Broken Home

This is a very short story, which depicts a narrator's thoughts on a broken home, and specifially, her broken home.

A broken home is typically defined as a home in which one or both parents are absent due to divorce or separation. However, the term broken home is often used and defined as a home in which the family is set apart due to tensions or certain problems. I much rather prefer to look at the term broken home in the second definition, because it covers not only physical separation, but essentially the emotional separation and disturbance within a family. 

They say that home isn’t a place, it’s a person. And although many people use this clichéd idea to refer to their significant other, the truth is most people identify ‘home’ with their family; the feeling of home when you smell your mom’s freshly baked cookies; or when you smell your sister’s perfume, or you hear your father’s booming laughter. Unfortunately, I can’t say the same for myself. Coming from a broken home, as they call it, the essential sentiment of feeling at home does not get triggered by my family. When I smell my mom’s freshly baked cookies I think of the times I would come home to a happy mom; when I smell my sister’s perfume I remember a time when we were happy and little and had no need for such things; when I hear my father’s booming laughter I think of the times where I heard its echo in our house. 

But I most definitely don’t think of home, I don’t feel ‘at home’. 

And this was, in fact, because of the divorce, but it was more than that. The emotional separation in my family is what made me come from a broken home, and not just the fact that my parents had a divorce. It’s what comes after that matters. It’s what comes after that hurts. Typically, people will assume the time of the separation is the hardest: the shock of your whole world turning upside down as you’ve known it. But in truth, it’s probably even the easiest part of the whole process. Because afterwards there’s the anger, regret, disgust, fury, sadness, desperation, self-deprecation, depression; and it all comes raining down on the only one’s always there to receive it: the kids. Does it seem right to you, that a 5-year-old child would willingly refuse to see her dad for a year? Does it seem right to you, that the mother would condone such refusal? 

A broken home isn’t just a home whose parents have separated, it is inherently a home whose separation is entrenched so deeply on an emotional level, to the point that you don’t even know how to connect the dots of your own family. 

A broken home doesn’t make broken people, but it breaks the feeling of home that used to belong to those people. 

Author's Note

This is the first thing I'm sharing, and it's a very recent piece I've come up with, and I would really appreciate any criticism or thoughts on this! :)

Reviews

[Sachchit Sharma]

Quite sentimental and thought provoking.