My Parents Got Divorced and Lindsay Lohan Lied to me

Rosa Main | SHE/HER

It was 2006. Donald Trump was a creep and a pandemic was looming. Oh, how times have changed. 2006 was also the year my parents told me they were separating. I didn’t care because I was seven and concerned only with ensuring my younger sister had less than half of whatever we were sharing. The only thing which sought to constrain my epic ascent into year two was my family’s burdensome fortnightly weekend custody arrangement.

My dad emerged from my parent’s relationship a newly singled man in his mid-forties. He tried his best to entertain us over the years through many blended families and macaroni and cheese dinners, but every time his weekend with us rolled around I would feign illness and beg my Mum to let me stay home. 

Our obligatory visits made me feel powerless. I was too young to throw in my two cents on this judge-mandated arrangement, in which my sister and I were bounced from the familiarity of Mum’s home to Dad’s interior-decorator girlfriend’s place. I felt like a child in the 60’s who was expected to be seen but not heard—quiet, well-behaved, and obliging.

Unsure if I was alone in these feelings I asked my friend Isabelle about her experiences as a child of divorced parents. “I used to hate going [to my Dad’s], but now I’m really glad I was forced to go because I got to do things I never would’ve with my Mum,” Isabelle explained. When she was at her Dad’s she spent time with her large Korean family who had recently emigrated to New Zealand and “weirdly loved the outdoors”. 

“It gave me a taste of being part of a huge family. There were nine of us living together and we needed to take two vans for transportation”. Through their oftentimes reckless exploration of New Zealand’s wilderness, she said, “it was honestly a miracle that none of us ever had to be rescued by the New Zealand Land Search and Rescue department”. 

While I shared Isabelle’s hostility towards these visits, I often took more dramatic measures to evade them. On one particularly cunning occasion, I even saw my dad in the carpark waiting to pick me up from school and thought to myself, “not today papa!”. I grabbed my sister and walked to my Mum’s work down the road instead. This plan backfired quickly as my Mum wasn’t even at work that day. Her co-workers looked confused at the two beady-eyed sprogs staring over the front desk. My Dad ended up walking in moments later, having exhausted all two options of where his progeny may have been (here, or at my Mum’s house), and I attempted to act puzzled as to how I may have confused his weekend with my Mum’s.

Nothing made me feel more helpless than the family trips he would take us on. Well, maybe the time I was accidentally flashed by one of his girlfriends coming out of the shower. Taken aback by her prune-like labia and horribly augmented breasts, she then informed me that “this is what you have to look forward to when you turn 50, sweetie”; a direct quote I have never managed to banish from my thoughts.

Pressing forward, on one of these trips we went over to the Gold Coast. I had recently been dumped with a bag of Abercrombie and Fitch hand-me downs from a cousin and was excited to debut some truly criminal outfits on the Surfers Paradise boulevard.

One evening my dad had plans to meet up with another divorced single father who everyone inexplicably referred to as ‘Perk’ and go out for the evening. Under ordinary circumstances, he would happily have left my sister and I to heat up our own cheese frankfurters in the microwave.
But this was 2007. Madeleine McCann was allegedly snatched from her hotel room, just a few weeks prior. So my Dad diligently sought out a nanny advertised on a flyer at the Turtle Bay Beach Resort bulletin board to look after us for the evening. 

What arrived was a cranky woman in her 70’s who had about as much affinity for children as I do for COVID-19. Even though I was nine years old, she forced us into bed at about 6pm while we could still hear the Italian family outside splashing around, and proceeded to blast Law and Order on the hotel television. Thankfully, when I awoke the next day the old witch was gone, and my Mum was delivered two, mostly healthy, albeit scurvied children. I would never again take for granted my unfettered internet access at home.

Another compulsory family trip I often made was up to our family bach at Pakiri beach. My Dad would fill it with his friends over the New Year period, and often subject to the old proverb, ‘respect your elders’ us tweens would be relegated to the outside. One summer, Dad set up a canvas army tent in the backyard in which I was to sleep that looked like it was used in the Civil War. I have endured a paralyzing fear of the dark ever since. I had just turned nine and started reading urban myths on the internet. The idea of sleeping alone, outside, in a desolate rural backyard was almost enough to make me call child protective services on my Dad. 

I spoke to my friend Frankie about her obliging single dad experiences and was heartened to learn that they are to some extent universal. “Dad would tell us he was taking us out for lunch at Prego. Me and Gigi were so excited that we were getting carbonara, but when we arrived it wasn’t just a special father daughter lunch. One time he had seven of his friends roll through and pull out cigars, and hit on waitresses,” she explained.

Frankie reflects on her and Gigi looking so out of place with their cute gap teeth and Jay Jay’s Fedoras. “They would only acknowledge us by commenting on how much we had grown or teaching us how to shake hands like a real man”. To be fair, Frankie does have one of the most respectable handshakes I’ve come across. 

As I grew older, Dad began to respect my independence, and empower me with the freedom to dictate the terms of our relationship. I’m grateful that I even have a Dad, especially one who could stand to hang out with two tween-age girls. They suck. I have learnt that family is a constant negotiation. When you are young maybe you expect too much of your parents. Maybe watching Dennis Quaid in The Parent Trap has given me a warped perception of what the perfect Dad is supposed to be like. These childhood experiences have actually hardened me against the world and made me eternally grateful for the freedoms afforded to me at my Mum’s house like being able to say ‘shut up’ if I was singing it in a song and eating an entire packet of animal biscuits on Sunday after we hit the supermarket.