almost
separated from my family because they were so
white-bread and I was so very
black-sheep.
Far be it from me to say that my
parents were
bad people; they both
loved us and tried
really hard. But in the
interests of having that damn
apple-pie-looking family, they sacrificed a lot. Too much. As a kid, we
never found out what was going on if it would
look bad. So I was
12 before I found out that my
grandpa was a
schizo in a
very bad way or that my
mom had been on
Prozac my whole life. Just last year,
out of nowhere, my parents
separated. The rest of the
family couldn't have seen it coming in a
million years; one day we knew nothing, the next they were telling us they'd been having
irreparable problems for the last
several years.
They won't get back together because they can't
talk about bad things, with each other or us. It's been
eight months and neither my brother (who still
lives at home) nor I have a
clue what's actually going on. They'll probably get a
divorce is my guess, which, although not as nasty with almost-grown kids as it would have been ten years ago, is still a
really shitty way to end a
thirty-year marriage.
All this, because we'd rather
hide the bad things than face up to them.