In Spite of Everything Read online

  It is a well-worn axiom that if you want to learn what is unhealed from your own childhood, have children. In psychological terms, this is known as a “narcissistic injury” or “narcissistic wound.” Parents have always had specific nightmares that plague them in peculiar ways. For some, it is the unquenchable fear that their child may be picked on by stronger or meaner kids; others are terrorized by drowning scenarios; still others imagine the horrors of sexual exploitation. All such nightmares, many psychologists would argue, are rooted in the parents’ own childhood fears. For Generation X, I think, it is the dread of abandonment that keeps us up at night—dread stemming from having been utterly alone ourselves as kids. It makes sense, then, that to allow our own marriages to end in divorce is to live out our worst possible childhood fear, but, more horrifying, it is to inflict the unthinkable on those we love and want to protect most: our children. We would be slashing open our own wounds and then turning the knife on our babies. To think of it is impossible.

  Nobody puts it quite like Alice Miller, the renowned psychologist who—in her seminal text on the subject, The Drama of the Gifted Child—describes those of us who sustained such childhood wounds: “They are driven by unconscious memories and by repressed feelings and needs that determine nearly everything they do or fail to do.”* When we become adults, marriage, with children, becomes the center of our universe. It is the world. Market research has shown that we won’t ask our own mothers for child-rearing advice because we feel they failed as mothers, and we’ve decided we’re going to walk the polar opposite line. Having grown up without a stable home, we pour everything we have into giving our children the homiest possible home, no matter how many sacrifices that means along the way. Our lives center around our own kids’ childhoods, around saving them from the smallest pain. Survey says: Despite our hardened exteriors, our crunchy crust, Gen-X moms are all completely, utterly attached to our children. We would rather err on the side of being too close, too involved, too loving than repeat our own parents’ sin of neglect. Scan any Gen-X mommy blog, and you’ll find them all variations on a theme: the cool, maverick mama with the giant, attachment-parenting heart. A photo of Mom’s arm tattooed graffiti-style with her kids’ names. The combat boots and the nursing bra. The adorable baby girl in her Clash onesie. You get the idea.

  A lot of this is a result of the parenting style with which so many of us were raised: “benign neglect.” It is a recognizable outcropping of the “good-enough mother” ideal proposed by the great child psychologist D. W. Winnicott, in which the imperfectly conscientious mother does a better job than the “perfect” one by allowing her child to develop as an independent being rather than smothering him with attention. If you are an X parent, you have likely heard your Boomer parents’ thoughts on the subject. The salient points are “When we were kids, our mothers just told us to be home by dinnertime” and “We would just hop on our bikes and roam the neighborhood” or “play stickball in the street”—and how sad it is that “kids today just don’t get that kind of freedom” because it is “so important to their development.”*

  But what Boomers often omit from these object lessons is that in the 1950s and ’60s, their mothers were at home to tell them to get on their bikes, and the reason they had to be at home by dinnertime is that their fathers would be expecting the whole family to sit down together. As Dr. Spock had advised that generation of parents, there were clear house rules, no spanking, attentiveness to the children. By contrast, for most of us who grew up in the 1970s and ’80s, life at home revolved around a pattern of benign neglect that looked something like this: We watched Saturday morning cartoons and Brady Bunch reruns while playing with Star Wars and Transformers action figures or Strawberry Shortcake and My Pretty Pony dolls. Our parents got divorced, and when our moms went to work, they gave us the house keys so that we could let ourselves in after school. We helped ourselves to something in the orange category of snack, like Cheetos and Doritos, or in the white—Top Ramen noodles, Pringles, Fluffernutter sandwiches—while we watched ABC After-School Specials like My Dad Lives in a Downtown Hotel and The Boy Who Drank Too Much. When Mom came home, she was too tired to cook, so it was either TV dinners at home or stuffed potato skins at Houlihan’s. We saw our dads every other weekend, and after they bought us more Star Wars stuff, sometimes they’d take us to their single-guy apartments, which looked like the last day of a Macy’s clearance sale. Lunch? Bennigan’s.

  Where was the “benign” part in this “benign neglect”? Friends and I often joke that whereas Baby Boomers’ mothers actually did practice Winnicott’s counsel, our own mothers just went for “neglect neglect.” To this, our mothers often bring up feminism and all the important ways in which the women’s movement made it possible for their daughters to go to college and launch real careers. No one would wish to minimize this effort. After all, most of us who have had a higher education and a career to go with it—whether Boomer or Xer—can affirm that we would not wish the repressive delirium of the Feminine Mystique or Yellow Wallpaper on any woman. Neither would we want to yoke men with the albatross of disaffected breadwinner. Yet what the X mother cannot shake is this: In the realm of the child, whose worst fear is to be alone and unprotected, such feminist affirmations mean nothing. If children are alone and unprotected, they are damaged—period.

  In other words, for “benign neglect” to function as a parenting style, there must be the presumption of “benign” for children to reap the developmental benefits of “neglect”—and “benign” amounts to the security of knowing that they are not really on their own, having to fend for themselves. This is why, according to many child development experts, alone and unprotected is the chief condition of fairy-tale protagonists—and why they must find parental surrogates to prevail. Where, after all, would Cinderella be without her fairy godmother? What would have become of Snow White without her gnomish octogenarians? X mothers know that Cinderella would likely have been recast as Courtney Love, whimpering to a succession of palace houseboys: Go on, take everything, take everything, I want you to! Snow White might have been recast in the sweet, pretty form of Kurt Cobain, lost in the forest: All alone is all we are, all alone is all we are.

  Call us helicopter parents, call us neurotically attached, but we are not going to inflict such wounds on our children. And for me, the fundamental premise of wound avoidance was simple: No divorce.

  Yet, as Sophocles has reminded us for more than two thousand years, one can design one’s life around preventing the very scenario that eventually unfolds via one’s own hand in spite of everything. Looking back on it, it seems obvious now that just about everything I ever did in my life was either a response to my own parents’ divorce or a preemptive move geared to stave off my own. I became involved in “relationships” at a preternaturally early age in an effort to supply fatherly attention and protection with boyfriends; I drank and drugged to fend off the nagging, existential terror of solipsism; I worked like an animal to attract surrogate parental attention, as well as to try to caulk up the hole in my gut; I married the kindest, most stable person I’d ever known to secure kindness and stability in my own empty but turbulent universe—and to ensure that our children would never know anything of that void; I nursed, loved, read to, and lolled about with my babies—completely restructured and reimagined my career—so that they would be secure, happy, attended to; my husband and I made the happiest, comfiest nest possible; we worked as a team; we loved our kids; we did everything right, better than right. And yet divorce came. In spite of everything. In spite of my not having seen it bearing down on me, us, from light-years away. Oedipus didn’t know that the stranger he had killed in the road years before was his father until he had already been long and happily married to the woman who turned out to be his mother. In spite of everything.

  This is an account of a sharp turn in life I never expected to take. I found myself wrestling with the very decisions that I never thought I would think of making but that I found mysel
f having to make, with the nearly superhuman attempt to keep life as gentle and undisrupted as possible for our children—essentially, the effort to reverse-engineer childhood karma. My story is a meditation on our generation and the fallout from our parents’ divorces, looking at what those divorces did to us, why it now feels to us that shielding our kids from any kind of pain is a life-or-death proposition, what happens when real pain happens anyway—and what it is like to inhabit an entirely new world.

  Before the events of the past five years, I could never even have contemplated some of the questions I’ve been forced to confront. Namely, is it possible to survive the explosive upending of divorce without inflicting permanent wounds on our own children? Is it possible, by surviving it as adults, that our own injuries might actually begin to heal? All alone is all we are, whimpered our sweet, lost, sad, fallen hero. Our fear is that “alone” is the central truth that lies at the heart of the universe, and that if we cannot provide them with an unimpeachably happy childhood, our children will be forced to stare into that void by themselves, too.

  But what if that isn’t true? What if there is more than this? What if the only truly perfect gem that we can really keep and share with our children is that none of us is alone—that they can remain loved and secure, in spite of everything?

  * William Strauss and Neil Howe, Generations: The History of America’s Future, 1584 to 2069 (New York: Morrow, 1991), p. 324.

  * The Drama of the Gifted Child: The Search for the True Self (New York: Basic Books, 1997), p. 2.

  * In my experience, such reminiscences always seem tacked with punctuation marks subtly denoting superiority, allowing plenty of white space for the implied conclusion: “And maybe that’s why we’ve occupied the lead roles on the national stage since we hit puberty.”

  ONE

  LOUDER THAN BOMBS:

  CHILDHOOD

  When I was about four, my parents decided to make several home improvements. Back then, it seemed that every Berkeley family we knew had a deck on which the grown-ups—the mothers in their seventies wrap dresses and the dads in their weekend jeans—would sit drinking sangria and discussing Nixon, Bob Dylan, and public education while the kids mucked around in the playroom or tiny backyard in their school-made tie-dyes and Sears Toughskins. My mother had particular ideas about adding our own deck and playroom, ideas that involved French doors, window seats with giant storage drawers, and textured linoleum flooring. Although she was an academic—at the time, in graduate school at U.C. Berkeley, furiously at work on her dissertation—my mother nonetheless loved to work with professionals to help her make the right decisions about interior design and clothes.

  My dad, for his part, had definite ideas about the second-floor room that was to be added: my room. Or, rather, he had one definite idea. My room had to have a skylight, and my bed was to be positioned directly beneath it. “Suze, as the official Little Dipper and Pleiades finder, you need the right tools,” said my dad, who had conferred on me a special status for my knack for spotting these constellations in the night sky. “Furthermore, you may find, as I do, old pal, that you do your best star contemplation alone.”

  I remember two things vividly from that time. The first is that on the opening day of the renovation job, the construction guys left the French doors open while they were digging up the backyard to build the deck. I forgot that the ground outside was gone and walked right out into the pit, gashing open the bottom of my jaw on rocky debris. I had to go to the emergency room for stitches, and the remaining nettlefish-like scars still undergird the dimple on my chin. My mother was distraught and flailing, cracking her knuckles antsily and spraying me with Bactine. My dad, an ice climber by avocation, was a little more laid-back. He crouched down and took a look at the jagged green threads knitting my skin together. “You’re tough as nails, Suze-o,” he grinned.

  The second thing I remember is lying in bed beneath the skylight. It was long and rectangular, and I would align my body with it at bedtime. My mother usually came in first, to read me poetry, often “The Highwayman” by Alfred Noyes. She would lean over my bed, throatily whispering, eyes wide with menace. After my mother had read this or another poem selected for stimulating a sense of cadence, Dad would come in. We would look up at the night sky and think. It occurs to me now that I never thought about what he was thinking; I guess I was too little to think that we were separate. What I thought was: Here are the stars; they are beautiful and strange; Dad is with me.

  There is also something that I do not remember, but that I remember my parents worrying about at the time: As a young child, I was a chronic sleepwalker. I would not just roam into my parents’ room or into the kitchen but actually walk out of the house and down the street to our family friends’ house, ring the doorbell until one of the groggy adults answered, toddle into their living room, curl up on a sofa, and go back to sleep. The bewildered parent would call our house, and Dad would come scoop me up and take me back home.

  The conflation of these events has always struck a primal chord in my sense of my own beginnings. Everyone has his own Genesis, the creation myth that allegorizes the idiom of his early childhood. But children, like all orthodox adherents, are literal thinkers, and, like native peoples, provincial ones. The universe originated in their homes and neighborhoods, and all the figures and fixtures therein are singular, monolithic, and mystical. Proust and Piaget said as much. A magnolia tree growing in the front yard, for example, is The Magnolia Tree; its gray polished bark is crinkled in a distinctive elderly-elephant-knee pattern where the first branch forks off from the trunk. A big slide at the playground is The Big Slide, a high diving board at the local pool is The High Dive. Such structures, which seem generic to parents, are the Everests, Denalis, Ulurus, Shiprocks of their children’s aboriginal dreamtime. The children know every crack and contour of them all, have practiced strategies for mastering them, each child emerging as the mythical hero of her own folktale once that mission has been accomplished.

  As a person gets older, however, these things present as personal archetypes, themes. One’s life, it seems, plays out as variations on them.

  Room. Poems. Gash. Sleepwalking. Stars. Ice.

  Dad.

  There is a giant so-called reference book called The Secret Language of Birthdays, which catalogs every day of the year and offers an astrological analysis of people born on that day. Whenever I see it at Barnes & Noble or on someone’s coffee table, I sheepishly crack it open and look up everyone I’ve met since the last time I scoured it to see how it pigeonholes them. One of the neatest, and also one of the most idiotic, things about it is that each day gets its own headline, which is supposed to capture that person’s astrological essence. Of course, they’re often wrong. Mine, for example, is “The Day of the Boss,” which is, as I am sure my younger brother would confirm, not correct. My dad’s, however, is “The Day of Laughter and Tears.” When I read that for the first time, I closed the book.

  I am not someone who invests the portfolio in horoscopes, but I relish the feeling of cosmic symmetry when they seem to be on point, and if there ever was such a thing as a Gemini, that archetype could not have found a more impeccably corporeal landing than in the dual nature of Dugal Thomas. All Gemini’s twin aspects were writ large in my dad: good/evil; contemplative/foolhardy; kinetic/paralyzed; expansive/hermetic; funny/brooding. You never knew which you were going to get. This is, as adult children later learn, one of the textbook characteristics of alcoholics. Knowing this explains a good deal, but in my experience, it doesn’t do much to help significantly on the ground. As a child, even as a comprehending adult, all you are ever certain of is that any encounter will imprint you with either fear or delight. I was one of the lucky ones—at least until I was ten, it was unequivocally of delight.

  Partly, this had to do with my mom. Although she very much wanted a baby, Mom was not, I think, prepared for the reality of having one. She was extremely anxious when I was born. She is this way constitutionally (as
am I), but she also had a number of other very real weights pressing down on her at that time. For one thing, my parents—both New Yorkers—had just moved to California so that my mother could attend Cal’s Ph.D. program in English Renaissance literature. For another, she had married my father only a year and a half before, after dating him for a handful of months—this directly on the heels of a disastrous nine-year marriage to her college boyfriend (note that my mom went to college—Wellesley—at sixteen), an intense and acerbic young man who had graduated at the top of his class from the Groton School, Harvard College, and Harvard Law School and who had competed with, shamed, and degraded her as much as he had idolized her. In my father she saw a charming, light-footed chap who had graduated with a straight-C average from Harvard; who was as much a painter, photographer, and naturalist as he was a patriot, a mountain climber, a guy’s guy. Who also idolized her. He loved that she was tall and leggy, and for my mother—who, to this day, is self-conscious and klutzy and combats chronic back pain because of her height—his flattery was ambrosial. He loved how brilliant she was, and for my mother—who had spent a lifetime trying to impress her exacting parents, and then her ex-husband, with academic achievement—his praise was a lullaby. He loved that she was so lost and needy; she loved that he loved it. Of course he would support her going to graduate school—piece of cake! Of course they should have a baby right away—no time like the present! My dad made everything look so exciting, fun, easy. His trademark lines were: “So, I have an idea,” and “Whatever you want—I’m easy!” Beware of peddlers with magic beans.

  So there they were, three thousand miles from most of their friends and family, starting out on their exciting, fun, easy life. And you can tell from photos of that period that life was exactly like that for them then—certainly, I never witnessed them so goofy and huggy with each other. They looked relaxed and gorgeous, my mother’s black hair, high cheekbones, and model stature glamorizing my dad’s jocky, redheaded boyishness. But when I was born, in November 1968, fun and easy came to a grinding halt.