In the past week, I’ve been reading Judith Wallerstein’s insightful and breathtaking work, The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce: The 25 Year Landmark Study as well as Kevin Wilson’s fascinating new novel The Family Fang. As I look back on the real and fictional terrain they cover, tracing the perspectives of children attempting to survive their families and live to adulthood, I see their point crystal-clear:
If you are a parent to a child, be an adult.
Wallerstein points out that the odds of your being and acting like an adult in service to the healthy development and maturation of your child are higher if you are married, but the true enemy of childhood is chaos. Although intact families can be chaotic, divorce always brings structural and emotional chaos to a family system.
“Their lives begin with an intact family that one day vanishes…For children, divorce is a watershed that permanently alters their lives. The world is newly perceived as far less reliable, more dangerous place because the closest relationships in their lives can no longer be expected to hold firm. More than anything else, this new anxiety represents the end of childhood.” (31 and 60)
However, chaos can reign in intact families, in single family homes, in co-habiting homes…and chaos is always bad for kids. Children need adults to be in charge and who put their development first. I like her description of what being an adult on behalf of your child looks like:
“In a well-functioning family, mothers and fathers are in the background as children grow up. Their role is to create a safe and supportive place for the children, whose job during elementary and junior high is to go to school, play, make friends, and simply grow up…Their parents should encourage, applaud, feed and clothe the players…the things that can make a difference in the child’s life always involve sacrifice and change on the part of one or both parents.” (57 and 257)
In other words, children should not necessarily see their parents, but they should not disappear.
In the Kevin Wilson’s Fang family, chaos reigns supreme. Camille and Caleb Fang, the parents, are explicit that their lives are devoted to creating chaos as art. Carefully orchestrated and recorded moments of societal dissonance enmesh them to each other and to the world of artistic expression. And then children come along. Although Annie and Buster see themselves as children and individuals, their parents refer to them as Child A and Child B, or simply A and B, who are then dragged along and incorporated into the family act. The parents see the children as equal players in their life work, but children see the world and their family much differently than adults do. As Buster muses:
“How often had their parents sent them into the wilderness of a mall or public park or private party and asked them only to be prepared, to open themselves up to the infinite possibilities that their parents, god-like, would create?” (167)
Children are at the mercy of their parents, and chaos makes pretty unmerciful parents. Everyone in the family cannot be center stage in order for the children to mature into a healthy adulthood that is defined by meaningful relationships and meaningful work. Neither Fang child can figure out what to do nor who to be with, and when they do step out in faith they are terrified. Buster speaks of his choice to try to be in a relationship:
“Actually, it seemed like a good idea, but I was terrified of it. I feel like I’ve always done things that were profoundly bad ideas, and it’s always ended exactly as you’d expect. That comes from Mom and Dad.” (233)
And then their parents disappear for real. I won’t spoil the book for you, since you really must read it, but they spend the remainder of the book sorting through this dilemma:
“They (the siblings) would forever come to this impasse. Buster wanted to believe that his parents still loved them, that they planned all of this as a way to save their children from falling apart and to make them strong. Annie, however, was certain that their parents had created something just for themselves, and that they did not care what pain they caused in service to this idea.” (169)
In childhood and young adulthood, they have no adults to help them negotiate this mine-field of relative meaning.
I first fell in love with Kevin Wilson’s writing with his collection of short stories, Tunneling to the Center of the Earth. I have been fascinated by how in both his stories and this novel, parents suddenly disappear, often exploding in fiery flames. At first glance, one would think that incorporating the idea of spontaneous combustion would be a narrative stretch, but I wonder if Wilson is not a child of divorce. In one short story, a young man’s parents spontaneously combust on a train and he is left to raise his younger brother. He supports them financially by working in a Scrabble tile sorting factory, where each day he stands knee deep in lettered tiles searching to create words from the sea of letters around him. His family has disappeared, he is deeply lonely, and he lives in a world full of meaning that is opaque and confusing to him. And the tiles just keep falling.
As Wallerstein writes of chaotic family systems:
“there is far less opportunity to escape from the madness that surrounds them because there are no true adults to give them a helping hand.” (150)
Both Wallerstein and Wilson follow young people traversing the wilderness of growing up. I think of Little Red Riding Hood who is sent into the wilderness to tend to the needs of the previous generation, her grandmother, and along the way is led astray. Her mother, no father is mentioned, tries to provide a roadmap, but in a time of distress she is not backstage ready to help and encourage and support. Little Red is swallowed up by the wilderness and with the countless different endings to the story you can choose, she is left to create meaning for herself.
As Little Red sings in Sondheim’s Into the Woods at the close of her journey into and out of the woods:
“And I know things now, many valuable things,
That I hadn’t thought to explore,
Do not put your faith in a cape and hood,
They will not protect you the way that they should,
And take extra care with strangers,
Even flowers have their dangers,
And though scary is exciting,
Nice is different than good.”
The world is wild, so if you are raising a child, be an adult.
