There were a lot of things we pretended about in our family when we were young. For instance, whenever there was a parent-teacher conference, I remember my mother telling our teachers that my father was away on business. She never said that she was divorced. And she never told me that the plan was to tell my teachers this, for whatever reason. And I never questioned it. Somehow by then I knew that enough unexplained things existed in my family, and that I better not complicate things by asking questions. Not until adulthood did my sister and I realize that we’d always just gone along with the stories that our mother told our teachers, and we both came to the conclusion that she did so because she didn’t want anybody to make judgments about us. We think that she believed if our teachers considered us to be coming from a so-called “broken home” then they might treat us badly with disregard, or maybe with special treatment, none of which our mother wanted for us. She just wanted us to be as normal as possible in school, and to be seen as anybody else, without any negative stigmas that were so common when we were young, especially since our father was not involved in our lives, as opposed to other people who live in divorced families.
