Childhood Guilt-I was Happy, My Family was Miserable

Audrey Zetta
4 min readJan 22, 2024

I didn’t know. I feel like I should have noticed.

Photo by Taisiia Shestopal on Unsplash

When I was about 10 years old I thought my world was ending. Two years after that I was happy but no one else was.

It was Saturday, and my parents were fighting. My sister, brother, and I were all sent to clean our rooms while our parents tried to keep their yelling under control. My parent’s unhappiness was palpable, and I was crying intermittently while I cleaned my room.

Suddenly, my mom opened the door of my room. Her eyes were red-rimmed; she had clearly been crying, too.

“Your father is leaving.” She said flatly.

I didn’t know what she meant, “Where is he going?”

“He’s leaving for good!” She spat the words.

I didn’t know how to react. “Okay,” I said.

She left the room, slamming my bedroom door, and I sat there dazed. I knew how this was supposed to go. Our parents would sit us down and tell us they loved us but that they were no longer going to live together. We…

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Audrey Zetta
Audrey Zetta

Written by Audrey Zetta

Feminist, dirty liberal, thoughtful absurdist. I store miracles in words.

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