Corley [kor-li] - proper noun

or, events and such that define my being - 5-10

(I would like to be able to tell you why my father is such an amazing person, like the entry I wrote about my mom. However, my father has a fairly high profile job, and I'm fairly searchable. I don't know that he wants his co-workers to know ALL about his past.)

I don't remember exactly how old I was, but I very clearly remember the night that my father told me and my little sister that he and my mom were separating. I remember telling him that I knew that it meant they would be divorced, and he told me that it wasn't that at all. It turned out to be the case. Sara was about three, she had no idea what was going on. I remember being extremely angry with her in the following months because she would cry at night. I knew that she didn't understand why she was crying, really. She had separation anxiety and she really did miss my dad, but she didn't understand what was going on.

The divorce was final right around February of the next year, I think. I remember thinking it was that much more sad, being close to Valentine's Day. In the end it was the best for everyone.

My parents didn't fight when they were married - they're actually still very good friends - but had they been forced to parent in the same house once I became an adolescent things would have been much different, and they would have fought quite a bit. Looking back I can say that I believe that my father's depression was the biggest contributing factor to their divorce. His sister Becky was diagnosed with cancer and subsequently died, his mother had died of cancer a couple of years before that, and earlier in his life he lost his sister Sally and his father. My dad had dealt with grief much differently with his father's death as a kid, and Sally's as a young adult. He couldn't use the same methods to cope. The way I see it is that he just had so much to work through that he couldn't work on a marriage. Sometimes love is not enough. I know that they continued to love one another; my father cried when he found out my mom was going to re-marry.

Because of the divorce I had two wonderful experiences:

:::Time with Poppy::My grandfather, Poppy, came over every Thursday night to babysit. He'd arrive with a brown paper bag with four frozen treats in it - one each for me and my sister to enjoy that night, and one for later in the week. We'd watch TV, play games - once we put sponge rollers in his hair, only to have mom come home early. She says that he looked like Clem Kadiddlehopper when they all came out. When he put us to bed he'd sing us songs from hit parade. I was the only 8 year old singing Perry Como's "Prisoner of Love."

:::Horses::: My dad set me up with riding lessons with a girl he worked with. We'd go on Wednesday nights, a.k.a Dad nights, and I'd sit atop 'Nomad,' an old flea-bitten grey Arabian, and try to keep my heels down. Claire, his owner, gave me my first horse book and gave me the horse bug that's been draining my bank accounts ever since.