MY PARENTS DIVORCED when I was 13 years old, which is arguably the worst possible time in a kid’s life for parents to get divorced. An awkward, depression-prone teen, my increasing angst was constantly engaged in the struggle for an outlet, and I had more friends on the Dave Matthews Band message boards I frequented than I did in real life.

But one of the things you learn when you are a teen and your parents tell you that they want to end their lives together is that, contrary to what the TV and the radio and Tiger Beat tell you, the world does not actually revolve around you. Beside the credenza on the cheap embroidered couch, my parents told my sister and me that they were separating, and instantly the focal point of our intimate family life shifted. Immediately our lives had very little to do with the small victories of childhood—the straight-A report cards and soccer games and birthday parties—and everything to do with the fact that my parents did not love each other anymore.

This is an earth-shattering realization to have at 13, when every single event in your tiny universe is divided into two opposite camps: everything is either the best thing ever or the worst thing ever. How simple and black and white life is at 13! How simple it was to forget and resent that the pottery project I made in art class was meaningless next to the reconstruction of a solid family unit. Celebrating these things felt like worrying about what to wear to a funeral. The details and minor accomplishments and joys of childhood were continually eclipsed by the larger picture—mainly, that our small, quiet, suburban life would never be the same again.

In college I would become maniacally selfish, perhaps in an attempt to make up for those years when the dissolution of my parents’ marriage wavered on the court docket. But in 2001, my teen years ceased to be about Britney Spears and MTV. Instead, life became about things like what to make for my little sister for dinner, because my father, wholly obsessed with his job, was running late again.

I always made spaghetti. I was 13 and didn’t know how to cook anything else.

IN THE LIVING room, when my parents told us it was over, I did not say a word. My sister—who was nine, sparked like a firecracker and proudly wore her heart for all to see—shot straight up on stick legs, locked her hands on her hips and demanded after letting out a wail, “BUT WHAT WILL MY FRIENDS THINK?” I did not even cry, just observed stoically and then ran up to my room to record the event in my private Livejournal. I had the feeling even then that the detailed recollections of that night would be valuable to me some day. But analysis, the attempt to wrap this messy time in our lives into a coherent narrative, is possible only in retrospect. “They finally did it,” reads my diary entry from that night. “My family has completely fallen apart.”

Looking back, I don’t know how my parents kept it together for almost 15 years. My mother was 24 when she had me, and my father’s passion for teaching often demanded the attention my mother wished he’d give to us. When I was a toddler, my father used to wake me up at dawn before leaving for work. We’d take quiet walks around our city neighborhood, the sound of chattering birds and garbage trucks scoring our steps. I was young, but I have a distinct memory of these sunrise strolls, because it is one of the only times I can recall when the child/parent dynamic between us was so pure, unencumbered by the demands divorce would eventually thrust upon it. I did not have to worry about parental duties like making dinner and tending to my sister, activities I’d inevitably shoulder come the division of our household. In those bright, brief mornings before my family split, I was just a kid and my dad was just an adult: our relationship was so easy, so clearly defined. Though we would strive to return to that comfortable place, our rapport would never be quite that uncomplicated again.

What I remember most about the beginning of my parents’ separate lives is how important time suddenly became. They did not have a scorebook but one would have served them well, as every second spent with one parent was obsessively documented by the other. My parents collected these moments like precious jewels, hoarding them, unleashing the wrath of their unfair distribution on my sister and me only when the time was right. My mother stopped calling us, claiming she didn’t want to “intrude,” but even at that tender age we recognized her actions as a passive-aggressive grab for attention.

My father got the house, and with it by default came my sister and me, because the house was close to school, to our friends, and included the bedrooms we’d proudly decorated with posters and IKEA furniture. For our family, there was no court battle, no batch of subpoenas–custody was settled behind closed doors, and since my Dad worked in our school district, it just made sense for him to keep living there. My mother moved to an apartment in a part of Philadelphia 20 minutes from our school district, and on nights when we came home grumpy and exhausted by math tests and field hockey practice and play rehearsal, we simply didn’t want to make the trip to my mother’s apartment, where we did not have rooms of our own but instead slept on the lumpy living room couch.

We didn’t realize it until much later, but the fact is that my mother kept careful track of every night we canceled on her, of every plan we made with our father that did not offer a counterpart with room for her. Our parents were playing a game that we were not, one where seconds were precious and every moment spent with the other parent was a narrow betrayal. As these betrayals built and collected and grew into the fractures that threatened our relationship during my teen years, I remained essentially clueless. I just wanted to know which parent would drive me to the mall. I was young and I had all the time in the world, and I wanted to spend most of it away from my father, who did not like my attitude or my red-lipsticked friends, and away from my mother, who siphoned cruelty from small gestures, whose own hurt over the divorce manifested itself in clinging desperately to one of my arms while my father yanked stoically on the other.