Backstory

Before I can actually tell you the story that made so many of my friends question life and love, we have to take a little journey into the past.

I was never a popular girl in school. I was the quiet one, sitting in the back of the class, who knew every answer but was always too shy to answer teachers’ questions. I was Abigail Rings, the quite, smart girl who no one really knew anything about.

I had one best friend and quite a complicated life. My mother and father are divorced and my mother had remarried. So my new family had a mother, a stepfather, my sister Lizzie and my two half-siblings, Emily and Justin.

As if it couldn’t get more messy, my father lived in Cincinnati, a four hour drive from my home in Akron, Ohio. Lizzie and I went to visit him every other weekend. It was our haven. We could do whatever we wanted, we could eat whatever we wanted. There were no rules and our father would do anything to make us happy. We had him wrapped around our little fingers.

Life is always pretty simple when you are between the age of one and twelve. You don’t really have to worry about anything except spelling tests and if your friends could come play Barbies with you.

You are blissfully ignorant of the realties of the world. Nothing can hurt you. Well, almost nothing.

Divorces are tricky you see. They cause a lot of emotional trauma, trauma that you don’t even see until years later. So as I was happily sitting on the floor of my closet surrounded by stuffed animals and playing house with them, parts of my heart and spirit were being pummeled as I listened to my mother fight with my father over the phone. I didn’t know it yet, but the emotional turmoil that I unknowingly experienced as part of my parent’s divorce would cause lots of holes that needed to be fixed.

My mother worked as hard as she could to make life as normal as possible for Lizzie and I despite the pain and confusion surrounding us. She did the best she could with what she had to offer. She loved us unconditionally even when we told her how much we disliked living with her. She still welcomed us back into her arms every time, even though she knew that we would rather be with our father.

He constant love and devotion made my sister and I relatively normal and happy children despite our circumstances. I even remember how worried she became when I began to wake up in the morning screaming for her. I think this was the first indication that I had developed extreme separation anxiety as a result of the divorce. It got so bad that she even decided to take me to a child psychologist.

I hated it. Every second of it. Which was probably why the therapy didn’t work. I didn’t want it to work. I rejected every suggestion. I think in the back of my mind I was just convinced that it was never going to get better. That the fights between my parents and how mean I thought my stepdad was to me was just going to be the reality in which I lived.

I stopped going because we hit a wall when the therapist diagnosed me as depressed and my dad threw a fit when she said that she wanted to put me on anti-depressants. So, no more therapy.

But all things considering, I had a fairly normal childhood. I had a best friend in my next door neighbor and we would spend all summer playing. We pretended to play school, we did plays, we rode our bikes and had adventures. It was in no way idyllic, but it was exactly the childhood I needed to grow up without giant scars that would pain me later in life. 

It didn’t get better from there necessarily, we moved out of that house and away from my first friend and we started a new life in Richfield. I was still in the same school district but it was a big change nonetheless. Little did I know that moving into that house would mark a very big turning point in a young girl’s life.