People my parents' age 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 when parents part ways; everyone is happier." Such sentiments remind me of a set of statistics I read in William Strauss and Neil Howe's Generations: The History of America's Future, 1584 to 2069 (HarperPerennial). A child in the 1980s faced twice the risk of parental divorce that a boomer child in the mid-1960s did. "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 about that sentence that strikes me as intolerable. There is still part of me that feels that to get divorced is to play out Medea: the wailing, murderously bereft mother; the cold father protecting his pristine new family; the children ... dead.
And so this is my foxhole prayer: Please, please God. Please do not let my children ever open their dad's dresser and find it empty but for a gust of his cedary, Scotch-y scent. Please do not let them have to panic as their mom moans like a phantom in her damp nightgown and matted hair, thrashing on the floor of the playroom. Please do not let them shave their heads at 13 and chain-smoke stolen Marlboro Lights behind the train station with their cool older friends. Please don't let them have a grimacing stepmother who drinks straight gin with ice cubes and keeps them awake until daybreak, snarling that their father despises them and wishes to God in heaven that he didn't have to support them, while that dad lies passed out in the family room. Please don't let them run into their high school art teacher at a paint-peeling apartment, buying drugs from the neighborhood dealer and C-list porn star. Please do not let them, at 18, move in with their boyfriend, into an apartment on a crack corner in North Philadelphia. Please don't let their father die without wanting to say goodbye. Please don't let them marry to avoid fear. Please, please, please: Whatever you do, do not let divorce happen to them.
Yet last year, there I was: sitting at a table in a cozy-chic restaurant with my husband of eight years and mate of 16, crying that I was miserable in our relationship and had been for years, and hearing him say back to me that he, too, was miserable and regretted that we hadn't split up a decade earlier.
It seemed that light darkened. My field of vision narrowed to my husband's dinner plate, grotesque, blown with bits of rice and desiccated meat. It was happening. There was one thought: I am here.
It's an axiom from Psychology 101: If you want to learn what is unhealed from your own childhood, have children. In psychological terms, this is known as a narcissistic injury. In The Drama of the Gifted Child (Basic Books), psychologist Alice Miller describes adults who have sustained such childhood wounds: "They continue to live in their repressed childhood situation, ignoring the fact that it no longer exists. They are continuing to fear and avoid dangers that, although once real, have not been real for a long time. They are driven by unconscious memories and by repressed feelings and needs that determine nearly everything they do or fail to do."
To live with such a windy, black pit in one's psyche is, obviously, bad. This is why for me, and for many others my age, divorce has always seemed like the one absolutely unimaginable course of action. For this particular narcissistic wound—the one brought on by the savage divorces of the late 1970s and the 1980s—is endemic to my generation.
They say that every generation is shaped by its war. The Greatest Generation (1901–1924) was forged by World War II; baby boomers (1946–1964) were defined by Vietnam and the sexual revolution. But our war was the ultimate war-at-home: divorce. Generation X, according to a 2004 study conducted by marketing-strategy and research firm Reach Advisors, "went through its all-important, formative years as one of the least parented, least nurtured in U.S. history." Half of all Gen X children's parents split; 40 percent were latchkey kids.
The effects of the narcissistic wounds inflicted by our parents linger, subtly but powerfully, in our behavior as parents now. We still consider ourselves the misfits, the outsiders, the snickering critics who see through everyone else's pretenses. But that's just the crunchy crust covering the soft, gooey center. We are completely, utterly attached to our children. Generation Xers, the parents of the majority of young children now, by all accounts appear to be the most devoted to family in American history. Nearly 30 percent of Generation X parents volunteer at their children's schools or extracurricular activities, according to market research. We would generally rather err on the side of being too close, too involved, too loving, than repeat our own parents' sins of neglect. (I still sleep scrunched between my girls.) Again, according to market research, we panic about child care and preschool, spending more money on them than on any other household necessities. We leave the workforce if no decent child care is available. All this is, in traceable and ineffable ways, the fallout from the mass family breakdowns of the 1980s. We may not be aware of the precise qualities of these undercurrents, but we discern them in some murky, disquieting way. It's why we dread divorce.
When you talk to recovering alcoholics or drug addicts, one of the most striking themes is that no matter how bad it got, it never seemed to dawn on them that they had a problem until they hit rock bottom. It's often like that for people whose marriages are disintegrating. People say things like, "I just need time for myself"; "He just hates his job"; "We're so tired"; "It'll change when the kids get older." Certainly, these are very real problems that are common to couples with young children, and all have a corrosive effect. But as with the alcoholic's narrative arc, things can get overwhelmingly bleak, and then get even worse, before the real problem hits you on the head like a cartoon safe. Or at least that's how it was for me.
I was 31 when I married my now ex-husband. Of the stock phrases used to describe couples, "They complement each other" fit us best. I was the flamboyant, intense one from the hypereducated, broken alcoholic home; he was the low-key, stable one from the traditional immigrant family. But like any two people who have been attached to each other for a long time, we had our perennial quagmires. I was quietly (and sometimes not quietly) infuriated by his need for control over everything, from what toaster oven we bought to my work time, and shamed by his fastidiousness in domestic affairs. He thought I was a snob, a blabbermouth, and a disgusting slob. He hated his work but couldn't figure out how to change it, and resented my (not intentionally) patronizing you-can-do-it pep talks. I did like my work, but it was intense, and I was too spent to do anything domestic—like open my mail or pay for parking tickets or clean. Sex was a chore.
