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[Teach]

My greatest regret is something I had no control over: my parents’ divorce. I was 13-years-old at the time and living in a Boston apartment when my parents divorced.

Moreover, I didn’t know it at the time - I was then becoming a teen-ager - but my father was a “skirt-chaser.” His women-chasing habits bordered on the insane. An obsession. My father hid his “affairs” very well. He would often call my mother to tell her he’d be late; he’d say he had an important meeting. Sometimes, he’d come home well after midnight. It wouldn’t have taken a rocket scientist to figure out that my father was an adulterer.

Further, what's sad about all this is that my mother was an attractive women. I would see guys in our neighborhood “eyeing” her, especially when they learned she was a divorcee.

When my mother died in 2007, I asked my uncle, my mother’s younger brother, to tell me about my mother when she was a young women (she was born in 1919). My uncle would reply, “Walter, your mother could have had anyone in the city of Syracuse (New York).” He then repeated the word: “anyone.” Yet, she married my father and relied heavily on him for just about everything, including money. After they divorced, she “fell apart.” She became depressed. She was, for a period of time, institutionalized. After the divorce, she was never right. Never the same. She could be delusional. The divorce along with my mother’s state of mind caused my younger brother to attempt suicide. I remember being at the hospital shortly after the doctors “stomach-pumped” him. Thankfully, he survived. Yet we were both emotionally scarred by our parents’ divorce. Both my brother and I became extremely shy. For the most part, we were “loners.” In addition, I felt inadequate. I felt that the half-glass of water was half-empty instead of half-full.

Although I’m better (I received counseling) than I was when I was younger, I still, to this day, can be quite negative when it comes to life’s events and outcomes. Finally, the divorce hurt my relationship with women. There were, before I got married, women whom I liked very much; yet I could never bring myself to say to any of them, “I love you.” That hurt me deeply. I could be so shy. So inhibited.

In fact, in closing, whenever I did say something I’d often end up putting my foot in my mouth. There was time that my date and I went to a movie and then visited with her parents. I recall my date’s mother asking me, “What if Barbara (their daughter) got fat?” I blurted out, “I’d kill her!” That’s not what I truly felt or wanted to say. I loved Barbara. I enjoyed her company, yet I all but ended our relationship with my unthinking, "shoot-from-the hip" comment.

In retrospect, my parents’ divorce “destroyed” my mother and put my brother and me “behind the 8-ball.” To this day, over 65-years later, my brother and I should feel good about ourselves, he became a statistician, I became a teacher. Yet, instead, sadly, we are, to this day, both lacking in self-confidence.