FOR OUR PART, my sister and I did not handle our parents’ divorce or eventual remarriage to other people with any modicum of grace. Spoiled and angry, we put up a fight at every curve. My sister, always resistant to change and obsessed with the opinion of her friends, spent middle school going to great pains to obscure the fact that my parents divorced at all. She did not even tell her friends my father was getting remarried until a few days before the actual ceremony. I reacted quietly, indirectly, smoking cigarettes and shoplifting, rebelling in all of the stereotypically teenaged ways. In 10th grade, I wrote a short story so devastating and unhinged in its depiction of my feelings about my family that my English teacher insisted we have a private meeting to discuss it. In the story I appeared injured, bursting with despair: I wrote about storming out of the bridesmaid dress fitting, about missing my mother but not knowing how to tell her. My teacher made wrinkles appear in her forehead and touched my hand for a long time.

With Catholic inhibition and emotional frigidity sewn deep, my father performed the logistics of remarriage slowly and sneakily. The evidence of my stepmother’s impending presence in our household began to surface in small ways. One day—suddenly—her silverware appeared in our kitchen drawers. Knickknacks that smelled of potpourri and proudly declared, “Home is where the heart is!” showed up on the walls next to paintings my mother had hung. I did not want to leave my room, for fear I’d trip over a new living room rug, or come face-to-face with a Victorian piece of embroidery boasting, “Welcome to our home.”

My sister and I made those first few months after our father’s remarriage miserable for everyone, lavishing in the monetary bribes my stepmother offered while refusing to treat her like a member of our family. We did not let her accompany my father to school events because we were ashamed; on a vacation to Europe financed by her ever-generous family, I smashed a bottle of wine on the hotel room floor and told her that I hated her. Many nights, I stole the car so that I could cry by myself on dark stretches of thick-wooded roads. My father threw himself into work; my mother kept refusing to call. We loved them but we were too damaged to say it. I did not invite my mother to my graduation party; my sister would never let her friends see the inside of my mother’s apartment. We hurt our parents out of spite, because we thought they deserved it. We hurt them because we were lost and scared. Crying into our fists at the wedding seemed like the only thing we could do.

My sister and I were too entitled by the safety of our upbringing prior to the divorce to understand sacrifice, to just shut up and go to sleep in the place that hurt our parents the least. The struggle, it seemed, was that we were always hurting at least one of them, whether we meant to or not. It is a very powerful thing to realize at 13 that you have the ability to hurt your parents, that your actions impact them just as much as theirs do you. Because of this, we recognized our parents as actual human beings far earlier than most kids do: humans who cry and ache and act out of spite, humans who err. We loved them as people, not as parents. I don’t know if that made things better or worse.

What all of the counting and keeping track taught us was that love bears an arresting resemblance to need, and that both could be measured in mathematical terms, in numbers with sums that add up to a finite amount of affection. If someone had asked us which parent we preferred at that time, we would have laughed and brushed the question off just like any other kid, but in the back of our heads was the nagging knowledge that our parents could have answered that question easily, with confidence. The results changed from week to week, but the answer to “Which parent do you love more?” was always the one who had amassed more time-jewels, the one whose house we’d slept at the most.

Now that we are adults it is not unusual to recognize that our parents needed us then, but as kids the notion tasted strange in our mouths, like a spice from a far off country. It felt perfectly natural for us to need them—we were far too young to take care of ourselves—but every time they expressed their need for us, an expression amplified by the subtle competition that brewed between them, we were taken aback. What value could we provide them, with our loud music and selfish demands and angst-ridden door slamming?

The value, of course, was love and connection, two things we took for granted but our parents desperately sought in our every word. They needed to hear “I love you” just as frequently as we did. But we were careful with our phrases and our gestures, their divorce a thorn in our side that we believed authorized us to behave poorly and without regret. We leveraged the guilt they suffered and used it to our advantage: it felt like, after all we had been through, we deserved that little victory. It took us far too long to realize that the divorce wasn’t our punishment, but actually theirs. We had not lost anything, just watched helplessly as it divided in half. For them, it had all been subtraction.

It has been eight years since the divorce, and we are still learning to love each other in immeasurable ways. As we grow older, it feels much less strange to acknowledge and love our parents as people. My mother no longer keeps tally of the phone calls I make to her. I tell my parents I love them every time we speak. This June, my stepmother had a child with my father, a dough-cheeked baby girl named Madelyn who screeches happily when she hears my voice on the phone. When she is old enough to speak, she will call my mother “Aunt Michele.”

I went back to Pennsylvania a few months ago and my whole family—parents, stepparents and sisters—had dinner together, Chinese food eaten buffet style at the dining room table. Madelyn cooed with equal contentment in everyone’s arms. The things we had done to each other during that hurtful time seemed so inconsequential compared to her gooey baby smile. It has taken years, but the awkwardness and resentment have dissipated, and in their place exists the simple desire to relish in each other’s company. Our family has added and subtracted, divided and multiplied, but it’s no matter—we’re not keeping score any longer.

Portions of this piece originally appeared on the author’s blog.