During a time when we are all stuck at home, family is more important than ever, which got me thinking about how my own family has grown and changed. When I was younger, in elementary school, students used to have to draw pictures of their families.
Everyone around me would take out their crayons and draw a mommy and a daddy, maybe a brother or sister, sometimes a dog and cat. I wouldn’t draw anything, even though I wanted to. It was the same choice every time: to tell the truth, or to tell the old truth.
I always picked the latter.
My parents divorced when I was seven
Mommy, daddy, sister, puppy. My teachers would smile and give me a shiny sticker. But what they didn’t know was that my picture was a lie. My puppy had died and my old life shown in that picture was gone. The story that my drawing…