In Spite of Everything Read Free Page B

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
.
    Call us helicopter parents, call us neurotically attached, but we are
not
going to inflict such wounds on
our
children. And for me, the fundamental premise of wound avoidance was simple: No divorce.
    Yet, as Sophocles has reminded us for more than two thousand years, one can design one’s life around preventing the very scenario that eventually unfolds via one’s own hand in spite of everything. Looking back on it, it seems obvious now that just about everything I ever did in my life was either a response to my own parents’ divorce or a preemptive move geared to stave off my own. I became involved in “relationships” at a preternaturally early age in an effort to supply fatherly attention and protection with boyfriends; I drank and drugged to fend off the nagging, existential terror of solipsism; I worked like an animal to attract surrogate parental attention, as well as to try to caulk up the hole in my gut; I married the kindest, most stable person I’d ever known to secure kindness and stability in my own empty but turbulent universe—and to ensure that our children would never know anything of that void; I nursed, loved, read to, and lolled about with my babies—completely restructured and reimagined my career—so that they would be secure, happy, attended to; my husband and I made the happiest, comfiest nest possible; we worked as a team; we loved our kids; we did everything right, better than right. And yet divorce came. In spite of everything. In spite of my not having seen it bearing down on me, us, from light-years away. Oedipus didn’t know that the stranger he had killed in the road years before was his father until he had already been long and happily married to the woman who turned out to be his mother. In spite of everything.
    This is an account of a sharp turn in life I never expected to take. I found myself wrestling with the very decisions that I never thought I would think of making but that I found myself having to make, with the nearly superhuman attempt to keep life as gentle and undisrupted as possible for our children—essentially, the effort to reverse-engineer childhood karma. My story is a meditation on our generation and the fallout from our parents’ divorces, looking at what those divorces did to us, why it now feels to us that shielding our kids from any kind of pain is a life-or-death proposition, what happens when real pain happens anyway—and what it is like to inhabit an entirely new world.
    Before the events of the past five years, I could never even have contemplated some of the questions I’ve been forced to confront. Namely, is it possible to survive the explosive upending of divorce without inflicting permanent wounds on our own children? Is it possible, by surviving it as adults, that our own injuries might actually begin to heal?
All alone is all we are
, whimpered our sweet, lost, sad, fallen hero. Our fear is that “alone”
is
the central truth that lies at the heart of the universe, and that if we cannot provide them with an unimpeachably happy childhood, our children will be forced to stare into that void by themselves, too.
    But what if that isn’t true? What if there
is
more than this? What if the only truly perfect gem that we can really keep and share with our children is that none of us is alone—that they can remain loved and secure, in spite of everything?
    * William Strauss and Neil Howe,
Generations: The History of America’s Future, 1584 to 2069
(New York: Morrow, 1991), p. 324.
    *
The Drama of the Gifted Child: The Search for the True Self
(New