choosing

Since I've been throwing out pebbles related to the pieces of my life I've been working on/thinking about, (although maybe in an overly academic way) I might as well say something about divorce...
I have this picture of life like jumping around on rocks in a creek. When parents can't live together, they leave the kid with two big rocks that are uncomfortably far apart. The kid can either choose one of them to use as a base and build from that, or not choose. In that case, you are stuck with a large world with no center. I didn't choose, and so I've been trying to become a broad enough person that stability extends from one rock to the other. And when I fall I just have to trust that there will be a rock somewhere to land on. Its not that finding a path from one parent to the other, or one part of myself to the other is really so hard. The thing is that because the parents decide that they can't live together, this sets up a model that certain things are incompatible. Even with a marriage where the two people are very different, the kids see an example of those differences coexisting.
I'm not into judging and saying that I (and other such non-choosing kids of divorce) have it so hard. Its more just that I have it different in particular sometimes hard to articulate ways. I say this because I've found it hard to talk about this with my parents without them feeling attacked. Its really like saying that there is a part of my experience that has not been understood. I find this experience interesting. But one needs to be able to take the good with the bad in order to see the whole. And its probably a hard thing as a parent to take things in such an objective way.