Supernormal. Мэг Джей

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      Psychologist and renowned family therapist Virginia Satir suggested that “most people prefer the certainty of misery to the misery of uncertainty.” As an adult, Sam did not think he would have preferred for his parents to have remained in a miserable marriage, but the uncertainty that followed had been difficult, too. When parents break up, foundational assumptions about love and family and order and permanence are shattered, and children begin to ask themselves devastating questions about bedrock: Is it my fault? What will happen next? Who will take care of me? If my parents can stop loving each other, can they stop loving me? Where will I live? Who is going to take care of the parent who lives with me? Who is going to take care of the parent who lives alone? Who is going to buy our food? Will my marriage break up one day? As comforting as one or both parents may try to be, reassurances that everything is going to be fine—or even better than before—are not always backed up by reality.

      Children fare well when their newly single moms or dads fare well, too, but sometimes parents and parenting deteriorate after divorce. As difficult as it is for modern families to juggle careers and children, single parents tend to struggle even more. Parents who once shared homes, bills, cooking, bath times, bedtimes, weekends, and sick days feel overloaded as they try to go it alone. Nearly two-thirds of adults live in a community other than where they were raised, which means that reinforcements in the form of Grandma and Grandpa and aunts and uncles may be miles or even an ocean away. Almost half of adults report they have only one person—at most—with whom they discuss important matters, and because this one person is usually a partner or a spouse, divorce leaves parents alone not only with their logistical needs but with their emotional ones as well. As some children become the shoulders for their parents to cry on, they are confronted with grown-up problems they are helpless to solve, such as who will drive the car pool or pay the bills.

      About half of custodial parents receive all the child support they are due, while about one-quarter receive some and one-quarter receive none; support is especially unlikely to be paid if there is not shared custody or regular visitation, or if one parent leaves the state. Yet even when parents both pay their fair share, finances are still likely to become strained. According to bankruptcy expert Senator Elizabeth Warren, in the twenty-first century, when two-income families who pool their money struggle to stay in the middle class, “today’s newly divorced [parent] is already teetering over a financial abyss the day [he or she] signs the divorce papers.” About one-third of single-parent families live in poverty, and because women are seven to eight times more likely to raise children after a divorce, they and their children are especially at risk. “Having a child is now the single best predictor that a woman will end up in financial collapse,” Warren writes. And she should know. Though Warren’s parents did not divorce, her own origin story begins when her father lost his job and she and her mother went to work to keep the family solvent: “I know the day I grew up. I know the minute I grew up. I know why I grew up,” she recalls.

      Sometimes even more wrenching than the day-to-day worries about where the childcare or the money is going to come from is wondering where the care will come from. Psychoanalyst Adam Phillips and historian Barbara Taylor suggest that “today it is only between parents and children that kindness is expected, sanctioned, and indeed obligatory,” and whether or not this is a sweeping truth, it does tend to be how children feel. One of the most robust findings in research on resilience is that a leading factor that protects children against hard times is the number of high-quality relationships in the child’s life, and divorce can cut this number in half. Sometimes the number is halved because where once there were two parents, now there is one. Other times the number feels halved because, even though both parents remain committed to the child, they are now preoccupied with new jobs, new lovers, new stressors, new responsibilities, and their own feelings about the divorce, and each parent may be only half as available as before. In an effort to cheer up their children and themselves, parents may tout the benefits of growing up with two bedrooms, two families, and two sets of everything. Life will be twice as good, some may say, but children are not fooled. “Even a good divorce restructures children’s childhoods and leaves them traveling between two distinct worlds,” says author Elizabeth Marquardt. “It becomes their jobs, not their parents’, to make sense of those two worlds.”

      None of this is to say that unhealthy, unhappy families ought to stay together. There are no easy answers to troubled partnerships. This is simply a recognition of something that as adults we may be pained to acknowledge but that children already know: Like marriage, divorce is for better and for worse. In one study, 80 percent of young adults agreed that “Even though it was hard, divorce was the right thing for my family.” Children do best when parents are willing to talk about breakups from the other side, too: that even though divorce may be the right thing, it is hard. Otherwise, adolescents are left alone with their grievances and young children are left alone with their grief.

      ***

      On the October morning Sam’s father left, no one in his family spoke of it. As odd as this may seem, it is not unusual. Twenty-three percent of children report that no one talked to them about divorce as it was happening, and 45 percent recall only abrupt explanations such as “Your dad is leaving”; just 5 percent of children report feeling fully informed about what was happening between their parents and being encouraged to ask questions. So off Sam went to school that day—and on all of the days that followed—as if nothing had changed. This was easy to do because, unlike home where he simply pretended nothing had changed, school was a place where this was actually true. Mornings still began with the same Pledge of Allegiance. At snack time, Sam still ate cheese crackers and drank chocolate milk from little cartons. Playing soccer at recess was still the best hour of the day. School was still where new things came in the form of fun and faraway facts, like about weather or Egyptians, and these new things were presented thoughtfully and stepwise, making them understandable and never overwhelming or personal.

      Then, not so long after Sam’s father left, his fourth-grade class was learning about the mail: how to write letters with proper salutations like “Dear So-and-So” and “Sincerely, So-and-So” and how to prepare envelopes with addresses and return addresses in the right places. For practice, Sam’s teacher asked each student to write a real letter to a real person who did not live at home. Sam sat at his desk and stared at his paper. He rolled his pencil in its pencil holder. He could not begin. After a time, Sam walked up between the rows of desks to where his teacher stood writing on the blackboard, her back to the class.

      “Miss Leonard . . .” he started.

      She turned around.

      “I can’t write the letter,” Sam continued, blankly.

      “Why not?” she asked, leaning toward the boy, ready to get back to her task.

      “I don’t have anyone to write,” Sam insisted, before he broke eye contact to study the chalk in her fingers and the powdery smudges on her roomy round-cut skirt.

      “Surely you can think of someone,” she pressed.

      “I can’t. There isn’t anybody . . .” Sam insisted again. Rigidly.

      Mrs. Leonard looked at Sam and then blew him away with nonchalance: “Why don’t you write a letter to your dad?”

      Sam stood there—stunned, shocked, breathless. Then, without a word, he walked back to his desk and wrote a letter to his cousin who lived in Texas.

      In November, Sam’s mother gave him a full-size Bible with a floppy black cover. They did go to church every Sunday, but Sam had never had his own Bible before. Unsure of what else to make of it, Sam took this to mean that, with his father gone, he was going to need all the help he could get. At night, he flipped and fanned his way through the flimsy see-through pages, and to his surprise he discovered that the Bible was more helpful than he expected. It went into some significant detail СКАЧАТЬ