The divorce (and the run-up to it) was far more devastating than the mere fact of coming home to an empty house, starting in middle school c. 2002. I notice tha

The divorce (and the run-up to it) was far more devastating than the mere fact of coming home to an empty house, starting in middle school c. 2002. I notice that there's no accounting for forced after-school program attendance (my reality up until about 3rd grade). Nor the time my dad was deployed and my mom doing deployed wife things. What did the damage wasn't the physical lack of presence, but the emotional abandonment. Recognition of my needs - a few HGH jabs so that I wouldn't be the shortest kid in my class anymore, a car so that I could socialize like a normal person with my classmates at the school I was bussed to - would have gone a lot farther than them being all up in my business constantly (which they mercifully were not, if only because they didn't know how to check my browser's history).