The littlest Christmas tree

It was the summer before my 12^th year. It was after the separation but before the remarriage. The divorce was not yet final. 

My nerves were high, my stomach was low and I was not eating much.

Some mornings with my mother, I locked myself in a closet and stomped on the electrical cords to see how many short circuits I could cause. I was not happy; that much is obvious. That upset my mother greatly, but I didn?t much care.

I saw my father once a week; he had taken a small apartment in a slightly run-down neighborhood not far from the university where he taught. It was formerly a student neighborhood, but populated now with older folk.

My father?s apartment was small and plain, so unlike the house I?d grown up in.

The summer had been lousy and I was not looking forward to fall and its culmination in Christmas.

I?d begged to go to Girl Scout Sleepover Camp; I?d had a fabulous time at day camp the year before. So my parents enrolled me, and I cried in my bunk the whole time.

This camp was near Park City, Utah, before the ski resort was built. It is fairly high in the Wasatch Mountains and cold, even in July. Camp counselors threw snowballs at each other the week before: it was July 4.

I had  been a veteran camper with my family, but this was different. The bunk was cold and damp; the food was terrible; I was a picky eater, which made matters worse. I was lonely, not knowing anyone during the camp.

Worse, I suspected something was up at home, but I?d no idea what. I resolved to go home, any way I could.

Since the camp counselors told me I could NOT go home unless I was ill, I decided I would stay in my bunk and cry until someone got me.

After one week, my father and his co-worker came to pick me up. I was overjoyed.

The next morning, my father was nowhere to be found.

My mother announced: Your father and I have separated. He is living up on 13^th East, near the U.

In the world of any child of 11, the words ?Mommy and Daddy? became fused into ?mommydaddy?, an inseparable unit.

I sat on the edge of my bed that day and did not eat. I did not sleep until well after midnight, so fixed I was on creating a strike so that my father would come home.

Well, that didn't get me far.

I relished the time spent with my father at his apartment, the walls were dingy and the furniture was old, but we had a great time.

One day we went to Pony Haven, a Western-saddle horse farm 20 minutes from Salt Lake. After we rode horses too well used to be of much good beyond trotting the last ¼ mile home, we sat in the ghost town's saloon and drank Sarsaparillas.

This would be the first Christmas without my father.

Like a glass ornament placed too close to the edge of the tree that it falls and shatters, the emotional life of a child in divorce shatters.

The one hope for redemption that Christmas would be the visit to my father?s apartment later Christmas day.

It would be my first sleepover at his place.

He told me he?d bought a tree.

I laughed when I saw a 24-inch, artificial tree sitting on his table. He wanted to decorate it with my sisters and me.

That Christmas became one of my fondest memories.

I learned what all children of divorce learn: each parent solo can be just as good as the two parents together.

And that the best memories can have their beginnings in the most inauspicious of corners.

Copyright  © 2007 Kathryn Esplin-Oleski