together as a family,” but that “we love you kids” and “feel that we’re all going to be happier in the long run.”
The eerie formality, compounded with the stunning disclosure that one’s parents not only had separate lives but were empowered to dissolve the indissoluble, made the Important Family Announcement hallucinatory. Parents’ postmortem to themselves, their friends, that “the kids seemed to take it well” was delusional. The kids were in a fugue state. For years.
With the nucleus of the family, once stable and prosaic, blown apart, the landscape became postapocalyptic. The father, heretofore a somewhat remote disciplinarian with whom you could occasionally roughhouse and be gross, was now trying to annihilate the mother with legal proceedings and character slander and was installed in some interim bachelor pad, absently spoiling the children with toys, junk food, and movies on the weekends. The mother, after about a year in depression during which she leaned terrifyingly on the children for emotional support, “reinvented” herself on a full-time career track, attending aerobics classes and dating a string of divorcés. Darth Vader, Princess Leia at war. There was no safe place to land.
My high school was littered with such sad-eyed, bruised nomads.There were perennial migrant flocks of latchkey kids in the suburbs, wandering from used record shops, to behind the train station to get high, to the parks they used to play in as children; they trudged back and forth from their mothers’ houses during the week to their fathers’ apartments on the weekends. In one of the most egregious cases, the divorced parents of a teenage boy I knew installed him in his own apartment because neither wanted him at home post–Important Family Announcement. Naturally, we all descended on his place after school—sometimes during school—to drink and do drugs. He was always wasted no matter what time we arrived. A few years ago, a friend told me she had learned that he had drunk himself to death by age thirty. A very close friend of mine, at fifteen, managed both of her parents as they collapsed under the weight of their respective mental breakdowns in the wake of the Important Family Announcement, each of them clawing at her constantly; in the meantime, she did her best to keep her two younger siblings together. Now in her forties, she lives alone, ready to answer triage calls from her family.
In my own family’s case, the Important Family Announcement landed on my little brother’s birthday. His tenth birthday. At this point, Ian and I did not grasp that our parents were estranged, much less getting divorced. We knew that things seemed terrible in a general sense and that Dad had been “on a business trip” when our mother was away in England. On this day, what we understood was that, for some reason we did not understand, our father was not there on Ian’s birthday. Where was Dad? Mom didn’t know, but she reassured us that Dad was certainly on his way. Morning gave way to noon, then afternoon. My brother, my mother, and I wandered in and out of the house, sometimes intersecting. At some point in midafternoon, my wanderings had taken me into the kitchen, where I had just opened the freezer to reach for a Swanson’s chicken pot pie. Suddenly, Dad was there.
“Howdy, old pal,” he said. He was wearing a jeans jacket. A
jeans jacket
. He clapped me on the shoulder like a man, strode into the pantry, and poured himself a scotch.
“Well, Suze,” he said, “as you’ve probably surmised, your mother and I are splitting.” He oriented his empty tumbler on the rippled tile counter, sauntered around the kitchen table, and stopped at the window to regard the vegetable garden he had planted. “The basic idea is this: I’ve reached a point in my life where I realize that I’ve done nothing for
me
, and I’ll be goddamned if I’m not going to do it.” He went on to explain that he was sick and tired of
The eerie formality, compounded with the stunning disclosure that one’s parents not only had separate lives but were empowered to dissolve the indissoluble, made the Important Family Announcement hallucinatory. Parents’ postmortem to themselves, their friends, that “the kids seemed to take it well” was delusional. The kids were in a fugue state. For years.
With the nucleus of the family, once stable and prosaic, blown apart, the landscape became postapocalyptic. The father, heretofore a somewhat remote disciplinarian with whom you could occasionally roughhouse and be gross, was now trying to annihilate the mother with legal proceedings and character slander and was installed in some interim bachelor pad, absently spoiling the children with toys, junk food, and movies on the weekends. The mother, after about a year in depression during which she leaned terrifyingly on the children for emotional support, “reinvented” herself on a full-time career track, attending aerobics classes and dating a string of divorcés. Darth Vader, Princess Leia at war. There was no safe place to land.
My high school was littered with such sad-eyed, bruised nomads.There were perennial migrant flocks of latchkey kids in the suburbs, wandering from used record shops, to behind the train station to get high, to the parks they used to play in as children; they trudged back and forth from their mothers’ houses during the week to their fathers’ apartments on the weekends. In one of the most egregious cases, the divorced parents of a teenage boy I knew installed him in his own apartment because neither wanted him at home post–Important Family Announcement. Naturally, we all descended on his place after school—sometimes during school—to drink and do drugs. He was always wasted no matter what time we arrived. A few years ago, a friend told me she had learned that he had drunk himself to death by age thirty. A very close friend of mine, at fifteen, managed both of her parents as they collapsed under the weight of their respective mental breakdowns in the wake of the Important Family Announcement, each of them clawing at her constantly; in the meantime, she did her best to keep her two younger siblings together. Now in her forties, she lives alone, ready to answer triage calls from her family.
In my own family’s case, the Important Family Announcement landed on my little brother’s birthday. His tenth birthday. At this point, Ian and I did not grasp that our parents were estranged, much less getting divorced. We knew that things seemed terrible in a general sense and that Dad had been “on a business trip” when our mother was away in England. On this day, what we understood was that, for some reason we did not understand, our father was not there on Ian’s birthday. Where was Dad? Mom didn’t know, but she reassured us that Dad was certainly on his way. Morning gave way to noon, then afternoon. My brother, my mother, and I wandered in and out of the house, sometimes intersecting. At some point in midafternoon, my wanderings had taken me into the kitchen, where I had just opened the freezer to reach for a Swanson’s chicken pot pie. Suddenly, Dad was there.
“Howdy, old pal,” he said. He was wearing a jeans jacket. A
jeans jacket
. He clapped me on the shoulder like a man, strode into the pantry, and poured himself a scotch.
“Well, Suze,” he said, “as you’ve probably surmised, your mother and I are splitting.” He oriented his empty tumbler on the rippled tile counter, sauntered around the kitchen table, and stopped at the window to regard the vegetable garden he had planted. “The basic idea is this: I’ve reached a point in my life where I realize that I’ve done nothing for
me
, and I’ll be goddamned if I’m not going to do it.” He went on to explain that he was sick and tired of
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