In Spite of Everything (2 page)

“W
hatever happens, we’re never going to get divorced.”

Over the course of sixteen years, I said that often to my husband, Cal, especially after our two daughters were born. No marital scenario would ever become so bleak or hopeless as to compel me, even for a moment, to embed my children in the torture of my own split family. After my dad left (with his secretary, who would become his second of three wives), the world as my brother and I had known it ended. Just like that. My mother, formerly a regal, erudite figure, shape-shifted into a phantom in a sweaty nightgown and matted hair, howling on the floor of our gray-carpeted playroom. Ian, a sweet, doofusy boy, grew into a sad, glowering giant, barricaded in his room with dark comic books, graphic novels, and computer games. I would spend the rest of middle and high school getting into a lot of surprisingly bad trouble in suburban Philadelphia: chain-smoking, doing drugs, getting kicked out of schools, ending my senior year in a psychiatric ward. Our dad was gone. He immediately moved five states away, with his new wife and her four kids. Whenever Ian and I saw him, which was, per his preference, rarely, he grew more and more to embody Darth Vader: a brutal machine encasing raw human guts. Growing up, Ian and I were often left to our own devices, circumstances that did not so much teach us how to take care of ourselves as simply how to survive. We dealt. We developed detached, sarcastic riffs on “our messed-up childhood.”

We weren’t the only ones. The particular memorabilia that comprise each family’s unhappiness are always different, but a lot of our friends were going through the same basic stuff at the time—and a lot of people our age we
didn’t
know were, too. The divorce epidemic of the 1970s and ’80s wiped out nearly half our generation.

A
ccording to a recent study of generational differences, Generation X—those of us born between 1965 and 1980—“went through its all-important, formative years as one of the least parented, least nurtured generations in U.S. history.” U.S. census and other data report that almost half of all Generation X children’s families split; 40 percent were latchkey kids. People my parents’ age all say things like “Of
course
you’d feel devastated by divorce, honey—it was a horrible, disorienting time for you as a child! Of
course
you wouldn’t want it for yourself and your family, but sometimes it’s better for everyone that parents part ways; everyone is happier.” Such sentiments bring to mind a set of statistics that has stuck with me: In 1962, half of all adult women believed that parents in bad marriages should stay together for the children’s sake; by 1980, only one in five felt that way. A child in the 1980s faced twice the risk of parental divorce as a Boomer child in the mid-1960s. “Four-fifths of [those] divorced adults profess to being happier afterward,” the authors write, “but a majority of their children feel otherwise.”
^*

But a majority of their children feel otherwise
. There is something intolerable about that clause. Because, although I realize this view is lunatic and hyperbolic, there is still something in me that feels that to get divorced is to enact
Medea:
the wailing, murderously bereft mother; the cold father protecting his pristine new family; the children: dead.

Not me. I married my husband because he was the most wonderful, reliable, stable person I had ever met. When my children were born a few years later, I stopped being cool, or what I thought was cool, because I fell in love with them so completely that my cool circuit blew out on the spot. As a mother, this became my foxhole prayer: Please, please, Whatever Karmic Force There Is, do not let divorce happen to
my
children. Divorce didn’t just evoke a sense of a sad, disruptive period, a portrait of parents yelling, children numbly munching frozen pizzas in front of TV cartoons. It had been scorched earth. The Bomb.

How can a person find herself doing precisely what she has built her life’s framework to
avoid
? As the daughter of a onetime classicist, and a former English major and theater geek myself, I knew the answer as well as anyone: Look no farther than Oedipus. But my feeling—really, my absolute certainty—was, again:
not me
. And yet, there I was. After sixteen years of life with Cal, I found myself without warning in the one place I had vowed never to be. Here I was sitting at a cozy-chic restaurant in Park Slope, Brooklyn, crying that I was miserable in our relationship, had been for years, and hearing Cal respond that he, too, was miserable and regretted that we hadn’t split up a decade earlier.

It seemed that the light blew out. My field of vision narrowed to his dinner plate, blown with bits of rice and desiccated meat. There was one thought:
I am here. In spite of everything
.

I
t is a hard truism that each generation is shaped by its war. The Greatest Generation (1929–43) was forged by World War II; Baby Boomers (1944–64) were defined by Vietnam and the civil rights and antiwar movements. Generation X’s war, I would argue, was the ultimate war at home: divorce. We didn’t get Purple Hearts or red badges of courage, nothing that could be culturally shared or healed. Our injuries were private, secret, solitary. Our generation’s drug use—unlike that of Baby Boomers, who favored the grandiose highs of psychedelics and, later, cocaine—revolved around heroin, Percocet, Oxycontin: painkillers. Outdoors, there was crack, AIDS, homelessness, racial conflict, Reaganomics. Indoors was the mall, in roving packs. Home? Alone, watching program-length commercials. “More than this,” crooned Bryan Ferry in Roxy Music’s eponymous eighties lullaby, “there is nothing.” The novel of our decade:
Less Than Zero
. The protagonist’s central crisis strikes when he encounters a billboard for a resort that reads
DISAPPEAR HERE
.

We did not disappear; we just stuffed the void with whatever we could grab. Many of us, including me, thrashed our way out of adolescence and worked our asses off to get as far away as possible from that
terroir
of existential fear. We developed crusts to cover our raw centers. Sociologists have shown how the effects of the mass divorces of the 1980s linger subtly but powerfully in our behavior as adults now, in our struggle to do everything differently.

Without a safe home to belong to, we still see ourselves as the misfits, the outsiders, the snickering critics who see through everyone else’s pretenses. Terminal uniqueness, it turns out, is a hallmark of Generation X. The insistence that you are different, cannot be stuck with any label, are impossible to categorize, is a phenomenon that marketers, somewhat hilariously, call “focus group of one.” Try your own. Start a conversation with people our age about Generation X, and see if they don’t respond with something like “Exactly
who
decided that I was in ‘Generation X’
anyway
?” or “I’ve never paid attention to those kinds of sociological generalizations.” But according to studies, we
do
conform to sociological generalizations in that we refuse to acknowledge them, even as we conform to them.

First, market research shows that we all bristle at being called “Gen X” (funny: “I Am Not a Target Market” was a chapter in Douglas Coupland’s
Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture
, published in 1991). Indeed, we still have a jaundiced view of authority, just as we did as adolescents. We’re still self-reliant; after all, we’ve been making our own dinner since we were six years old. We never counted on gold watches or pensions; we recalibrated ourselves and our careers as often as the economy morphed. We came to the whole idea of love after we’d been battered around like middle-aged divorcées—and when we actually found it, we cleaved to it. Love meant everything. It certainly did to me. It was my vulnerable little secret. I may have seemed jaded, but I was, after all, a kid needing love, security, and attention—the very things my parents had been too distracted and overwhelmed to offer.

So I, like many of us, made it. But I, like, I’d bet, many of us, unconsciously banked on the fuzzy logic that arrival in adulthood would somehow summon a mystical force that would seal up that gaping hole forever, like the giant boulder rolling over the cave entrance in
Aladdin
. It worked, for a while. Until we became parents.

I
t 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
.