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Kindred Gracethe day my father left 
by Guest Author on November 6, 2013  
by an anonymous author
He left on a snowy morning in mid-February. I had never before seen my father cry, but the day he left my mother and moved out of the house, red-rimmed were those blue eyes he had passed on to me.
I was seventeen when the perfect world I thought I lived in shattered around me. Like a neighbor boy’s baseball puncturing the glass pane of a living room window, the truth of what was happening to my parents’ marriage, to our family, caused a crash that has never fully repaired.
Through the whirl of the next few weeks, my father’s overnight bag was packed and unpacked as he flip-flopped between our house and wherever he stayed when he wasn’t there. My heart turned ragged when I caught my mother sobbing, when I had to change my college application papers multiple times to reflect my parents’ separation—unsteady marriage—separation, when I looked at my little brothers’ stony faces and couldn’t offer comfort.
Those were easily the worst months of my life—a nightmare come true. What I thought had been one of the truths I could count on—that my parents had decided divorce was not an option long before—lay laughing at my feet. I felt mocked, betrayed, deceived, and hurt. Only my mother’s faith in Jesus anchored me.
I missed my father when he was gone, but when he was staying with us, I would look at him and wonder if he would be there in the morning. It seemed each time I would stop wondering, he would be gone again.
Even years later, sometimes I still panic when I come home and his car isn’t in the driveway. He’s left again.
Before that February, I was that girl. That girl everyone could count on to teach Sunday school, to graduate homeschool with an honor cord around her neck, to go to college on a full scholarship. When my father left, I felt as if that girl was a lie.
Didn’t the horror of what my father had done cancel out the good Christian girl image? Didn’t the brokenness of my family forever decree that I too was broken?
Didn’t the betrayal my mother suffered mean I to