Supernormal. Мэг Джей
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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.
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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 blood from his father’s big toe—they got what they deserved.
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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