Best Thing My Divorced Parents Taught Me

Growing up in LA, my friends and I went everywhere.

Before we could drive, we took buses, cabs or walked.

Once we could drive, we’d head to parties in the Valley

using a Thomas Guide to figure out where the hell we were going.

I was the opposite of Clueless.

(Great scene in the movie Clueless, the kids are using Thomas Guide to find a party in the Valley, just like we did :-)

We all had a pretty good sense of direction because we had to.

When my dad moved to Tokyo, I would spend the day walking around the city and taking the subway while he worked.

No cell phone.

No Google Maps.

Just an actual map.

Because my dad worked and traveled throughout Asia,

we’d also go to Hong Kong

— I would walk and shop while my dad was at the office.

My dad’s instructions were pretty simple:

If you walk too far, just take a cab back to the hotel.

So one day, at about 15 years old, that’s exactly what I did.

I walked too far. I hailed a cab. I went back to the hotel.

No problem.

My only mistake?

I forgot to lie to my mother about it.

When I got back to LA and mentioned it accidentally,

she blew up.

“You let Tiffany take a taxi BY HERSELF in Hong Kong?!”

She was furious with my dad.

This was part of a strange contradiction in my childhood.

I was often asked to manage information between two parents.

“Don’t tell your father.”

“Don’t tell your mother.”

After a while, it got hard to remember what I wasn’t supposed to tell whom.

It’s the reason I’m almost incapable of lying today.

Sometimes I’m probably too truthful.

Because I learned something very early:

The problem with lying isn’t only that it’s wrong.

It’s exhausting.

You have to remember the lie.

The truth is easier.

And maybe that’s also why I remember conversations so well.

Growing up, I had to pay attention.

What did Mom say?

What did Dad say?

What did I tell Mom?

What am I supposed to tell Dad?

I learned to listen carefully to people’s words

—and maybe to notice when their words don’t quite add up.

I used to think I simply had a good memory.

I also can tell when someone is BSing me pretty well.

Now I wonder if it's because of what Sigmund Freud observed,

"we spend our adult lives undoing the debris of childhood."

Sometimes the skills we rely on most as adults started as coping mechanisms we didn’t even know we were developing as kids.

There can be silver linings to a parent's divorce

At least in my case, I learned from the good and the bad.

Tiffany Kent

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