Divorce is one of those things that I don't think gets the importance it should in discussions of mental health. Maybe because it's so common that people just accept it as an 'unfortunate event' without paying much attention to the repercussions it can have on the physical, emotional and mental health of those concerned.
But those who have either experienced divorce themselves or who have divorced parents know what a traumatic experience it can be. As with all traumatic events, the residue stays with you long after the event has passed. For me, issues such as loneliness and feelings of abandonment stemmed off the back of my parents' divorce.
The experiences and events I talk about in this chapter, particularly with regard to my dad's other family, are those between the ages of nine, when I first met them, to around twenty-one. After that, I didn't have much contact with them since my dad's relationship with my stepmother took a different turn.
Recently, though, I have reconnected with my half-sisters, as we are all older now and have lives of our own. I'll start by walking you through how I remember the divorce unfolding, how it affected me and the issues I faced off the back of it.
I have lots of memories of the time that my parents were together. As a child, I was very fortunate I got to travel the world with them and experience many things. My dad was not always around, though, because he was in India or elsewhere working (or doing other things I found out about later!), and I remember the excitement I always felt when he came into town. We lived in a huge house and for the majority of the time it was just my mom, my grandmother (dad's mom) and myself, and at times the house could feel quite empty. But when my dad was there, the whole house would come alive and had a kind of energy it didn't otherwise have.
We also had a second home near Southampton on the south coast of England, and my mom, my dad, me and a bunch of my parents' friends would go there on weekend trips. I loved it because we were all together. Then I remember going on a couple of trips where it was just my dad and me.
One of those was to South Africa, which was a great place to go as a kid. Being in the African bush, going on safari and seeing all the amazing animals in the wild were experiences that I absolutely loved. At the time, I didn't really question why my mom wasn't there, and I guess I saw those trips as father-son holidays. Either that or I was so caught up in the excitement that it probably didn't even register to me that she was absent! It certainly wouldn't have crossed my mind that perhaps the reason my mom wasn't there was because there might have been issues between the two of them.
The next distinct thing I remember was my dad showing me photographs of two little girls. One was a toddler named Leana and the other was a new-born named Tanya. He told me these two girls were my sisters. I don't think I fully comprehended what that meant at the time. After all, I was eight years old, so what is one really meant to think or say?
(Excerpted with permission from 'If I'm Honest: A memoir of my mental health journey' by Sidhartha Mallya, published by Westland)