The Independent Voice of Southern Methodist University Since 1915

The Daily Campus

The Daily Campus

The Independent Voice of Southern Methodist University Since 1915

The Daily Campus

The Independent Voice of Southern Methodist University Since 1915

The Daily Campus

Symposium attendees smile for the camera.
SMU helps women cast a net into the ocean of (net)working
Evangeline Bulick, contributor • March 27, 2024
The observatory sits behind Dallas Hall on Daniel Street
What is that?
March 25, 2024
Instagram

Carefully divided

My parents are divorced. It’s something I don’t recommend doing for fun.

Before you run to me with a sturdy shoulder or a fresh pack of facial tissues, realize my upbringing has been stellar. So much of the person I am today is based on what happened before I even started pre-K, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.

The people I’ve met, the lives that have touched mine and the experiences that I have been presented in my 25 years of life would only have been possible with my parents’ breakup in 1990.

After a rather unpleasant process and the decision to go their separate ways, my mother and father officially split and I was left to see my dad only two weekends each month for several years. In that timeframe, Pops remarried my stepmother and a couple flips of the calendar later they had two beautiful baby girls — my loveable half-sisters.

I won’t speculate on my parents’ possible desire to have more children if they’d stayed together because that type of thinking would get me nowhere very quickly. What I do know is that my two younger siblings bring a smile to my face every day because of how successful they’ve been and how much more I know they’ll be.

They are the biggest reasons I’m thankful for how my life has played out, and to know how they came into being also made me learn to love my stepmother as well.

Another great side of this is the traveling I’ve been able to do in combination with getting to live in one area. While my father continued his career as a military man, moving across the country for a few years at a time for most of my childhood, my mother and I settled in around the Dallas area.

My trips on an airplane by myself before I was 10-years old were some of the most nerve racking, and yet most entertaining times I can remember. Many of these four-hour flights included layovers that allowed me the simple pleasures as a child of meeting the pilots, getting to chat with some very nice fellow travelers, and most importantly, getting excited for the cities I was due to arrive in.

Many summers sent me on one-month long trips to Seattle where I developed a longing for rainy weather and a much greener view than what I see day-to-day in the Southwest.

After a decade or so of seeing the Pacific from this side of the pond each year, my stepmom was offered a career opportunity to teach high schoolers on an air force base in Japan. It took about thirteen milliseconds for her and my dad to say yes, and the same length of time five years later when they agreed to move to Naples, Italy.

I’ve been fortunate to live in or visit several countries outside of North America because of my parents’ separation, and the fun I’ve had is immeasurable. Cultures and people I would have never seen or learned from is worth the time lost from seeing one parent or another.

There’s obviously no way around that I don’t get to see both of my parents as much as I wish I could, and given the fact that they now live half a world apart it’s extremely difficult to do so. Thinking about seeing my dad is enough to make me regret all the wasted opportunities I could’ve had with him.

In a perfect world I’d simply walk down a block or two from one home to another and be able to see both whenever I pleased, but that’s not the hand I was dealt.

At no point in history has divorce been perceived as a positive, socially speaking. It’s almost looked at like a child dying of some disease: is it huggable or do I try to avoid it altogether?

Perhaps the fault lies at the feet of those too blind to look at the positives from an experience like this. I know I don’t.

Costa is a senior majoring in journalism.

More to Discover