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.

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