In Spite of Everything (3 page)

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?

W
hen I was about four, my parents decided to make several home improvements. Back then, it seemed that every Berkeley family we knew had a deck on which the grown-ups—the mothers in their seventies wrap dresses and the dads in their weekend jeans—would sit drinking sangria and discussing Nixon, Bob Dylan, and public education while the kids mucked around in the playroom or tiny backyard in their school-made tie-dyes and Sears Toughskins. My mother had particular ideas about adding our own deck and playroom, ideas that involved French doors, window seats with giant storage drawers, and textured linoleum flooring. Although she was an academic—at the time, in graduate school at U.C. Berkeley, furiously at work on her dissertation—my mother nonetheless loved to work
with professionals to help her make the right decisions about interior design and clothes.

My dad, for his part, had definite ideas about the second-floor room that was to be added: my room. Or, rather, he had one definite idea. My room had to have a skylight, and my bed was to be positioned directly beneath it. “Suze, as the official Little Dipper and Pleiades finder, you need the right tools,” said my dad, who had conferred on me a special status for my knack for spotting these constellations in the night sky. “Furthermore, you may find, as I do, old pal, that you do your best star contemplation alone.”

I remember two things vividly from that time. The first is that on the opening day of the renovation job, the construction guys left the French doors open while they were digging up the backyard to build the deck. I forgot that the ground outside was gone and walked right out into the pit, gashing open the bottom of my jaw on rocky debris. I had to go to the emergency room for stitches, and the remaining nettlefish-like scars still undergird the dimple on my chin. My mother was distraught and flailing, cracking her knuckles antsily and spraying me with Bactine. My dad, an ice climber by avocation, was a little more laid-back. He crouched down and took a look at the jagged green threads knitting my skin together. “You’re tough as nails, Suze-o,” he grinned.

The second thing I remember is lying in bed beneath the skylight. It was long and rectangular, and I would align my body with it at bedtime. My mother usually came in first, to read me poetry, often “The Highwayman” by Alfred Noyes. She would lean over my bed, throatily whispering, eyes wide with menace. After my mother had read this or another poem selected for stimulating a sense of cadence, Dad would come in. We would look up at the night sky and think. It occurs to me now that I never thought about what he was thinking; I guess I was too little to think that we were separate. What I thought was: Here are the stars; they are beautiful and strange; Dad is with me.

There is also something that I do not remember, but that I remember
my parents worrying about at the time: As a young child, I was a chronic sleepwalker. I would not just roam into my parents’ room or into the kitchen but actually walk
out
of the house and down the street to our family friends’ house, ring the doorbell until one of the groggy adults answered, toddle into their living room, curl up on a sofa, and go back to sleep. The bewildered parent would call our house, and Dad would come scoop me up and take me back home.

The conflation of these events has always struck a primal chord in my sense of my own beginnings. Everyone has his own Genesis, the creation myth that allegorizes the idiom of his early childhood. But children, like all orthodox adherents, are literal thinkers, and, like native peoples, provincial ones. The universe originated in their homes and neighborhoods, and all the figures and fixtures therein are singular, monolithic, and mystical. Proust and Piaget said as much. A magnolia tree growing in the front yard, for example, is The Magnolia Tree; its gray polished bark is crinkled in a distinctive elderly-elephant-knee pattern where the first branch forks off from the trunk. A big slide at the playground is The Big Slide, a high diving board at the local pool is The High Dive. Such structures, which seem generic to parents, are the Everests, Denalis, Ulurus, Shiprocks of their children’s aboriginal dreamtime. The children know every crack and contour of them all, have practiced strategies for mastering them, each child emerging as the mythical hero of her own folktale once that mission has been accomplished.

As a person gets older, however, these things present as personal archetypes, themes. One’s life, it seems, plays out as variations on them.

Room. Poems. Gash. Sleepwalking. Stars. Ice.

Dad.

T
here is a giant so-called reference book called
The Secret Language of Birthdays
, which catalogs every day of the year and offers
an astrological analysis of people born on that day. Whenever I see it at Barnes & Noble or on someone’s coffee table, I sheepishly crack it open and look up everyone I’ve met since the last time I scoured it to see how it pigeonholes them. One of the neatest, and also one of the most idiotic, things about it is that each day gets its own headline, which is supposed to capture that person’s astrological essence. Of course, they’re often wrong. Mine, for example, is “The Day of the Boss,” which is, as I am sure my younger brother would confirm, not correct. My dad’s, however, is “The Day of Laughter and Tears.” When I read that for the first time, I closed the book.

I am not someone who invests the portfolio in horoscopes, but I relish the feeling of cosmic symmetry when they seem to be on point, and if there ever was such a thing as a Gemini, that archetype could not have found a more impeccably corporeal landing than in the dual nature of Dugal Thomas. All Gemini’s twin aspects were writ large in my dad: good/evil; contemplative/foolhardy; kinetic/paralyzed; expansive/hermetic; funny/brooding. You never knew which you were going to get. This is, as adult children later learn, one of the textbook characteristics of alcoholics. Knowing this explains a good deal, but in my experience, it doesn’t do much to help significantly on the ground. As a child, even as a comprehending adult, all you are ever certain of is that any encounter will imprint you with either fear or delight. I was one of the lucky ones—at least until I was ten, it was unequivocally of delight.

Partly, this had to do with my mom. Although she very much wanted a baby, Mom was not, I think, prepared for the reality of having one. She was extremely anxious when I was born. She is this way constitutionally (as am I), but she also had a number of other very real weights pressing down on her at that time. For one thing, my parents—both New Yorkers—had just moved to California so that my mother could attend Cal’s Ph.D. program in English Renaissance literature. For another, she had married my father only a year and a half before, after dating him for a handful of months—this directly on the heels of a disastrous nine-year marriage to her college
boyfriend (note that my mom went to college—Wellesley—at sixteen), an intense and acerbic young man who had graduated at the top of his class from the Groton School, Harvard College, and Harvard Law School and who had competed with, shamed, and degraded her as much as he had idolized her. In my father she saw a charming, light-footed chap who had graduated with a straight-C average from Harvard; who was as much a painter, photographer, and naturalist as he was a patriot, a mountain climber, a guy’s guy. Who also idolized her. He loved that she was tall and leggy, and for my mother—who, to this day, is self-conscious and klutzy and combats chronic back pain because of her height—his flattery was ambrosial. He loved how brilliant she was, and for my mother—who had spent a lifetime trying to impress her exacting parents, and then her ex-husband, with academic achievement—his praise was a lullaby. He loved that she was so lost and needy; she loved that he loved it. Of course he would support her going to graduate school—piece of cake! Of course they should have a baby right away—no time like the present! My dad made everything look so exciting, fun, easy. His trademark lines were: “So, I have an idea,” and “Whatever you want—I’m easy!” Beware of peddlers with magic beans.

So there they were, three thousand miles from most of their friends and family, starting out on their exciting, fun, easy life. And you can tell from photos of that period that life was exactly like that for them then—certainly, I never witnessed them so goofy and huggy with each other. They looked relaxed and gorgeous, my mother’s black hair, high cheekbones, and model stature glamorizing my dad’s jocky, redheaded boyishness. But when I was born, in November 1968, fun and easy came to a grinding halt.

This is invariably true when a baby enters the household, even if you’re over the moon about him. As every parent knows all too well, babies’ needs are so constant and urgent that life is instantly more intense and demanding than you ever imagined it could be. It is fun for some, perhaps, but life with your first baby is not easy for anyone.
Especially for my mother. First of all, she was expecting someone else—a boy, for one thing. But, while embarrassed by her first fumble on maternal instincts, she was delighted with a girl. The first thing she said post-delivery was: “Her name is Susan Gregory, and we’re going to read Milton together!” At least the first part was true. My mother’s mother is from the South, where matrilineal naming traditions are common. On my nana’s side of the family, the tradition was to name the eldest daughter of the eldest daughter “Susan Gregory” plus the last name of the infant’s father. So I was the sixth in an unbroken line of eldest daughters having girls first. But I was different.