A young boy lays on his bed, carefully listening to his parents argue throughout the night. He wrestles with a crippling question about his family. Will they stay together?

”Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.”- Martin Luther King Jr. Apparently my father was not the light to my mother’s darkness nor was my mother the light to my father’s.

My parents’ relationship started to become shaky two years before they separated. Their angry words – mocking and spiteful – still ring in my head. I don’t think they knew that I could hear all of their fighting through the thin walls of our home.

The experience was agonizing. Every night I stayed awake, thinking about what was going to happen. For years this went on. Counselors got involved, doing their best to help. But it didn’t matter. Finally my parents grew apart, permanently.

Separation and divorce for many children, including some of our own Day Creek students, has the potential to change a lot. Before, the home was a place of consistency.  Now we live with a different weekly routine, moving from house to house during the week and again on weekends. It is far more complicated than a typical family’s schedule.

“If you forget like a book or something valuable that you need for school at your other parent’s house it will be difficult to complete your work adequately. Without the book you can’t do your homework, so that leaves you with a missing assignment, a lower grade, and makes you fall behind. This will result with you feeling more stressed than normal,” replied Kaileb D., a seventh grader at Day Creek.

“Sometimes it is a bit hard. After about five years you get used to it. Every once in a while when you are packing your stuff to go to your other parent’s house, you forget something and then you are pretty much done for. Sometimes your step-parents’ roles intervene with your biological parents’ and some people think they are your biological parents,” replied Nicholas D., a seventh grader on campus.

A divorce was the best option in my situation, and my family really is happier. No one wants their parents’ relationship to end up this way, yet it did put an end to the non-stop fighting. I would never want to go back to how things were.
“One of every 10 children whose parents have divorced will also see three or more subsequent parental marriage breakups.” So many kids were left with one parent. Perhaps one moved away to another city, or even another state. A divorce is tough to get through, but so many kids have wrestled through it.

To make matters more challenging, stepfathers and stepmothers come into play. “It just feels so different,” said Michael R. a seventh grader at our school.

Having divorced parents can bring some benefits. If you are in trouble for doing something naughty at one home most of the time you don’t have to worry about the punishments trickling over to the other home. And some of us lucky kids get to open Christmas presents twice!

A change in a household can shake the foundation everything that a child thought a family was. Divorce has sadly affected many lives but we must overcome the obstacles. “We may encounter many defeats but we must not be defeated,” said Maya Angelou. Anything, even something very small, can bring us down but we must live like there is not going to be a tomorrow.