Tell us about a conversation
you couldn’t help but overhear and wish you hadn’t.
Honestly, only one conversation comes to mind, and it doesn’t fully fit
the bill for this prompt, but I’ll share it anyway. When I was a young girl
(probably 10 or 11 years old), I was walking through our home to my room. In
order to get to my room, I had to go past the study and up the stairs. Our
study was rarely used, so it was usually dark in that room, and I usually
hurried past it because I tended to be afraid of dark rooms at that age. This particular night, there was a lamp on in
the room, so I stopped to peek in.
Before I could even put my head in the door, I heard my mom crying
softly. When I entered, I could see the
pain on her face. My dad was in the room
with her, also talking softly. In fact, I had never heard them raise their
voices at each other, but my mom usually wasn’t crying either, so I knew
something wasn’t right. In my young mind, it seems it was only a short time
after that, I learned my parents were getting a divorce. It could have been
weeks, months, or more than a year, but it was the very first sign to my
self-focused child’s mind that something was wrong between my parents. Turns out, something had been wrong for a
long time, but I was just oblivious to it until then. I say this story doesn’t fully fit the
meaning of the prompt because although it was a painful scene for me to
witness, I don’t wish I hadn’t heard their whisperings. It was a “gentle” way
to ease me into the idea that my parents were not perfect, and their life was
not perfect. If I had been totally blindsided by the divorce, that would have
been worse.
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