P LEASE, PLEASE don ’ t sign t h e m ! 0 Daddy, don’t sign those papers!” My pleadings must have added greatly to my father’s burden, but the pen held firmly in his hand continued to write his name on the final papers. Thus was my world destroyed and I with it, for on that day something died in the heart of a child. A child? In years, yes, but the child pleading in the divorce court that day would never again be a carefree little girl. From now on my mommy and daddy were divorced. It was a big word and a hateful one. What it meant to grownups I did not know, but what it meant to me is a story that can never be told. Right now it meant that the home we had known existed no longer. To us children our home was our world, with both Mother and Daddy essential parts o f it. But that world had suddenly crumbled. Like a storm that strikes suddenly and leaves you to pick up the pieces, so life had sud denly turned our home inside out and upside down. Much o f the shock lay in the fact that the ones destroying it were the two who had been our very security and life. From now on the family must be divided I was told to choose between my mother and father—I could not have both, though I loved both and wanted them, both of them, to love me. Each was so necessary to me; how could I turn my back on one and say I wanted the other more? I remembered nights when I was sick and how my mother kept vigil — how she had fed me and
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THE KING'S BUSINESS
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