Anxiety

Passages

Every passage tagged with this emotion in the Vela corpus. Search the body text, narrow by source or register, click through to a book’s profile to see how the passage sits with the rest of the work.

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• From The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce: A 25-Year Landmark Study (2000)

  The bad part is that as far as men are concerned, I always seem to be settling. Like even now I ask myself what am I doing living with a man who is twelve years older than me who has had two divorces? He’s nice but I’ll never fall in love with him. And he doesn’t love me. I worry about that.” Lisa shook her head slowly. “Look at it this way. I grew up unprepared for adult relationships, especially for being a woman with a man. No one taught me what I could expect or ask for. My mother never taught me about men. She didn’t know much herself. She never even taught me not to nag. And my father failed to keep his marriage vows. So it was hard for me to learn much from his marriage, although he’s been a great father and second husband. I have no idea how to be with a man. I have no idea what to expect. When my boyfriends have not been loving or kind or caring and I felt disappointed, I blamed me for being greedy and selfish. I told myself I was wrong for wanting more than I was getting, like I was supposed to be content. Kent told me I was trying to control him when I asked him to call if he was coming home late. I was dumb enough to believe him. I was incredibly naïve. “But look at the good news. I’ve had to become independent and strong. I can work well with change. When things get chaotic, I don’t lose my cool. I’m a good diplomat. I really had to be with my parents. I’m a good mediator in business and I can work with difficult people. I’m a great negotiator. Look at the lifetime of experience I have had keeping peace in my family. Also I learned at an early age to think for myself and to rely on myself. This may surprise you because I know that compared to a lot of others I’ve led a protected life. But I consider myself a survivor.” All that Lisa said was true of her own life and her generation. Others spoke proudly and triumphantly about their achievements and the strength they acquired in having to do things on their own. “Because my parents were so different I learned to navigate my own way in the world,” said Jerry, a thirty-one-year-old stockbroker. “I’ve learned to use my head and my heart. I’m not afraid of what comes along.” Because they learn at an early age that their parents’ values could differ sharply, children of divorce learn to think for themselves. Their independent thinking extends into learning not to take sides in any continued warfare between their parents.

• From The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce: A 25-Year Landmark Study (2000)

  Mostly they wanted their children to have protected years, which as loving parents they could relive with them and through them and enjoy vicariously. Children were also welcome because, despite their own experiences, the women and men felt that children would strengthen the marital bond. Women who missed their fathers while growing up treasured watching their husbands care for and interact with their children. Their yearning for the “dad I never had” was vanquished in part by seeing the smiles on their children’s faces as Daddy walked through the door and by the squeals of laughter that accompanied games of horsy or piggyback. For women, the decision to have a child was also mixed because it brought up again the issue of whether or not they could trust their husbands to be there. In fact, a fifth of the children were born out of wedlock, and none of the women in this group was in a stable or even a good relationship during the pregnancy. Most of these single mothers are having a very difficult time. Only a few have found stable partners and they are not working in jobs that pay well. After one or more abortions, they had decided to bring the child to term. Most had wanted a baby since early adolescence to offset their loneliness. These women spoke about their children with great love, and the ones I saw were well cared for at great sacrifice by mothers who had only a little help from their families. For the women who had children within a marriage, several obsessed about whether they should take their husband’s name because in the case of divorce, they reasoned, he might be more likely to provide support for a child that bore his name. The decision of some women to quit work full-time was also colored by their fear of relying on the continued presence of their husband to provide for the family. They also struggled with how many children to have. Most opted for one or two. A few had three. Every part of their lives—in love, marriage, and parenthood—evoked new promises and old disappointments. The men spoke of their growing wish to become fathers in the context of their relationships. One young man told me, “I think I’m finally ready to be a doting father.” Unlike men from intact families, they did not take fatherhood for granted.

• From Memoirs of Hadrian (1951)

  I succeeded in maintaining order in Syria, but could see flame in the eyes of beggars sitting at the doors of the synagogues, and mute sneers on the heavy lips of the camel drivers, a hatred which after all we did not merit. The Jews and Arabs had made common cause from the beginning against a war which threatened to ruin their commerce; but Israel took advantage of the times to throw itself against a world from which it was excluded by its religious frenzies, its strange rites, and the intransigence of its god. The emperor, returned with all speed to Babylon, delegated Quietus to chastise the rebel cities: Gyrene, Edessa, Seleucia, great Greek centers of the Orient, were set on fire as punishment for treasons planned at mere caravan stops or contrived and directed from Jewries. Some time later, in visiting these cities for reconstruction, I passed beneath colonnades in ruins and between rows of broken statues. The emperor Osro�s, who had subsidized these revolts, immediately took the offensive; Abgar rose up in resistance to re-enter demolished Edessa; our Armenian allies, on whom Trajan had thought he could depend, lent a helping hand to the Persian war lords. Without warning, the emperor found himself at the center of an immense field of battle where he had to face the enemy on all sides. He wasted the winter in the siege of Hatra, a virtually impregnable fortress situated in the heart of a desert; it cost our army some thousands of deaths. His stubbornness became more and more a form of personal courage: this ailing man would not let go. I knew from Plotina that Trajan still refused to name his heir, in spite of the admonition of a brief paralytic attack. If this imitator of Alexander were to die, in his turn, of fever or intemperance in some unhealthy corner of Asia this foreign war would be complicated by civil war; a struggle to the death would break out between my supporters and those of Celsus or of Palma. Suddenly reports ceased almost completely; the thin line of communication between the emperor and me was maintained only by the Numidian bands of my worst enemy. It was at this period that I ordered my physician for the first time to mark with red ink on my chest the position of my heart; if it came to the worst, I did not intend to fall, alive, into Lusius Quietus' hands. The difficult task of pacifying the adjacent islands and provinces was now added to the other duties of my office, but the exhausting work of daytime was nothing in comparison with the length of the restless nights. All the problems of the empire fell upon me at once, but my own plight weighed upon me even more. I desired the supreme power. I desired it that I might put my own plans into effect, try my remedies, and restore peace.

• From The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce: A 25-Year Landmark Study (2000)

  But as children they did not mention these events and as adults they did not recall such dinners in their memories of growing up. Even the children in the remarried families did not talk about their family dinners together except early on in the remarriage when the children wondered where the new stepparent would sit and whether he would occupy Dad’s or Mom’s vacant place. Somehow these occasions lacked the symbolic power of belonging to a family, as they did for children in intact homes. A Sense of History WITH THE VISION of a mom and dad at either end of a dinner table, I said to Gary, “Tell me about your folks.” Gary leaned back and stretched out his long legs. Suddenly he jumped up, went over to the piano, and brought back a framed photograph. “This will help to explain it,” he said, handing it to me. “It’s my favorite picture of my parents.” Taken when Gary’s parents were in their twenties, the father was leaning casually against a tree, his head thrown back, laughing. He was tall and fair, with tightly curled blond hair, and he wore sideburns, which were then very fashionable. Gary’s mother was much shorter than her husband and had very dark, exotic, Barbra Streisand—like looks. She was standing in profile, both hands around one of her husband’s arms, looking intently up at him. “That’s kind of how they are,” Gary continued, as both of us gazed at the photo. “They’re so different but I think that’s what brought them together, being really different. Later on, though, it caused a lot of friction.” He set the picture on the coffee table in front of us. “I’d like to hear about them.” Gary then launched into a detailed description of his parents’ courtship—who said what, when, and where, almost as if he’d been a fly on the wall. As he talked, I mentally added him to the growing list of other children from intact families who recounted similar courtship stories. They described how their parents decided to have children, a fact (or myth) that was important because it cemented their sense of being wanted from the outset. In hearing these stories, I realized again how much these young adults saw themselves within the context of their family’s history—and how children of divorce did not share this feeling. If the latter knew the story of their parents’ courtship, they didn’t mention it spontaneously. It probably would have been painful for them to think about. In some interviews, children of divorce asked me to repeat what they’d said at earlier meetings as if to turn the pages of an imaginary family photo album, enabling them to reconnect with the past. The loss of continuity with family history is a consequence of divorce that we have overlooked.

• From The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce: A 25-Year Landmark Study (2000)

  The child of divorce is thought to experience one huge loss of the intact family after which stability and a second, happier marriage comes along. But this is not what happens to most children of divorce. They experience not one, not two, but many more losses as their parents go in search of new lovers or partners. Each of these “transitions” (as demographers call them) throws the child’s life into turmoil and brings back painful reminders of the first loss. National studies show that the more transitions there are, the more the child is harmed because the impact of repeated loss is cumulative. 1 The prevalence of this instability in the lives of these children hasn’t been properly weighed or even recognized by most people. While we do have legal records of second, third, and fourth remarriages and divorces, we have no reliable count of how many live-in or long-term lovers a child of divorce will typically encounter. Children observe each of their parents’ courtships with a mixture of excitement and anxiety. For adolescents, the erotic stimulation of seeing their parents with changing partners can be difficult to contain. Several young teenage girls in the study began their own sexual activity when they observed a parent’s involvement in a passionate affair. Children and adolescents watch their parents’ lovers, with everything from love to resentment, hoping for some clue about the future. They participate actively as helper, critic, and audience and are not afraid to intervene. One mother returning home from a date found her school-age children asleep in her bed. Since they’d told her earlier that they didn’t like her boyfriend, she took the hint. Many new lovers are attentive to the children, regularly bringing little gifts. But even the most charming lovers can disappear overnight. Second marriages with children are much more likely to end in divorce than first marriages. Thus the child’s typical experience is not one marriage followed by one divorce, but several or sometimes many relationships for both their mother and father followed by loss or by eventual stability. 2 Karen’s experience is typical of many that I have seen. Her father’s second wife, who was nice to the children, left without warning three years into the marriage. After she was gone, her father had four more girlfriends who caused him a great deal of suffering when they also left. Karen’s mother had three unhappy love affairs prior to her remarriage, which ended after five years. Obviously Karen and her siblings experienced more than “one divorce.” Their childhoods were filled with a history of new attachments followed by losses and consequent distress for both parents. Karen’s brother, at age thirty, told me: “What is marriage? Only a piece of paper and a piece of metal. If you love someone, it breaks your heart.” In this study, only 7 of the original 131 children experienced stable second marriages in which they had good relationships with a stepparent and stepsiblings on both sides of the divorced family.

• From Memoirs of Hadrian (1951)

  In case of disaster they would know how to rally round me the fidelity of a part of the army. My adversaries would have to reckon with the presence of this aged sufferer from gout, who was setting forth only in order to serve me, and with this woman who could exact of herself the long endurance of a soldier. I watched them depart, the emperor on horseback, firm and admirably placid, the patient group of women borne in litters, Praetorian guards mingled with the Numidian scouts of the redoubtable Lusius Quietus. The army, which had passed the winter on the banks of the Euphrates, moved forward as soon as its chief arrived; the Parthian campaign was beginning in earnest. First reports were magnificent: Babylon conquered, the Tigris crossed, Ctesiphon fallen. Everything, as always, gave way before the astonishing mastery of this man. The prince of Characene Arabia declared his allegiance, opening thus the entire course of the Tigris to the Roman barges. The emperor embarked for the port of Charax at the head of the Persian Gulf. He was nearing the fabled shores. My fears persisted, but I hid them like something criminal; to be right too soon is to be in the wrong. Worse still, I was beginning to doubt my judgment; had I been guilty of that base incredulity which keeps us from recognizing the grandeur of a man whom we know too well? I had forgotten that certain beings shift the boundaries of destiny and alter history thereby. I had uttered blasphemy against the Genius of the emperor. I was consumed with anxiety at my post: if by chance the impossible were to take place, was I to play no part? Since everything is always easier than to exercise common sense, the desire seized me to don once more the coat of mail of the Sarmatian wars, using Plotina's influence to have myself recalled to the army. I envied the least of our soldiers their lot on the dusty roadways of Asia and the shock of their encounter with Persia's mailed battalions. This time the Senate voted the emperor the right to celebrate not one triumph but a succession of triumphs which would last as long as he lived. I myself did what the occasion demanded: I ordered festivities and went to offer sacrifice on the summit of Mount Casius. Suddenly the fire which was smoldering in that land of the Orient burst forth everywhere at one time. The Jewish merchants refused to pay tax at Seleucia; Gyrene straightway revolted, and the Oriental element of the city massacred the Greek element; the roads by which Egyptian grain was brought to our troops were cut by a band of Zealots from Jerusalem; at Cyprus the Greek and Roman residents were seized by the Jewish populace, who forced them to slay each other in gladiatorial combats.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  ‘For God’s sake!’ The reply was desperate, muffled and close at hand. ‘Open the bloody door—please!’ I can only have taken a second to work this out, but already there came the pent-up banging I’d heard before. I crossed the room to a smaller door whose handle I tried and a moment later turned its stiff brass key; it was a door which was rarely locked, but which, gratifyingly, still could be if need be. Charles was not gratified. He had retreated to the other side of what was evidently a little dressing-room, with a chest-of-drawers, an open wardrobe, and a corner washbasin against which he leant, red in the face, his tie and collar undone, a look of both apprehension and fury on his face. He made me think of a boxer, penned in his corner, honour-bound to make a final and fatal sortie. He had no idea who I was. ‘Where’s Lewis?’ Though questioning me he seemed to look through me. He was out of breath. ‘Has Graham gone?’ I went towards him with my arms open, but he stepped forward with no purpose of greeting or reconciliation. He lurched past me, though I turned to support him and in the event merely pawed at his shoulder, and followed him closely into the bedroom. There he grappled with a chair which was lying on its side on the floor; the stooping and the effort seemed too much and I stepped around him to help. ‘Charles, it’s William.’ He took no notice of this until he had righted the chair, and dropped on to it heavily. Then he looked at me silently and intently. ‘They’ve gone,’ he said, after a while in which I squatted in front of him and watched him with an anxious smile. ‘They locked me in there—or Lewis did. He didn’t want me to get involved. Look at this room.’ Already Charles was struggling to his feet, though he reached towards me, and I felt he had gone through a transformation, and while doubting its logic, accepted that I was there. I held his considerable weight against me, while his left arm draped round my shoulders and we tottered towards the bed like a pair of drunks. When we got to it he held out his other arm in an eloquent gesture of amazement and desolation.

• From The Evolution of Beauty: How Darwin's Forgotten Theory of Mate Choice Shapes the Animal World—and Us (2017)

  [image file=image_rsrc3P5.jpg] CHAPTER 11The Queering of Homo sapiensFor decades, those iconic New Yorker couple-in-bed cartoons portrayed exclusively heterosexual couples. Like many American cultural institutions, however, The New Yorker has slowly begun to acknowledge the existence of gay and lesbian couples and to include them in occasional couple-in-bed cartoons. The first ones have been quite prim in comparison to the frequent depictions of postcoital heterosexual couples under rumpled sheets, and, indeed, one of the earliest gay-couple-in-bed cartoons insightfully explored the anxiety surrounding the awkward intercultural negotiation required to bring the simple fact of gay couples sharing a bed into the public conversation. In a brilliant 1999 cartoon by William Haefeli, two men, fully clothed in winter overcoats, are lying next to each other on a smallish, bare mattress among many in a big department store showroom. One man comments to his partner, “I still think we should get a queen-sized mattress—despite the obvious jokes it will invite among the sales staff.” Like traditional New Yorker cartoons, the previous chapters on the evolution of human sexuality in this book could be viewed as reinforcing a heteronormative concept of “human nature”—the idea that heterosexuality is the only “natural” human sexual behavior, the only one that is somehow sanctioned by evolutionary science. However, diversity of sexual preference is a profoundly human characteristic that must be accounted for in any natural history of human desire. Sexual diversity poses distinct challenges to evolutionary explanation. How can evolution account for sexual behavior that is not directly related to reproduction—sperm meets egg? One of the most exciting aspects of this emerging theory of aesthetic evolution is the possibility that it sheds light on this enduring mystery of variation in human sexual desire. Understanding the origin of variations in sexual desire requires that we focus specifically on the evolution of the subjective desires of individuals—that is, the individual aesthetic experiences of sexual attraction. I will not be talking here about the evolution of sexual identity—that is, the conceptual categories of heterosexuality, homosexuality, bisexuality, and so on. The idea that sexual behavior is a marker or definition of a person’s identity is actually a quite modern, cultural invention—perhaps only 150 years old. Because we live in a society that is accustomed to conceiving of sexual behavior in terms of sexual identity, we tend to think that sexual identity categories are biologically real and, therefore, require scientific explanation. The problem is that scientific research on the origin of “homosexuality” seeks to explain the evolution of a social construct. As David Halperin, professor of English at the University of Michigan, explained to me, “Proposing a theory about the evolution of homosexuality is like proposing a theory of the evolution of hipsters or yuppies!” Sure enough, an ample scientific literature on the “evolution of homosexuality” gets this issue mostly wrong and has undermined itself as a result.

• From The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce: A 25-Year Landmark Study (2000)

  This is far and beyond what most adolescents are expected to achieve. Given the normal challenges of growing up—which they had to accomplish on their own—it’s no surprise that children of divorce get waylaid by ill-fated love affairs and similar derailments. Most are well into their late twenties and thirties before they graduate into adulthood. My analysis may not seem to match the pseudomaturity exhibited by many children of divorce who often appear on a fast track to adulthood. Compared with youngsters from more protected families, they get into the trappings of adolescent culture at an earlier age. Sex, drugs, and alcohol are rites of passage into being accepted by an older crowd. At the same time, they’re independent and justifiably proud of their ability to make their own decisions and to advise their parents. But let’s not be fooled by the swagger. The developmental path from adolescence into adulthood is thrown out of sync after divorce. Many children of divorce can’t get past adolescence because they cannot bring closure to the normal process of separating from their parents. In the normal course of adolescence, children spend several years in a kind of push and pull pas de deux with their parents, slowly weaning themselves from home. But Karen hardly experienced this separation process. By the time she left for college at age eighteen, she was still tied to her parents by her needs and theirs. And she was not alone. By late adolescence most children of divorce are more tied to their parents and paradoxically more eager to let go than their peers in intact families. Like the folk story of Brer Rabbit and the Tar Baby, the divorce is as sticky as the tar that held the rabbit. The young people want out but can’t move on because of unfinished business at home. Children of divorce are held back from adulthood because the vision of it is so frightening. From the outset, they are more anxious and uncomfortable with the opposite sex and it’s harder for them to build a relationship and gradually give it time to develop. Feeling vulnerable, bewildered, and terribly alone, and driven by biology and social pressures, these young men and women throw themselves into a shadow play of the real thing involving sex without love, passion without commitment, togetherness without a future. (We’ll explore what happens to children of divorce who marry impulsively and early marriages in Chapter 14.) The fact that Karen and others were able to turn their lives around is very good news for all of us who have been worried about the long-term effects of divorce on children. It sometimes took many years and several failed relationships, but close to half of the women and over a third of the men in our study were finally able to create a new template with themselves in starring roles. They did it the hard way— by learning from their own experience. They got hurt, kept going, and tried again.

• From The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce: A 25-Year Landmark Study (2000)

  For children, divorce is a watershed that permanently alters their lives. The world is newly perceived as a 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. Karen confirmed this change in several of our follow-up interviews. Ten years after her parents’ divorce, I learned that she was attending the University of California at Santa Cruz so that she could run home on weekends and be available for crises. And there were plenty of those, mostly involving both her younger brother and sister. When she was twenty, she told me angrily, “Since their divorce I’ve been responsible for both my parents. My dad became a pathetically needy man who always wants a woman to take care of him. I’m the backup when his girlfriends leave him. My mom is still a mess, always involved with the wrong kind of men. I’ve had to take care of them as well as my brother and sister.”

• From The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce: A 25-Year Landmark Study (2000)

  Some terrible loss will change my life, and it only gets worse as things get better for me. Maybe that’s the permanent result of my parents’ divorce. Gavin says I’m always waiting for the other shoe to drop. I’ve learned to contain it. I no longer wake up in terror when I go to sleep happy, but this feeling does not ever go away.” “So how did you make up your mind to marry him?” I asked. “Well, it’s strange, but a near catastrophe made me change my mind. Gavin was in Nashville, giving a talk, and on the drive home was caught in a freak ice storm. He got pulled off the road in the middle of nowhere by the highway patrol and couldn’t get to a phone for eight hours. I was home, waiting for him, hearing about all sorts of fatal accidents on the roads. I was beside myself. Anything could have happened to him.” “You must have been scared out of your mind.” “Oh, yes,” said Karen. “It was ghastly. I just knew it was the disaster that I always expected and that it would blow my life away. But something really important happened to me at the same time. I realized that whether we married or not, life is always chancy. If I marry him, I might lose him. If I don’t marry him, I might lose him. So I could lose him either way. And that’s when I realized that I want to hold on to Gavin for the rest of my life and for whatever happens. I said yes, let’s get married.” Smiling at her calculation, I said, “So you decided to take a chance, to reach out for what you really want?” “That’s right, although it’s still hard for me to know what I want. But I’ve learned what I don’t want. I don’t want another edition of my relationship with Nick or with my mom or dad.” “And what do you want?” “I want a lover and a husband. I’m no longer frantic to find just anybody. I’m no longer afraid to be alone. I can stand on my own two feet.” Her last words were unforgettable. She seemed to be talking more to herself and only partly to me. “My co-workers say that I have an old soul. I’ve always felt that I would die young, that so much unhappiness was compressed into the early part of my life that it made sense. But maybe the second half of my life is the part that I will enjoy more. I never had a childhood. I always took care of everything.” A smile broke across her face. “You know, I like the kind of woman I’m becoming. I love the man I’m marrying. I like my kindness and my sensitivity. I love my work. I’m on a good path.

• From Etched in Sand (2013)

  Vibrant flowers bursting in pink, orange, and yellow surround her—a contrast to the brown lawn and bushes that are dry and barren from the winter. I take in the breadth of the house; how ordinary it is: yellow shingles and weathered wooden shutters with nailed-in plastic cutout images of horses and buggies. I notice the cracked cement of the driveway; the neglected trees and bushes that are years overdue for trimming. I exit the car and cross the street slowly, ignoring my nervousness in order to open the chain-linked gate and walk the broken path to the front door. This close to the flower beds, I see that the clusters of silky color are artificial bouquets stuck upright in the frosted soil. I step toward the front door—protected by an exterior storm door framed with Police Youth League and Jesus and Mary decals. Jesus’ face is plastered on stickers representing every phase of his life, and as I move to open the storm door, the inner door suddenly opens. A woman shrunken by age appears. She’s wearing a flowered knee-length day dress, slippers, and a tightly sprayed white bouffant. “Regina?” she asks. “Yes. Hello, Julia.” She opens the door and moves to me on the porch. I stay still while, with wide eyes, she examines me—first my hair, then my face and my clothes . . . then finally my hand as she takes it in hers. Suddenly, her small frame opens, her arms stretching in an invitation for me to walk into them for a hug. I freeze: it’s almost too much to take in. By the look on her face, it’ll be devastating for her if I refuse, so I fix my arms around her in a political hug—a guarded non-embrace. For a moment we remain this way—Julia, breathing me in; and me, telling myself it’s safe to soften to her affection. Finally, she moves away but keeps a gentle hold on the sleeve of my coat. “Go on, dear,” she says. “Please, make yourself at home.” Passing through the front door to the living room, I look in at the worn carpeted steps leading to the second floor. It’s as if I’m outside of myself, watching a movie of this moment: I recognize all of this place. I know what lies up those stairs—three bedrooms and a yellow bathroom. My eyes move toward the dining area with its oval table and the plastic-covered chair they used to sit me in, propped up on phone books and pillows so I could reach the table. If I walk through the dining room, I’ll find the kitchen, with a yellow and brown linoleum floor, a small stove tucked in the corner, and the large window above the sink where I used to bathe.

• From Etched in Sand (2013)

  I wish I could debate with her, but the fact is a towel’s probably the best we’ve got. We’ve been trying to get her to sleep on her own, rather than with Camille or me, so enticing her with the mattress as opposed to a less comfortable box spring should help our efforts. I reach into her garbage bag and pull out a polyester romper that I used to wear when I was about the same age. It has blue shorts with a cuff and a light blue sleeveless button-down top that’s attached to the shorts. Rosie steps in through the unbuttoned neck opening as I hold it up. We button it up together, taking turns. Then I pull her hair back to help cool her face, fastening it with a rubber band I’d had on my wrist. I kiss her forehead and pat her tummy. “Go help Camille and Norm find money. I’ll be down in a minute.” Rosie’s long ponytail sways back and forth with her skip. The dirt that’s collected in the folds behind her knees and her black-bottomed feet make me cringe as I try to recall the last time any of us bathed in a real bathtub. (Gas station sinks don’t count.) Rosie disappears around the corner and descends the stairs to join the hunt for our dinner fare. I fold her pajamas, put them on her bed for later, then move from room to room, opening up the windows in an attempt to cool off the floor. Somehow, I resolve, we’ll get to eat and sleep tonight. At a skinny five-foot-two, Camille and I are the same size. Her thick brown hair curls from the summer heat, framing her round face and almond eyes. “Look what I found stuffed into one of Cookie’s bras,” Camille says, unwrinkling a five-dollar food stamp. I squish my nose. Her bra ? “It’s a wonder it survived. Have you checked the basement?” Camille reasons that five dollars will be enough to get us through the grocery store without creating any suspicion. We know that kids as disheveled as we are will be pegged as shoplifters; but also, if we don’t act correctly they’ll suspect worse: that we’re unsupervised. Then the store manager will call in the police, then the police will bring in child welfare agents, and the agents will instantly see through our lies and realize that we are on our own. We’ll lose any control that we have over our lives . . . and worse, we’ll lose Rosie and Norm. No matter what horrible circumstances Cookie dumps us into, it will always be better than being separated and put into foster care. Over the years, Camille and I have perfected our food-shopping routine because we understand the consequences of any possible misstep. By now it’s three in the afternoon, and all the children’s shows are for kids younger than Rosie. I turned the TV knob to our favorite soap opera, General Hospital .

• From Etched in Sand (2013)

  One day, while I am eating the school’s free breakfast, Mrs. Young crouches next to my cafeteria table. “Would you like to come with me to the office?” she asks, and I oblige her, feeling safe that we have the same thing in mind. Together with the principal, we fill out registration forms for Norman, Rosie, and me so we can get credit and finish out the school year. The only thing that will get you out of your situation is to stay in school, Regina. I remember Ms. Van Dover’s words, so I perform well on Mrs. Young’s tests and participate not like my life depends on it, but because my life depends on it. I keep to myself during free time so that none of my classmates will ever ask to come to my house. When Mrs. Young sees me reading at recess, she gives me work sheets to practice long division and encourages me to take a stab at the challenge questions in our science books. The more work I have, the safer I feel. Holding it together with a job is stressing Cookie to proportions we’ve never seen before. Making it worse is the fact that summer’s fast approaching, and the taste of independence that Cherie and Camille had living on their own is inspiring them to lash out. “I’ve got five kids, a household to manage, and a paycheck to keep!” Cookie says. “And now you sluts want to give me attitude?” Cookie stays out all night at bars or rolls out of bed just as we’re heading out the door to school. On the rare occasion she’s home when we are, the beatings are guaranteed and more brutal than ever. We all go into full-fledged survival mode and stay out of the house as much as we can when she’s home. On the school bus, Camille adopts the nickname “Dancing Queen,” swaying and boogying to kids’ boom boxes and starting impromptu dance parties, in an attempt to preserve her fast-fleeting days as a teenager. When I ask her whether she ever flirts with boys when she goes to dances at the community youth center, she looks at me dubiously. “Haven’t you seen how Cookie behaves with men?” she says. “Believe me, I’m not dancing to meet boys. I dance so I can be me. It’s the only time I can really be a teenager.” One night, I pray Camille will have beat me home when it takes me until almost seven to arrive from school. Instead I open the front door to find chicken cutlets frying on the stove, and Cookie, who turns to me with her eyes blazing. “Where the hell were you?” she says. I hesitate, until I blurt it out. “I was looking for my coat.” She burns holes through me with her eyes, spurring me to share more. “It disappeared from my locker today.” “Good goddamn job, you dumb shit. It’s gonna be a cold, wet April.

• From Etched in Sand (2013)

  Alan tells me that the call at three o’clock Geraldine has is with President Clinton’s New Americans committee. “She’s a big supporter of mine, Regina. All you have to do is fax her a memo, then go down there and walk her through it. Give her all the data she requested. Anything extra you know about these ethnic leaders, include it. We have two hours. I’ll put you in a cab so you can meet her at her office to go over the list.” “Meet her?” I feel sweat break out of the pores in my scalp. “Alan, I can easily do that over the phone.” Alan looks at me sternly. “Regina, get in a cab and go over to meet her. This opportunity will never come again.” Spring flowers blossom on the trees along the route our taxi takes from our office across from City Hall straight up toward SoHo, to Lafayette Street. Geraldine Ferraro’s office sits on the top floor of a quaint redbrick building with a black awning over her son’s restaurant, Cascabel. As her no-nonsense secretary eyes me from her desk, I begin outwardly perspiring. The harder I focus on controlling my rising nervousness, the harder it exits my pores. I breathe inconspicuously, deeply in and out, and begin counting to calm myself, watching Geraldine through the glass window into her office. Inside the sunny, warm-toned room she moves about assuredly and with grace, her voice rising only once on the phone. It hits me: meeting Geraldine Ferraro is like meeting Amelia Earhart. Geraldine is a woman who’s blazed trails in the face of the barriers women in politics—and in society—have faced, paying no mind to the thousands of critics who wanted her to fail. She persevered, believing that fighting and being defeated would be better than not fighting at all; but here she is, right in front of me, wearing a soft peach-toned turtleneck scented with something close to Chanel, pearl earrings, and a smile spread across her perfectly proportioned face. “Regina,” she says. “Please. Come in.” Finally able to focus on our work, I’ve ceased my sweating episode. After a few minutes of going over the list together, Geraldine leans forward over her desk and asks me: “Regina, would you mind staying and participating in my call?” “Your call . . . with the White House?” “Yes. I’m just thinking—you seem much more comfortable discussing the individuals on this list than I am.” I try to think of some reason I need to run back to the office, then I remember Alan’s words: This opportunity will never come again. She directs me away from her desk to the couch in her sitting area, taking a seat across the coffee table in a sturdy armchair.

• From The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce: A 25-Year Landmark Study (2000)

  Children of divorce need more time to grow up because they have to accomplish more: they must simultaneously let go of the past and create mental models for where they are headed, carving their own way. Those who succeed deserve gold medals for integrity and perseverance. Having rejected their parents as role models, they have to invent who they want to be and what they want to achieve in adult life. This is far and beyond what most adolescents are expected to achieve. Given the normal challenges of growing up—which they had to accomplish on their own—it’s no surprise that children of divorce get waylaid by ill-fated love affairs and similar derailments. Most are well into their late twenties and thirties before they graduate into adulthood. My analysis may not seem to match the pseudomaturity exhibited by many children of divorce who often appear on a fast track to adulthood. Compared with youngsters from more protected families, they get into the trappings of adolescent culture at an earlier age. Sex, drugs, and alcohol are rites of passage into being accepted by an older crowd. At the same time, they’re independent and justifiably proud of their ability to make their own decisions and to advise their parents. But let’s not be fooled by the swagger. The developmental path from adolescence into adulthood is thrown out of sync after divorce. Many children of divorce can’t get past adolescence because they cannot bring closure to the normal process of separating from their parents. In the normal course of adolescence, children spend several years in a kind of push and pull pas de deux with their parents, slowly weaning themselves from home. But Karen hardly experienced this separation process. By the time she left for college at age eighteen, she was still tied to her parents by her needs and theirs. And she was not alone. By late adolescence most children of divorce are more tied to their parents and paradoxically more eager to let go than their peers in intact families. Like the folk story of Brer Rabbit and the Tar Baby, the divorce is as sticky as the tar that held the rabbit. The young people want out but can’t move on because of unfinished business at home. Children of divorce are held back from adulthood because the vision of it is so frightening. From the outset, they are more anxious and uncomfortable with the opposite sex and it’s harder for them to build a relationship and gradually give it time to develop. Feeling vulnerable, bewildered, and terribly alone, and driven by biology and social pressures, these young men and women throw themselves into a shadow play of the real thing involving sex without love, passion without commitment, togetherness without a future. (We’ll explore what happens to children of divorce who marry impulsively and early marriages in Chapter 14.)

• From The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce: A 25-Year Landmark Study (2000)

  As Gary spoke, I could see before me the similarities and differences between him and children of divorce. Like all young men and women, Gary stood at the threshold of marriage with trepidation. His anxiety was increased by his awareness of his parents’ unhappiness, and it is no accident that he was flooded with images of their troubles at a time when he was ready to commit to Sara. He loved her but was scared by his parents’ lifelong unhappiness. But he stopped in his tracks only briefly. He also had a competing image that was equally powerful of his mother and father working closely together as a team on behalf of their children. He had a storehouse of memories of both parts of his parents’ marriage. Their unhappiness frightened him. But he also knew a lot about the skills and compromises that they made in order to keep the marriage afloat. These observations underlie his resolution, which he called an epiphany—that if he wanted a good marriage it would take hard work. School for SpousesADULTS RAISED IN intact families have been to “marriage school” alongside their academic learning. By the time they reach adulthood, they figure they’re as prepared as they will ever be to build their own family. They have watched their parents carefully, observing them in many moods, in different settings at different times, in sickness and in health. They have seen them use humor in tense situations to tide them over and watched them read each other’s moods and body language to distinguish a minor upset from an incoming storm. One colleague, Paul Amato from Pennsylvania State University, has proposed that the main difference between adults raised in intact families and those in divorce is that the latter lack social skills. But it’s more than social skills. Those raised in an intact family understand the marriage’s context. They know that to make a marriage work amid today’s pressures, you have to keep it front and center in your mind at all times. Nobody wanted a marriage just like their parents. There are big generational differences. All of the men and women in the comparison group wanted a freer, more equal relationship than their parents had, even if it meant more arguments. They all expected that the wives would work, which made a huge difference in their roles and especially in their parenting. But the children raised in intact marriages used their parents’ marriages as a model that they could shape to their liking. They did not doubt the very existence of a happy marriage, even if their parents failed to attain it. The lack of observations and memories of a working marriage is a serious handicap for children of divorce in learning to live closely with another person and striking the balance that both need. It’s like becoming a dancer without ever having seen a dance.

• From The Swimming-Pool Library (1988)

  A tongue of white chewing-gum, rough with grit, had welded itself to the rubber and squelched into a curl under the step of the heel. It was surprisingly difficult to detach—and I had a certain revulsion from it, and reluctance to touch it. So with drunken insouciance I remained, leaning on Phil’s bunched shoulder, one flamingo leg drawn up, and spoke quite seriously about the British Museum, outside whose bleak north entrance we were standing. On a huge pillar above our heads a poster advertised the Egyptian galleries, with a number of aproned, broken-nosed pharaohs standing stonily, but rather pathetically, in a row. As I spoke of Charles’s relief of Akhnaten Phil actually started giggling, and only giggled more when I told him to fuck off. ‘If you really cared you’d get this stuff off for me,’ I said. ‘At the one time I need help, you refuse it to me.’ He was not quite sure of the rhetorical conventions now, but muttering ‘Oh, give it here’ grabbed my foot and jerked it upwards, so that I hopped round involuntarily and hung on his neck. I don’t know how slow I was to realise that we were being watched. Certainly my eyes dwelled incuriously on the far pavement for several seconds and though I took in a figure waiting under one of the gently stirring young trees I did so abstractly, and focused all sensation in my hands on Phil’s cropped neck. To the watcher we must have been a well-lit and enigmatic group. I looked away as Phil flung down my foot, but still embraced him while he groped for a handkerchief, a quiver of protective anxiety ruffling my sexy, complacent mood. Two seconds later, the figure had moved. I was slow again to spot him, now further off, under the next tree, and screened to chest height by cars parked at meters along the middle of the street. His act was to be going away, disarming the suspicion he had aroused in me. Or perhaps he did not know he had been seen. He was looking back again now, but still moving, sidling inexpertly under a street-lamp. Then I quickly led Phil away, keeping him turned in towards me, my arm and hand oppressively around his shoulder, so that he was squashed and stumbling against me. But there could be no doubt who it was. It gave me a shock but also the pleasure of a bitter little nodding to myself in recognition of what was afoot. ‘Right!’ I thought, and then, after turning quickly at the corner to look back—but there were other people on the street now, and the distance was all a pattern of shadows—more or less forgot about it for the rest of the night. I was too taken up with the honest but slightly unworthy excitement of coming back to my old haunt with such a luscious piece of goods as Phil.

• From Untrue (2018)

  Still, I couldn’t help imagining jealous scenes and drama. I was wrong; I later learned that polyamorous people, swingers, and those in open relationships “generally report high levels of relationship satisfaction and happiness” and “do not experience any more jealousy in their relationships than monogamists do.” But what about the practical aspects of a life lived polyamorously or even “just” openly? Polyamory is an underdog when it comes to institutions as concrete as those that issue marriage licenses and as abstract as the monogamy-industrial complex, which produces dozens of books and thousands of therapy sessions and many conferences every year on how to survive the searing betrayal of an affair. Parents feel exhausted. Mothers of young children are still more likely to be primary caregivers and have less access to the field of play, so to speak, than fathers of young children do. How can we possibly balance the demands of careers with the demands of our unleashed libidos? And the emotional complexity of multiple involvements? The psychiatrist, sex therapist, and author of Love Worth Making, Stephen Snyder, MD, later told me that of the people in his practice who had open marriages over the years, most were either gay men or “older couples with the time, energy, and maturity for such [complicated negotiations], and whose kids have left the house.” (He winkingly added that he had no doubt the next sexual revolution would be fueled by retirees.) Polyamory, consensual non-monogamy, and open relationships might be nice for idealists with flexible schedules and time on their hands, I found myself thinking. But for the rest of us, it hardly seemed realistic. And all this stuff about transparency and being honest, about ethical non-monogamy and its standard of relentless candor, which Atlantic columnist Hugo Schwyzer notes is “the non-negotiable admission price to liberation” in CNM, raised red flags for me. My inner graduate student, a 1990s Foucauldian, saw and still sees mandatory disclosure—principled and ethical as it may be—as a form of social control. What made it any better, in the end, than telling women they had to be monogamous? It smacked of puritanism too: in embracing consensual non-monogamy, which a recent study found more than 20 percent of US adults have done at some point, it was as if we Americans needed to repent and confess at the very same time we were sinning. It also offended my sense of privacy, somehow, in ways I wasn’t sure I wanted to consider too deeply, and in ways that were related to my sense that if I was going to be a slut, I didn’t want someone telling me how to do it ethically. Isn’t part of the whole point of sluttiness the thrilling freedom of saying “Fuck you” to ethics? Why didn’t these people just get out of my bedroom already, I wondered crankily.

• From In the Dream House (2019)

  There are no hallucinations, exactly, except for a strange buzzing on the edge of your hearing, like, your friend observes, cicadas at the height of summer. The buzzing isn’t there, of course; your minds are simply imbuing the silence. You could go mad if you stay here too long, you think. Your mind would fill in the gaps and the blanks and God knows what it would fill them with. What happens when there are no echoes, here in this underground crypt? You clap and clap but nothing answers back. Dream House as Generation StarshipEventually, everyone forgets. That’s the worst part, maybe. It’s been so long since anyone’s seen Earth; so long since that first crew made their way shipward, leaving behind their beloved planet wreathed in smoke and ice. They had to get out—they knew it, everyone knew it, but they were lucky, and found a ship. And they set course to Somewhere Else and settled down, and when they had children they told their children the story of where they used to live. They left out the worst parts, maybe, because even now, surrounded by chrome and glass and stars, the acute bite of the planet’s betrayal has lessened. And by the time they passed on, and the ship was still careening Away, the children of the children of the first crew had only the faintest wisps of understanding of what Used to Be. By the time they got to Somewhere Else (a beautiful planet, with singing stones and citrine trees and soil that smelled like cumin and water you could walk over), no one could even remember why they’d left Earth to begin with. “I suppose it must have been terrible,” they said uncertainly. “We took so much effort to leave. It must have been the worst place.” But that nagging sense of doubt was so profound they eventually gave it a name: Nonstalgia (noun) The unsettling sensation that you are never be able to fully access the past; that once you are departed from an event, some essential quality of it is lost forever. A reminder to remember: just because the sharpness of the sadness has faded does not mean that it was not, once, terrible. It means only that time and space, creatures of infinite girth and tenderness, have stepped between the two of you, and they are keeping you safe as they were once unable to. Dream House as L’esprit de L’escalierWhen I was preparing to fly to Cuba with my brother to see our ancestral home, I discovered that Santa Clara, Cuba—the city where my grandfather was born and raised, where he was once forced to eat a soup made from his pet rooster—is the sister city of Bloomington, Indiana. How was this possible? Of all the cities in the world, how were these two connected by such an arbitrary umbilical cord?