CHAPTER 2
Origin Story
I don’t really miss God, but I sure miss Santa Claus.
—Eric Erlandson and Courtney Love, “Gutless”
The sound of hangers scraping woke Sam up. It was a familiar sound, one he had heard through the thick haze of sleep on weekday mornings for as long as he could remember. Sam’s father was a businessman—a manager of some kind—at a paper mill in the next town over, so he started his day sooner than the rest of the family, pushing and pulling his suits and shirts along the metal bar in his closet as he chose what to wear. By the time Sam got out of bed to get ready for school, the only evidence his father had been in the house at all was a nearly empty cup of coffee that sat at the head of the breakfast table. Cold when he got to it, the coffee was sweet with sugar and rich with cream and Sam loved to start his mornings by drinking it up.
This time when Sam heard the hangers, it was different. It was too dark to be morning, and the screeching and scraping went on for longer than usual. Plus there had been that fight—one that seemed worse than usual—between his parents the night before. When he heard his father walk out of his bedroom and start down the hall, Sam knew he was leaving—not for work, but for good. He padded to the doorway and peeked out, just in time to see his father moving through the last few feet of the shadowy corridor, his brown hard-sided suitcase in hand. As he watched his father go, Sam thought about calling out and saying something: maybe Wait, don’t go!
Instead, he said to himself, It’s for the best.
Betraying his more complicated feelings, Sam tiptoed to his sister’s room where he knew his mother would be sleeping, and he shook her shoulder until she grunted a groggy “Huh . . .”
“Dad’s gone,” Sam whispered to her, feeling someone should be informed of this significant turn of events.
“Go back to bed,” was all she said.
Sam did.
He was nine years old and it was a school night.
***
Every resilient child has an origin story. This is a story that does not begin with “I am born”; instead, like Superman’s being sent away from his home planet Krypton or like Spider-Man’s spider bite, there is an event or a circumstance that places the child on his desperate and courageous path. In the words of pediatrician and psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott, “a change occurs which alters the whole life of the child.” Something happens that is so consequential that life simply cannot go back to the way it was, and the way it is now feels broken somehow. “My seven-year-old world humpty-dumptied, never to be put back together again,” writes Maya Angelou about being raped as a child. Sometimes, though, there is a circumstance that is not like a spider bite at all in that it is there from the start, such as when a baby is born into extreme poverty or to a parent who is mentally ill. For the supernormal child, in one way or another, continuity and connection are splintered: There is a before and an after. Or a then and a now. Or a me and an everyone else.
Most often, changes that alter the life of the child take place over months or even years—such as when a sibling becomes ill, when a town deteriorates, or when a parent starts drinking—but the changes feel abrupt and cataclysmic nonetheless. “No one hired a skywriter and announced crack’s arrival,” rapper Jay Z remembers about growing up in Marcy Houses in Brooklyn. “But when it landed in your hood, it was a total takeover. Sudden and complete. Like losing your man to gunshots. Or your father walking out the door for good. It was an irreversible new reality. What had been was gone, and in its place was a new way of life that was suddenly everywhere and seemed like it had been there forever.”
For Sam, his father’s leaving was that total takeover, that origin story. When he thought about his life, the story always started there. That night was not Sam’s earliest memory, but it was his first memory—the first moment—of his irreversible new reality. It was the change that rearranged Sam’s family and the roles his family members would play for decades to come. And as he stood there in the doorway and watched his father walk away with his old life, Sam tried to be reasonable—and strong—by telling himself 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.
***
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