When you create an image of yourself based on the happy, caring family you’ve always known, what happens when life takes a 180?

BY JARED DODDS

IMAGE BY ANNA BONDARENKO

8:00 p.m.

Nothing like the hiss of a bottle opening. Sounds just like home.

It had been another long night: trip to the beer store, mom upstairs crying over dinner and her third glass of wine. I forgot to ask her if she had been to work today. Should check to make sure. If not, I’ll have to push harder than usual tomorrow morning to get her out of bed. Thursdays are always the easiest since I’m already up for wrestling.

9:00 p.m.

I swore to my friends that I’d finish the essay for our project, but I can’t seem to stay motivated. My mind is on other things. I have to remember to call Dad tomorrow. He told me to give him a ring and let him know how practice went. I think he moves into the new house on Friday as well. It would make him happy if I asked about it. I’ll text Maddie, see if she can tell me what to say. He told me I should come by next week. Just got to find someone to look after mom for the night.

10:00 p.m.

100 words deep and I’ve lost focus again. Got so frustrated I almost spilled my beer, knocked all the other bottles over and everything. People are counting on me to finish this tonight—we can only ask Mr. Miller for so many extensions. This is why I hate people relying on me. I always seem to let them down, mess everything up.

11:00 p.m.

No sound from upstairs. I think mom finally passed out. I’ll bring her to bed once I’m ready to go, this essay isn’t getting finished tonight anyway. I’ll finish this beer and go up. Once I get her settled, I should be asleep by 12. Practice starts at 6, I think. 7? Head feels so fuzzy.

12:00 a.m.

Ran out of beer. I keep forgetting to go to the store. Mom will probably need wine anyway; I’ll head there after groceries tomorrow. I feel like I should go to my room but don’t want to wake mom up, plus my stuff is still down here from yesterday. Another night on the couch won’t hurt.

This was a typical night for me in 2012. My final year of high school, with my sister off to England for medical school, my father told my mother he wanted a divorce. It was a shock to all of us. My mother was a wreck, turning to drinking and crying on the couch every night. My sister did her best to stay out of it, taking an out of sight, out of mind approach. And me? The pain was too much, so I turned myself off emotionally, drinking myself to sleep every night, telling the world I was fine all while feeling like my world was collapsing.

I was seventeen years old when my parents separated. At the time, some people (including my father) suggested the experience was probably easier on me than it would have been if I was younger. I was going off to university the next year, I had friends and a girlfriend to support me, and I was more emotionally mature. As divorce becomes more and more common across the globe—between 1970 and 2008, divorce rates rose from 2.6 to 5.5 divorces per 1,000 married couple—the assumption is that there is a way to make it better, more palatable and perhaps the older you are the easier it becomes to handle the transition. My experience, however, was something much different.

The obvious pitfall in my father’s plan was the substance abuse. I became, by all definitions of the term, a high-functioning alcoholic. I drank every night as a way to separate myself from the noise and achieve some modicum of peace. As I grew older, I added marijuana and tobacco to my list of vices, using this trifecta to try to shut down whatever emotions drifted to the surface. But besides substance abuse, I think the biggest reason why divorce is so much more difficult for adult children is the shift away from normal. I grew up assuming my parents were happy. We went on vacations, we ate dinner together at the table almost every night, and they came to all my hockey games. I spent seventeen years putting together a picture of what I thought the world was, only to have it destroyed in a twenty minute conversation at my kitchen table. I didn’t trust anything I had thought before. Relationships were now meaningless to me, because if the strongest couple I knew could be torn apart that easily, how did anyone stand a chance?

Moreover, I went from a kid to the man of the house in a heartbeat. My dad moved to a new apartment and I had to look after my mom while still going to high school. The stress would keep me awake at night, trying to map out how to handle all this responsibility. I was sleeping less than six hours a night, my grades suffered, and I became a nightmare to be around for my friends.

For young kids, these problems simply aren’t on their radar. They don’t have to worry about the responsibility because they haven’t had enough time to understand how much they are losing. Divorce becomes normal to them, whereas I had to learn how to live this new life just after I thought I had figured out the old one. But the biggest difference is the effect on the other relationships in your life. I had a network of friends, family and a steady girlfriend, all of which were shaken by this change. I found it difficult to open up and be intimate with my girlfriend because my emotions were so shut down. My family dinners turned into slam sessions against my father, with all those around me talking about how he had ruined so many lives. Meanwhile, I quietly got drunk in the corner doing my best not to let the hate seep into me as well. I lashed out at coaches and teachers, all of whom I looked at as father figures I could take the anger out on, even as I denied its very existence. Nothing was normal anymore.

So how do we help kids like me who were, are, and will be so full of hurt and confusion? The sad and short answer is that you simply cannot. There is no comfort that can be provided, nothing that anyone can say to bring that child’s family back together. All they need is time to grieve and learn what the new world is. It is a long and painful journey. There are tears and fights, lost loved ones along the way. It took me six years to get to a place where I can finally say I’m “better,” and I don’t even know what that means. My individual relationships with my parents have never been stronger, I have a girlfriend who is too good for me, and I’m on the path toward becoming a reporter, something I am truly passionate about. But there are still days where I want to shut the world out and stew in my own self-pity or lash out at people simply to feel something. So, while I am certainly better, the truth is I don’t think I can ever be one hundred percent. I lost so many years of my life to a darkness that will never truly go away. It invaded every aspect of my being and became my new normal in a time when I was desperately looking for anything stable. Being uncomfortable became comfortable, because at least it was consistent. I can’t regain what I lost, only try and keep moving forward, learning what I can from my troubled past.

And now comes the final hurdle, and the reason for writing this piece: trying to make people who have never experienced this type of pain and loss understand the feelings of those who have. It’s a tough balance, because anyone who knows what kids like me went through would not wish it on their worst enemy. But at the same time, it is crucial to try and at least give a sense of what it feels like, because that is the only way we can offer help to those around us suffering in the same boat. I don’t want to make it seem like these problems are the most pressing things facing us as a society right now but these problems were everything to me at the time, and still shape me to this day. And I can assure you if you know someone going through something similar, what they are facing is everything to them as well, no matter what they say. So, do your best to take some of that load. Be the shoulder to cry on or the person to yell at. Anything to smooth their transition. You can never give them back what they’ve lost. But with a little luck, you can help them see a little bit of what they will eventually gain.

Jared Dodds is a Journalism student studying at Humber College. Though his passion for writing began while covering Mixed Martial Arts, he hopes to put sports on the shelf and pursue a career covering politics after graduation.

An earlier version of this story was written as part of Humber’s WRIT 400 course.

Image: Anna Bondarenko, Plaster Head, oil on canvas, 2019.

An earlier version of this story was originally created as part of Humber’s WRIT 400: Literature and Composition 2 course.

Edited for publication by Elizabeth Reid, as part of the Creative Book Publishing Program.

The HLR Spotlight is a collaboration between the Faculty of Media & Creative Arts and the Faculty of Liberal Arts & Sciences and Innovative Learning at Humber College in Toronto, Ontario. This project is funded by the Applied Research & Innovation.