His speech at my father’s wedding was filled with happiness and love, but as he reached the final sentence, it broke my heart. In the process of breaking the illusion of a great day and exposing a truth that my mother had concealed for years, my chest clenched, my world began to spin, and I walked out of the room. For seven years.
That is the amount of time that had passed since the divorce of my parents. Over the course of seven years, we have been splitting holidays, rotating weekends, and listening to two distinct versions of the past. Even after all that time had passed, I was still unable to comprehend the reasons behind the dissolution of their marriage.
My family only had one adopted child, and I was the only one. My biological children were my brother Caleb and my sister Julia. Both of them were born to my parents.
Julia inherited her mother’s small nose, and Caleb inherited his father’s crooked smile. As for me? As a result of the fact that I did not resemble either of them, I never had the experience of being an outsider.
At least, not at the beginning. In every instance, when I inquired about the divorce, Mom’s responses were always ambiguous. She would grin at me in a way that was tight and distant, but it never reached her eyes, and then she would redirect the conversation in a another direction.
Dad was not like other people; he wore his resentment like a badge of pride and was constantly making snarky remarks about how unfairly life had treated him. I do, however, recall one battle, which is one of those memories from my youth that has been etched into my head. During the time that they were yelling in the kitchen below, I was perhaps nine years old and I was crouching at the top of the stairs.
The sharpness of their words reverberated off the walls of the room. And suddenly, “You are a selfish man who does not deserve these children,” Mom said, cutting through everything else that had been going on. Despite the fact that I was unable to comprehend it at the time, those words became ingrained in my mind.
Children are unable to fully absorb the whole meaning of their parents’ wrath; instead, they simply store up those shards of information in the hope that they will make sense at a later time. After a number of years had passed, I had, for the most part, put those memories behind me. Until the day that my father gets married.
It was on that day that all of the disparate parts came together to produce a picture that I was not prepared to view. As for the ceremony itself, I must confess that it was rather delightful. The mood was the kind that made everything feel staged, like a glossy magazine spread, with cream and gold everywhere, flowers put in perfect symmetry, and flower arrangements that were perfectly symmetrical.
There was a string quartet playing softly in the background, and guests were laughing and clinking their glasses. To put it another way, it was so flawless that it made your stomach turn because you knew that something beneath the surface was going to break. At the front of the room, I was standing with Caleb and Julia, and I was smiling politely to everyone around me.
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