Supernormal. Мэг Джей

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СКАЧАТЬ that it was for the best: Mostly his parents seemed miserable together. Yet as he tiptoed off to find his mother, Sam had the foreboding feeling that things were about to get worse.

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      One-third of marriages end within the first fifteen years, making divorce the most common adversity children face. An estimated one million children watch their parents split up each year, yet the fact that divorce is widespread does not mean it is without consequences for the child, any more than the fact that an estimated 350,000 babies are born each day makes childbirth any less painful or momentous for the individual. As commonplace as it may seem, divorce has the potential to, as Winnicott said, change the whole world of the child because, usually, parents are the child’s whole world. Divorce shows a child that his world can be torn in two, not just by rare, extreme acts of abuse or terror, but by something as ordinary—and sometimes even as well intentioned—as two parents going their separate ways.

      In 1969, California governor Ronald Reagan signed the first no-fault divorce law in the United States. Prior to no-fault divorce, to be freed from marriage, one spouse had to prove that the other was clearly to blame for the breakdown of the union, with adultery, abuse, desertion, insanity, and lack of intimacy among the most common grounds for dissolution. To many legal scholars and advocates for women’s rights, these conditions made divorce unnecessarily complex and adversarial, and the burden of proof seemed too heavy, especially for wives who may have had less access to money and other resources to support their case. After California, no-fault statutes swept the nation in the 1970s and 1980s as men and women embraced the prospect of being able to liberate themselves from dysfunctional, loveless marriages. By 1985, no-fault divorce was available in forty-nine of our fifty states. Freedom and choice, it seemed, would help partners and parents make healthier decisions and lead more joyful lives, and this appeared to be in the best interest of children as well.

      Without a doubt, sometimes divorce is necessary and in the best interest of all parties—parents and children included. Not every divorce is an adversity. But not every divorce is a “good divorce,” either, and sometimes, even when “it’s for the best”—as Sam said in the doorway that night—there is change and loss. Large national studies report that, after divorce, about 20 to 25 percent of children experience emotional or behavioral difficulties—such as depression, anxiety, aggression, disobedience, or academic problems—compared with about 10 percent of children in intact families. While this means that children of divorce are twice as likely as their peers to have noticeable and even diagnosable troubles, such data also suggest that 75 to 80 percent appear to do just fine. “The kids are all right,” we may be relieved to conclude, but the absence of disorders is not the same thing as the absence of distress. “The key,” says psychologist and divorce-expert Robert Emery, “is to separate pathology from pain.”

      Clinical and empirical research over the past four decades suggests that children of divorce are “resilient but not invulnerable.” From the outside, many seem to adapt gamely, taking on more chores at home, keeping up with their own homework, looking after siblings and themselves, and being go-betweens for their parents; yet they may do so as they live with unspoken struggles that are not revealed for years and even decades after the breakup of their families. Psychologist Judith Wallerstein argues that “divorce is a cumulative experience. Its impact increases over time and rises to a crescendo in adulthood.” This may not be the case for every young adult whose parents have divorced, but many live with painful feelings and memories.

      According to research by Robert Emery and colleagues, compared with those from intact homes, adults from divorced families are three times more likely to feel they had “harder childhoods than most people.” About half agree that their parents’ split relieved tension in the family, while the other half do not, instead feeling that one set of problems was traded for another. Adult children of divorce tend to have more negative feelings, memories, and beliefs about their families, and they are three times more likely to wonder if both of their parents love them. Unable to don the rose-colored glasses they see some others wear, they view life and love through the “filter of divorce.” This sort of filter was what brought Sam to therapy as an adult: “I feel like a piece of Scotch tape that has been stuck and unstuck and now I’m not sticky anymore. I have relationships that look like everyone else’s but there is no naïveté. If your own parent can leave you, then anyone can leave you. Life happens. Things change. Things can start off good and wind up bad. I can’t pretend I don’t know that.”

      Many children seem to take divorce in stride, even though later they may say that their parents’ split was the formative event of their childhoods—the origin story of their lives. Three-quarters of children of divorce say they would be different people today had their families not broken up. They are twice as likely to feel that their childhoods were cut short, and some say they lost the ability to play. Their happiest days, it seems, were before their families fell apart. Their best days, they worry, are behind them.

      ***

      Sylvia Plath’s father passed away when she was nine years old, and she later remembered that time like this: “My father died, we moved inland. Whereupon those nine first years of my life sealed themselves off like a ship in a bottle—beautiful, inaccessible, obsolete, a fine, white flying myth.” Sam’s father was still living, but much as in Sylvia Plath’s case, the nine years they had spent together now suddenly seemed like something in a bottle, maybe not something as fancy or as put-together as a ship, but perhaps something like a few old pennies that clinked around inside. Those old pennies were the happy memories Sam had of his father and maybe even of his life so far, and while he once thought he would keep dropping pennies in that bottle year after year, now it seemed like those few red cents were all he had.

      Sam’s father hailed from Brooklyn—which, in Virginia in the 1970s, was more foreign than it was hip. He was a Yankee, which Sam understood to be bad, but he always had the feeling his father had been exposed to some special things that maybe those around him did not know. This seemed deliciously possible on Saturdays, when they would spend lazy days clicking through his father’s old slides of Coney Island or poring over the stamp collection that once had belonged to his father’s father. Sam loved how important and official the smooth, plastic-covered pages felt under his fingertips, and the crackling sound they made when he turned them. Sam marveled over all the old-fashioned pictures and prices—1c! 3c!—on the stamps, and how the dates went way back.

      Other Saturdays, “the boys” made the short drive to the tidewaters where Sam’s father taught him to ride ocean waves on a red-and-blue canvas float. For the biggest ones, they kicked out and bodysurfed, Sam riding on his father’s back with his arms around his neck. Sam’s father taught him how to dive under the waves that scared him, and to hold his breath until the swell rolled over his back past his ankles. When the tide was low, they hunted for clams by looking for little air bubbles along the wet sand and then digging as deep and as fast as they could. When the tide was high, Sam and his father went crabbing, tying chicken necks on nets and lowering them over the side of a pier. Sam’s job was to hold the string and wait for a nibble; when he felt a tug or two, he hopped foot-to-foot in excitement as his father swooped in and pulled the line up hand-over-hand, quickly closing the net around the unsuspecting crabs.

      Once they had a dozen or more crabs scratching around inside their Styrofoam cooler, father and son triumphantly took them home to boil them alive. Sam’s father dropped the scrambling crabs from the cooler into a tall pot of steaming, bubbling water, and they made a hissing sound when they hit the surface. Sometimes, when a crab managed to jump out of the pot and scamper across the kitchen floor, Sam fled and watched from the hall, shouting while the disoriented crab scurried sideways, this way and that, banging into the cabinets or the refrigerator, free for a few seconds until his father could step on its shell, pick it up by its back two legs, and pitch it again into the pot, this time for good. Sam was the kind of kid who made faces at the thought of hurting animals but he was his father’s favorite and his father was his, so Sam figured, those crabs—with their sharp, jagged claws that once drew СКАЧАТЬ