Parents Divorse - Cause and Effect on Child

        As a child, I was always envied by my fellow neighborhood children for having the latest toys, hippest pair of shoes, and having lots of freedom as a child.  However, what they didn’t know is that I paid an emotional price for having all of those things.  I would have traded it in a heart beat for a father that didn’t drink all of the time and parents that got along.   When I was ten years old, my mom filed for separation between her and my father, and he moved out of the house immediately.  It had been a long time coming, and even at the young age of eleven I knew it was the best thing for our family.  My father was constantly creating chaos in our household.  Visits to our house made by the police went from terrifying to normal in a very short period of time.  My father would go away for months at a time, which I found out eventually were the times when he would go to inpatient treatment in an attempt to sober up and get his act together.  This also became a regular occurrence in my childhood.  When my father would come back, he would always buy me new toys and spoil me out of guilt.   Sadly, the toys and ice cream never would make up for the time he was missing from my life.  When I was eleven years old, my parents’ divorce was finalized and it has had some serious psychological effects on my life since then.  

        After the divorce, my mother decided to relocate our family to California, which would to be very difficult for me.  Initially, I was very excited for the move because California seemed like an oasis to me.  Growing up on the east coast, I dreamt of one day having a real palm tree in my yard.  When I moved to California, that dream became a reality.  The harsh reality of having to start my life completely over hit me very hard and fast.  I was intimidated by the coolness I thought every kid in my school had, solely based on the fact that they were from California.   Here I was for the first time, the awkward new kid in school.  I didn’t know how to surf, have blonde hair, or know how to properly use the term ‘gnarly.’   I saw myself as the weird kid from Washington D.C.  whose wardrobe wasn’t nearly cool enough to be seen in California.   I felt like such a huge misfit.

        Making friends was a big problem for me.  I didn’t think I would be able to fit in with the popular kids, so I migrated towards the other group of “misfits” at my school.  In middle school I began hanging out with the bad kids that your parents would warn you to stay away from.  I was in eighth grade and began slacking and disregarding basically any assignment given to me by my teachers.   My grades began to drop dramatically, but I liked the attention I got from that, even though it was negative.  I felt so unsubstantial as a person and was just happy that someone was noticing me.  Once I got to high school, I had really reinforced the idea that the only way I was going to get attention was to display bad and inappropriate behaviors.  I began being disrespectful towards my mother by disregarding practically everything she said.  If she wanted me to be home by ten, I was home by twelve.  I would talk back to her and always thought I knew better than she did. I began to skip school and would spend that time with older kids smoking cigarettes and drinking.  I didn’t necessarily enjoy these things, I just wanted to feel like I belonged.  It also made me feel terrible about myself because I was acting exactly how my father used to act, and I hated him for that. These behaviors eventually caused a lot of chaos in my life. I ended up getting kicked out of my high school and was sent to do independent studies, an alternative method of schooling, in which I was able to graduate from high school at my own pace and from home.