1
Donât Fight It
ITâS 1983, ITâS RAINING and Phil Collinsâs âYou Canât Hurry Loveâ is playing on the radio. I wonât know what irony is for at least fifteen years but this already seems cruel. Because it turns out you canât slow love down, either. Iâm on the couch playing with my blue-haired doll when I hear the familiar squeak of hand on banister. It is my dad and heâs carrying a suitcase. Heâs wearing bell-bottoms and a shirt with sleeves rolled up to his elbows, despite the fact that itâs January. His hair is long, spilling over the edge of his collar. And itâs brown. Itâs the early eighties, so most things are brownâthe clothes, the decor, my hair and that of my parents. I am three years old and itâs only been three months since a Very Sad Thing happened to our family, on October 31, 1982. Halloween, in fact. A day that changed all of us but that will remain unspoken of for years to come.
My dadâs eyes used to crinkle when he smiled and my mom used to be âchatty,â but now my dad doesnât smile and my mother doesnât chat. Nothing has been right since the Very Sad Thing happened, and now my dad is leaving.
Heâs back after a few days the following weekend but he doesnât stay the night. I know itâs the weekend as Iâm being allowed to watch TV in my pajamas after breakfast rather than having my hair and teeth brushed immediately afterward. This is strange. Whatâs stranger still is that when my paternal grandparents visit, no one mentions the lack of sleepovers.
âYou havenât told them?â I hear my mother whisper to my father in the kitchen.
Told them what?
My dad starts picking me up every Saturday and driving me to a popular chain of family-friendly eateries. I eat a lot of corn from the salad buffet then stuff my face with ice cream for dessert, so I donât have to talk too much but then feel sick after. My dad has started wearing a leather jacket and now drives a convertible Golf GTI. This would probably be termed a midlife crisis for most men, but my dad is only twenty-seven. So perhaps itâs just a âcrisis.â I donât much like the convertible Golf GTI because having the roof down makes my hair blow about until I canât see and then get carsick and vomit. This makes the car smell so bad that having the roof down becomes a necessity; otherwise my dad will vomit, too. Nausea is fast becoming a constant.
These outings are . . . fine. But soon our weekly lunchtime jaunts morph into monthly, overnight expeditions. My dad is staying in a small apartment in London with his ânew girlfriend,â her sister and her teenage son. There isnât really room for all of us so I share a bunk bed with the fourteen-year-old boy. Sunday mornings now start with a teenage boy swinging his legs down from the top bunk and scratching his ass through boxer shorts. Itâs confusing and it doesnât smell great. But then, nothing seems to smell great anymore.
My mom and I move to be closer to my grandmother, a formidable woman who looks like a cross between the Queen and Margaret Thatcher. I start preschool in September while my mother goes back to work. No one tells the school what has been happening in our family until my mother is confronted with a picture I have drawn that my teacher is particularly pleased withâa drawing of my mom, my dad, my baby sister and me. My mom turns white at this and has to explain to the teacher that my baby sister is âno longer with usâ and that my dad isnât coming back, either. I am baffled by this.
Dad gone too?
To cheer us up after this upsetting incident, we decide that it is my blue-haired dollâs birthday and my mom bakes her a cake. I have little appetite but stuff it down regardless. I turn out to be pretty good at this. Food is a way of showing loveâand who can be sad eating cake? Sadness can also, I learn, be resisted or at least rescheduled by eating cookies, white bread and cereal straight from the package. All hail carbohydrates.
My dad and his new girlfriend want a place of their own to live, but they havenât got enough money to do this âwhat with me to pay for as wellâ and so my dad becomes stressed. He also becomes forgetful.
Pigtailed. Wide-eyed. Aged five. I remember waiting. Sitting on the beige-carpeted bottom step of my motherâs new house with a packed suitcase by my side. Toothbrush, pajamas, two changes of underwear (just in case), my favorite purple sweater and brown corduroy pants (the 1980s . . .) have been stowed away with care. But the blue-haired doll has been left out âfor airâ and is held tight in my arms. The clock shows both hands pointing upward, right at the top. This is the time my mom said that my dad would come. I have been âgood,â so he will come. He has to come. So I wait. And then I wait some more. Minutes tick by, audibly, until the big hand on the clock points toward the floor. The clock is now making an altogether different shape to the one my mother and I have drawn together on pieces of paper âto practice.â My motherâs voice becomes slightly higher as she assures me: âEverythingâs fine!â over and over. She alternates between checking the street for signs of life, trying the telephone, and even, unusually, offering the option of cartoons. But I will not be moved. I sit, eyes trained on the front door, for three hours.
He does not come.
When my baby sister was here, my dad did not forget things, and life was okay. Now itâs just me, my dad is increasingly forgetful and life is very much not okay. This confirms a new, niggling fear that has begun to develop: that it would probably have been better if Iâd gone instead and itâs all my fault that Dad left.
Iâm not special: preschoolers typically believe that theyâre responsible for their parentsâ separation. âWhat you have there is a case of childhood omnipotence,â the psychologist Aphrodite Matsakis tells me three decades later. This is a well-documented tendency of some children (and some adults) to think that the world revolves around them and that they control everything that happens in it. âSome young children have trouble seeing things from othersâ point of view and tend to think that theyâre the center of everythingâas well as the cause of everything. They often think that if they wish something it might come true. Itâs an exaggerated sense of responsibility based on the belief that âI, personally, have the duty and power to save loved ones in trouble.ââ
No one tells me otherwise. No one tells me much at all. So I make it up. âIf we donât tell them the truth, children do make it up,â says Jane Elfer, a child and adolescent psychotherapist at a large London hospital. âThey invent their own version of whatâs happenedâtheir own reality or faulty ideas. Often, what children imagine is even worse than whatâs actually occurred,â she says, âso from a really young age, we need clear, concrete and specific communication to avoid misunderstandings. We have to get better at unhappiness as a societyâif something sad has happened you need to allow and accept this.â
We do not accept it: we fight it. Ignore it, even.
The paperwork comes through and my parents are officially divorced. Despite the commonly held myth that most couples split up after the death of a child, around 72 percent of parents who are married at the time of their childâs death remain married to the same person.1 It is doubtless insanely painful, and cracks in a relationship turn to chasms under pressure. But this doesnât necessarily mean that we or our relationships are broken (although it may feel that way). According to the American Psychological Association, 40 to 50 percent of married couples in the United States end up divorced.2 So bereaved couples may actually be more likely to stay togetherâand one loss doesnât necessarily have to lead to another. Grief is the price we pay for love, but if weâre not prepared for this and weâve been raised to demand happiness, or at least a numbing out of pain at every turn, weâre less able to ride out the storm. If we expect too much of ourselves and our relationships after a loss, we will be disappointed. I fully understand the impulse to run for the hills in an attempt to âescapeâ sadness and pain: most of us have been raised to run for the hills. No judgment toward anyone whose longest relationship to date is with âthe hills.â Really, I get it (I heart hills . . .). People do crazy things. Neither of my parents were saints. And divorce is often the best course of action for both parties. But itâs worthwhile to remember that there is another way. When weâre experiencing loss, from low-level sadness to the catastrophic, life-changing kind, we will feel badâthatâs normal. If we learned to accept that things were going to be hard, we might be better equipped to endure periods of extreme sadness. Something I wish someone had told my family in the 1980s. But they donât. Because no one tells each other anything.
Instead, I join the esteemed legions of men and women worldwide with âDaddy Issues.â I grow up with a single parent who does the work of twoâa woman who, fortunately for me, is extraordinary in her strength and resilience. There are some pros to being the child of a single mother: I will grow up blissfully ignorant of the gendered nature of many domestic tasks, since in my house what needs to be done gets done, by her. I will become, like my mother, excellent in a crisis. I will value independence, although unfortunately, to the extent that I will become hooked on the stuff, wary of commitment or going all-in with anyone (Iâve seen where that can get you). I will insist on âroom to breatheâ in every relationship Iâll ever have. I will struggle to negotiateâthere was no need in our house, since one person made all the decisions. And I will see how keeping busy is a way to keep going. To fight the pain. Ish. The world already makes no sense to me so I make sense of it myself. Iâm told, regularly, not to be sad and not to cry. So I donât. No one does. Until the urge to cry or âfeel sadâ becomes strangely unfamiliar. Alien, even.
The late psychologist Haim Ginott wrote in Between Parent and Child3 that: âMany people have been educated out of knowing what their feelings are. When they hated, they were told it was only dislike. When they were afraid, they were told there was nothing to be afraid of. When they felt pain, they were advised to be brave and smile.â Children look to parents for how to regulate their own emotions because they donât yet know how to do it themselves. But if caregivers donât know either, or were never taught because the âbad feelingsâ were anesthetized away, then weâre really in trouble. And trying to fight âsadâ is something many of us are taught from birth. We administer sweet-tasting painkillers to babies after their first vaccinations, or anytime they have to travel, or feel discomfort from teething. The message is clear: being a good caregiver means never allowing your child to suffer, no matter what the reason for this might be. We live in a culture where distress demands to be alleviated and sadness is supposed to be âsolvedâ rather than experienced.
âWith most things in our life these days if we have a problem, we expect technology or medicine to âfix us,ââ says the psychotherapist and grief expert Julia Samuel, MBE, âbut sadness doesnât work like this. We are not taught to experience a little bit of pain so that we can learn to deal with big pain.â
We try to fight it: to lessen discomfort as a society, almost on autopilot. Only by doing so, weâre all worse off.4 Professor Nathaniel Herr from American University in Washington, DC, an expert in emotional regulation, says, ââSadnessâ is really important. People need to recognize it and what it provides. I have people saying to me: âI just donât want to feel anxious anymoreâI donât want to feel âsad,ââ and I have to say to them: âI canât help you with that!â Because you shouldnât want ânot to feel sad.ââ This is something that even Herrâs psychology students have a tough time getting their heads around. âIf I ask them, âWhy do we have sadness?â most will say something like, âWell, we couldnât have happiness if we didnât have sadness! Itâs like light and shade.â But thatâs not it: theyâre ignoring the function that sadness has socially. It sends out a signal, like, âHey! ...