Sadness

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 Hillbilly Elegy (2016)

  This is an opinion shared among many in the actual rural towns of the mountains that I have met.” I knew this because my cousin took to Facebook to silence the critics— noting that only by admitting the region’s problems could people hope to change them. Amber is uniquely positioned to comment on the problems of Appalachia: Unlike me, she spent her entire childhood in Jackson. She was an academic star in high school and later earned a college degree, the first in her nuclear family to do so. She saw the worst of Jackson’s poverty firsthand and overcame it. The angry reaction supports the academic literature on Appalachian Americans. In a December 2000 paper, sociologists Carol A. Markstrom, Sheila K. Marshall, and Robin J. Tryon found that avoidance and wishful-thinking forms of coping “significantly predicted resiliency” among Appalachian teens. Their paper suggests that hillbillies learn from an early age to deal with uncomfortable truths by avoiding them, or by pretending better truths exist. This tendency might make for psychological resilience, but it also makes it hard for Appalachians to look at themselves honestly. We tend to overstate and to understate, to glorify the good and ignore the bad in ourselves. This is why the folks of Appalachia reacted strongly to an honest look at some of its most impoverished people. It’s why I worshipped the Blanton men, and it’s why I spent the first eighteen years of my life pretending that everything in the world was a problem except me. The truth is hard, and the hardest truths for hill people are the ones they must tell about themselves. Jackson is undoubtedly full of the nicest people in the world; it is also full of drug addicts and at least one man who can find the time to make eight children but can’t find the time to support them. It is unquestionably beautiful, but its beauty is obscured by the environmental waste and loose trash that scatters the countryside. Its people are hardworking, except of course for the many food stamp recipients who show little interest in honest work. Jackson, like the Blanton men, is full of contradictions. Things have gotten so bad that last summer, after my cousin Mike buried his mother, his thoughts turned immediately to selling her house. “I can’t live here, and I can’t leave it untended,” he said. “The drug addicts will ransack it.” Jackson has always been poor, but it was never a place where a man feared leaving his mother’s home alone. The place I call home has taken a worrisome turn. If there is any temptation to judge these problems as the narrow concern of backwoods hollers, a glimpse at my own life reveals that Jackson’s plight has gone mainstream.

• From From Shame to Sin: The Christian Transformation of Sexual Morality in Late Antiquity (2013)

  Given the moral and material centrality of prostitution in Roman society, it is noteworthy that so little comment was aroused by the problem of how women became prostitutes. In part this silence is explained by the constant influx of slaves into the sex trade; slaves were social nonbeings whose exploitation was unremarkable. But the silence is more deafening than that. In comparison with other cultures, Roman ideology placed virtually no emphasis on the prostitute’s lust. Prostitution was a bios, a condition of life, not necessarily a result of the woman’s interior constitution. In parallel, the Roman ideology of slavery was equally underdeveloped. Aristotle’s natural slave theory had little purchase in the Roman Empire. Slavery was a fact; it was “an economic and political necessity, and that was that.” The prostitute, similarly, required no deep or elaborate psychopathology. She was an ill-starred creature, like the faceless victim sacrificed for Leucippe.55 What is notable about female sexual morality in the Roman Empire is its resolute constancy. Primitive expectations of the woman’s body endured with little questioning. A woman’s sexual behavior was an organic expression of the role she was assigned in the economy of desire and reproduction. The principal novelty in the imperial era is a heightened awareness of the deep association of social status and moral expectations. This awareness seeped into ordinary consciousness. It is evident, for instance, in an oft-quoted series of rhetorical exercises preserved by the elder Seneca. These ephemera of the Roman schools, such an important organ of socialization in the empire, transmit some of the most primitive and most progressive sentiments to have reached us from the ancient world. One elaborate series revolves around the imaginary dilemmas of a virgin enslaved in a brothel who escapes unstained and wishes to become a priestess. Some orators argued that the mere placement of the girl’s body in the brothel shamed it; others argued that her invincible chastity was all the greater for having triumphed over bad fortune. It would be inadvisable to extract any of these dicta and treat them as the Roman attitude. The exercise was aimed, with pinpoint accuracy, at the fundamental but unstable assumption that status and behavior were aligned. The tension, and even more so a consciousness of the tension, is specifically Roman.56

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

  Billy’s version of the wedding was slightly different. “The wedding was boring. There were all these people I hardly knew drinking too much and acting stupid. They wanted me to make a speech like Dave did.” (Dave was Tom’s fifteen-year-old son from his previous marriage.) “But I was too tired. I was sick the night before and couldn’t sleep. But my mom was too busy partying with Tom to check in with me like she usually does.” In a mixture of concern laced with irritation, Billy’s mother told me about her son’s increasing sullenness and withdrawals. “Billy is ten going on eleven. He’s too old to play the kinds of games we used to play. Anyway, I don’t have the time for that anymore. Tom and I agree that Billy needs to be more independent.” That Billy didn’t agree with this assessment of the state of things was all too clear. “She changed since he came,” he said sadly, referring to his mother and Tom. “She acts silly and laughs a lot and she even sits on his lap,” he said in disgust. “When I talk to her she’s always saying ‘Wait just a sec, hon’”—this said in a syrupy sweet falsetto voice—“and she’s on the phone with him again. He calls from work more than anyone I know. My dad never called from work. He does his work, not play kissy face over the phone!” Billy’s story shows us another way in which changed parent and child relationships can shape a child’s personality through the postdivorce years. Like Paula, Billy lost his mother’s devoted attention immediately after the divorce. But Paula’s mother disappeared because she had to go to work to support the family. Billy’s mother did not go back to work. Her devotion to her child in part reflected her dissatisfaction with her marriage. As she moved into a happier marriage, she expected her son to change with her—invoking the trickle-down theory of happiness that so many people believe in and which I questioned earlier. But Billy did not have the capacity to change. Caught between his inability to hope or to give up hope that his nurturing mother will come back, he comes increasingly to believe that he is unloved and unwanted. Like Paula, he’s angry but instead of lashing out at the world, he turns his frustrations inward. He withdraws into a sullen passivity. And as we’ll see in his later interviews, this passivity comes to dominate his adult life, including his attempts to build intimate relationships with young women—or to avoid them. TWENTY-ONE Children of Divorce A t the twenty-five-year follow-up, Lisa looked smashing. With her dark-rimmed glasses and curly auburn hair cut no-nonsense short and her elegantly tailored suit, she was a model of a poised young businesswoman. After college she went on to earn an M.B.A at Georgetown University and now held a middle management job at a Fortune 500 firm in Columbus, Ohio.

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

  Children from divorced and remarried families are two to three times more likely to be referred for psychological help at school than their peers from intact families. More of them end up in mental health clinics and hospital settings. There is earlier sexual activity, more children born out of wedlock, less marriage, and more divorce. Numerous studies 2 show that adult children of divorce have more psychological problems than those raised in intact marriages. Although many people no longer believe the myth that children always benefit from a divorce that makes parents happier, it continues to exert subtle, unconscious influences on how we think about divorce and our reactions to it. It has encouraged parents to expect that their children will approve their decision. Actually, as you will see in the chapters that follow, this is hardly ever true for children who have not yet reached their teens. It has made it harder for parents to see or believe that their children suffer with fears and sadness after the breakup. And it has made it harder for parents to prepare their children properly for the forthcoming divorce and provide them with the comfort they need. The fact that many men and women get caught up in the search for new lovers or taxing new jobs after divorce—both of which make parents less available to their children—only serves to compound their desire to hold on to this myth. A second myth is based on the premise that divorce is a temporary crisis that exerts its most harmful effects on parents and children at the time of the breakup. People who believe this leap to the happy conclusion that the key to the child’s adjustment is the settlement of conflict without rancor. Thus the spotlight of our attention in terms of resources and interventions has been on the breakup. If the two parents don’t fight, at least in front of the children, and if they rationally and fairly settle the financial, legal, and parenting issues that divide them, why then the crisis will resolve itself in short order. The two lucky adults will have broken free of their troubled marriage and, along with their children, can move forward to build happier lives. The children will resume their usual round of play and school activities.

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

  Although Larry rescued himself, he was helped by his mother’s decision to divorce and her love for him and her dignity during the postdivorce years. She set an example of courage and faithfulness to her children that strengthened her son’s ability to leave. The divorce that she undertook despite her fears and misgivings showed him that getting out was a better, braver way, and he learned from her example and found within himself the power to follow her lead and to leave behind the identity that he might very well have embraced had she remained trapped. An Escape Hatch Blocked WHAT ABOUT THE Carols of this world? Without one parent to help her escape the craziness of her family, what’s in store for her? At the end of our interview, Carol eagerly told me how she’d met Tom, a pilot for a major airline company. She recalled in great detail how their acquaintance progressed from smiles and nods to short conversations, to dates in New York and San Francisco, to their present arrangement in which Tom stays with Carol whenever he has layovers in San Francisco. Then, as Carol chatted on, sounding for all the world like an enamored twenty-three-year-old instead of a forty-year-old who’d slept with over fifty men, my newly optimistic mood took a nosedive. “The thing is that he’s married and he has two children. His family lives in New York and he’s waiting for a good time to break up with his wife. Their marriage hasn’t been good for years and he’d have left long ago if she hadn’t had a second child. I do appreciate how careful Tom’s being. He wants to make sure no one’s hurt or left hanging. I know that when we do get married he’ll be faithful to me. It will be such a relief to live together openly instead of having to keep our relationship secret and feel like we’re sneaking around.” I struggled to keep the dismay I felt from showing. What Carol was describing so blithely was, of course, the oldest story in the book. A man with full family commitments making empty promises that he’d never keep. As long as Carol believed him and tolerated their arrangement, he’d stay. When or if she got too insistent or too unhappy and demanding, he’d probably leave her. The scenario was ancient and obvious.

• From Memoirs of Hadrian (1951)

  There were times, too, when deep within myself I would come upon those vast, melancholy landscapes of Virgil, and his twilights veiled by tears; if I searched deeper still I would encounter the burning sadness of Spain and its stark violence; I reflected upon the varied blood, Celtic, Iberian, Punic perhaps, which must have infiltrated into the veins of those Roman colonists in Italica; I recalled that my father had been surnamed "the African." Greece had helped me evaluate those elements in my nature which were not Greek. Likewise for Antinous: I had made him the very image and symbol of that country so passionate for beauty, and he would be, perhaps, the last of its gods; yet the refinements of Persia and the savagery of Thrace had met in Bithynia with the shepherds of ancient Arcadia; that slightly arched nose recalled profiles of Osroës' pages; the broad visage and high cheekbones were those of the Thracian horsemen who gallop along the shores of the Bosphorus, and who burst forth at night into wild, sad song. No formula is so complete as to contain all. That year I completed the revision of the Athenian constitution, a reform begun by me long before. For the new instrument I went back, in so far as possible, to Cleisthenes' ancient democratic laws. Governmental costs were lightened by reducing the number of officials; I tried, too, to put a stop to the farming of taxes, a disastrous system unfortunately still employed here and there by local administrations. University endowments, established at about the same period, helped Athens to become once more an important center of learning. Beauty lovers who flocked to that city before my time had been content to admire its monuments without concern for the growing poverty of the inhabitants. On the contrary, I had done my utmost to increase the resources of that poor land. One of the great projects of my reign was realized shortly before my departure, the establishment of annual assemblies in Athens wherein delegates from all the Greek world would hereafter transact all affairs for Greece, thus restoring this small, perfect city to its due rank of metropolis. The plan had taken shape only after delicate negotiations with cities jealous of Athens' supremacy and still nursing ancient resentments against her; little by little, however, common sense and even some enthusiasm carried the day.

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

  FOURTEENSex and DrugsIn Larry’s and Carol’s stories I talked a bit about drug and alcohol abuse during adolescence and the astonishing rise in sexual promiscuity among many of the young girls from both chaotic intact and chaotic postdivorce families. But we still have not delved into the heart of these destructive behaviors and what the child gains from them psychologically. Paula shows us the inner logic of running out of control. The next time I saw Paula she was fifteen and looked about twenty-five. She was thin, very attractive, and very, very precocious. Her green eyes, lined with heavy black eyeliner, were bloodshot, whether from her incessant smoking or from some other drug I could not tell. With her black, short, sleeveless dress artfully falling from one shoulder and her legs encased in high red leather boots, she was the picture of what her exasperated mother had warned me of a week earlier: “Don’t be surprised, Judy. She looks like a slut.” With bravado, constantly tossing her long, curly hair into and then out of her eyes, she told me of her numerous boyfriends and of her adventures partying and evading the police and the school authorities. She boasted about being high every day and of the huge quantities of alcohol that she and her friends drank. In describing a confused mixture of sexual exploits and physical fights, she told me, “I give as good as I get.” She looked very tough and seemed utterly lost. I remember being saddened and very troubled by Paula at this time, but I wasn’t surprised. Her mother told me that the trouble started the summer after sixth grade when Paula turned twelve. In the next two years, Paula accumulated a police record for possession of drugs, disrupting the peace, and drinking in public. She had been suspended from school several times for possession of marijuana and for stealing from and harassing other students. She was on her final probation. One day, Paula’s mother unexpectedly came home early from work to find her thirteen-year-old daughter in bed with two seventeen-year-old boys. Screaming, pleading, grounding, and taking away privileges had no effect. Paula stomped out as soon as her mother left for work and returned when she felt like it. At age fifteen, she took her sister’s car and totaled it. Paula was on a tear and out of control. Paula hit adolescence filled with anger about having been abandoned as a little girl. She craved love, attention, and above all, she wanted to be noticed and taken seriously. At the same time, she had long-standing and growing doubts about her value and desirability as a person and as a woman. She was afraid of being alone and had little or no internal sense of direction, confidence, pride in achievement, or ability. She was singularly vulnerable to the dangerous temptations of sex and drugs. She had no reason or resources to resist their lure.

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

  THREEGrowing Up Is HarderOne of the many myths of our divorce culture is that divorce automatically rescues children from an unhappy marriage. Indeed, many parents cling to this belief as a way of making themselves feel less guilty. No one wants to hurt his or her child, and thinking that divorce is a solution to everyone’s pain genuinely helps. Moreover, it’s true that divorce delivers a child from a violent or cruel marriage (which we will soon see in Chapter 7). However, when one looks at the thousands of children that my colleagues and I have interviewed at our center since 1980, most of whom were from moderately unhappy marriages that ended in divorce, one message is clear: the children do not say they are happier. Rather, they say flatly, “The day my parents divorced is the day my childhood ended.” What do they mean? Typically parent and child relationships change radically after divorce—temporarily or, as in Karen’s family, permanently. Ten years after the breakup only one-half of the mothers and one-quarter of the fathers in our study were able to provide the kind of nurturant care that had distinguished their parenting before the divorce. To go back to what Gary said about his parents being “offstage” while he grew up, after a divorce one or both parents often move onto center stage and refuse to budge. The child becomes the backstage prop manager making sure the show goes on. What most parents don’t realize is that their children can be reasonably content despite the failing marriage. Kids are not necessarily overwhelmed with distress because Mommy and Daddy are arguing. In fact, children and adults can cope pretty well in protecting one another during the stress of a failing marriage or unhappy intact marriage. Mothers and fathers often make every effort to shield their marital troubles from their children. It’s only after one or both have decided to divorce that they fight in full view. Children who sense tension at home turn their attention outside, spending more time with friends and participating in school activities. (Gary, whose parents’ marriage was often unhappy, did exactly the same thing.) Children learn at an early age to turn a deaf ear to their parents’ quarrels. The notion that all or even most parents who divorce are locked into screaming conflict that their children witness is plainly wrong. In many unhappy marriages, one or both people suffer for many years in total silence—feeling lonely, sexually deprived, and profoundly disappointed. Most of the children of divorce say that they had no idea their parents’ marriage was teetering on the brink. Although some had secretly thought about divorce or discussed it with their siblings, they had no inkling that their parents were planning to break up. Nor did they understand the reality of what divorce would entail for them.

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

  Fortunately this myth has come under strong attack in recent years with reports from parents, teachers, and researchers like me who found that the children were suffering. The euphoria of the early 1970s soon gave way to a rising tide of concern about the impoverishment of women and children, the high distress among the many parents who did not agree with their spouse that their marriage was on the rocks, and the fact that children did not bounce back quickly. Children in postdivorce families do not, on the whole, look happier, healthier, or more well adjusted even if one or both parents are happier. National studies1 show that children from divorced and remarried families are more aggressive toward their parents and teachers. They experience more depression, have more learning difficulties, and suffer from more problems with peers than children from intact families. Children from divorced and remarried families are two to three times more likely to be referred for psychological help at school than their peers from intact families. More of them end up in mental health clinics and hospital settings. There is earlier sexual activity, more children born out of wedlock, less marriage, and more divorce. Numerous studies2 show that adult children of divorce have more psychological problems than those raised in intact marriages. Although many people no longer believe the myth that children always benefit from a divorce that makes parents happier, it continues to exert subtle, unconscious influences on how we think about divorce and our reactions to it. It has encouraged parents to expect that their children will approve their decision. Actually, as you will see in the chapters that follow, this is hardly ever true for children who have not yet reached their teens. It has made it harder for parents to see or believe that their children suffer with fears and sadness after the breakup. And it has made it harder for parents to prepare their children properly for the forthcoming divorce and provide them with the comfort they need. The fact that many men and women get caught up in the search for new lovers or taxing new jobs after divorce—both of which make parents less available to their children—only serves to compound their desire to hold on to this myth.

• From Hillbilly Elegy (2016)

  Behind the drugs, and the fighting matches, and the financial struggles, these were people with serious problems, and they were hurting. Our neighbors had a kind of desperate sadness in their lives. You’d see it in how the mother would grin but never really smile, or in the jokes that the teenage girl told about her mother “smacking the shit out of her.” I knew what awkward humor like this was meant to conceal because I’d used it in the past. Grin and bear it, says the adage. If anyone appreciated this, Mamaw did. The problems of our community hit close to home. Mom’s struggles weren’t some isolated incident. They were replicated, replayed, and relived by many of the people who, like us, had moved hundreds of miles in search of a better life. There was no end in sight. Mamaw had thought she escaped the poverty of the hills, but the poverty—emotional, if not financial—had followed her. Something had made her later years eerily similar to her earliest ones. What was happening? What were our neighbor’s teenage daughter’s prospects? Certainly the odds were against her, with a home life like that. This raised the question: What would happen to me? I was unable to answer these questions in a way that didn’t implicate something deep within the place I called home. What I knew is that other people didn’t live like we did. When I visited Uncle Jimmy, I did not wake to the screams of neighbors. In Aunt Wee and Dan’s neighborhood, homes were beautiful and lawns well manicured, and police came around to smile and wave but never to load someone’s mom or dad in the back of their cruiser. So I wondered what was different about us—not just me and my family but our neighborhood and our town and everyone from Jackson to Middletown and beyond. When Mom was arrested a couple of years earlier, the neighborhood’s porches and front yards filled with spectators; there’s no embarrassment like waving to the neighbors right after the cops have carted your mother off. Mom’s exploits were undoubtedly extreme, but all of us had seen the show before with different neighbors. These sorts of things had their own rhythm. A mild screaming match might invite a few cracked shutters or peeking eyes behind the shades. If things escalated a bit, bedrooms would illuminate as people awoke to investigate the commotion. And if things got out of hand, the police would come and take someone’s drunk dad or unhinged mom down to the city building. That building housed the tax collector, the public utilities, and even a small museum, but all the kids in my neighborhood knew it as the home of Middletown’s short- term jail.

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

  Adult children of divorce are telling us loud and clear that their parents’ anger at the time of the breakup is not what matters most. Unless there was violence or abuse or unremitting high conflict, they have dim memories of what transpired during this supposedly critical period. Indeed, as youngsters then and as adults now, all would be profoundly astonished to learn that any judge, attorney, mediator—indeed, anyone at all—had genuinely considered their best interests or wishes at the breakup or at any time since. It’s the many years living in a postdivorce or remarried family that count, according to this first generation to come of age and tell us their experience. It’s feeling sad, lonely, and angry during childhood. It’s traveling on airplanes alone when you’re seven to visit your parent. It’s having no choice about how you spend your time and feeling like a second-class citizen compared with your friends in intact families who have some say about how they spend their weekends and their vacations. It’s wondering whether you will have any financial help for college from your college-educated father, given that he has no legal obligation to pay. It’s worrying about your mom and dad for years—will her new boyfriend stick around, will his new wife welcome you into her home? It’s reaching adulthood with acute anxiety. Will you ever find a faithful woman to love you? Will you find a man you can trust? Or will your relationships fail just like your parents’ did? And most tellingly, it’s asking if you can protect your own child from having these same experiences in growing up. Not one of the men or women from divorced families whose lives I report on in this book wanted their children to repeat their childhood experiences. Not one ever said, “I want my children to live in two nests—or even two villas.” They envied friends who grew up in intact families. Their entire life stories belie the myths we’ve embraced.

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

  Caught between his inability to hope or to give up hope that his nurturing mother will come back, he comes increasingly to believe that he is unloved and unwanted. Like Paula, he’s angry but instead of lashing out at the world, he turns his frustrations inward. He withdraws into a sullen passivity. And as we’ll see in his later interviews, this passivity comes to dominate his adult life, including his attempts to build intimate relationships with young women—or to avoid them. B EIGHTEEN The Stepfamily illy was almost fifteen when I drove to Petaluma to meet him for our five-year follow-up. Billy, his mom, and stepfather Tom were now living in a Victorian home in an old section of the city with Tom’s son Dave. Billy also had a new half brother, Mark, who was two years old. We timed it right, for Billy arrived in a friend’s car just as I drove up. Still small for his age, he looked wiry rather than scrawny. I knew from my preliminary phone call to his mother setting up this round of interviews that Billy’s health was still precarious. Any physical exertion could bring on palpitations and shortness of breath. He carried his heart medication with him. In high school, as in previous school years, he had study hall when other students had physical education, and he had special permission to rest in the nurse’s office when he was fatigued. His mother was worried because his few friends tended to be loners and troublemakers rather than kids in the “in” crowd, which revolved around sports. Nevertheless Billy looked better than I had expected. His scowl and sullen attitude were replaced by a teenage awkwardness and tentative smile. Sitting in the large, sunny kitchen before the other family members arrived home, he was articulate for the first time about the divorce and his mother’s remarriage. “All divorces are bad for kids,” he told me. “They make kids do things that they normally wouldn’t do.” “Like what, Billy?” And then Billy told me with shame in his face how he had gotten into trouble in the year and a half since the family moved to Petaluma. “I ripped off some stores. I got caught smoking dope. I had a bad attitude toward my teachers. I fought a lot with my mother.” He looked at me as if to say, “You want to hear more? I’ll give you more.” Instead I asked, “How is this connected with your parents’ divorce?” “I was really angry,” Billy said quickly. “I remember thinking over and over, ‘If you won’t do for me, I’ll make life miserable for everyone.’” “Are you still angry?” Billy shrugged. “Sometimes I am. Sometimes I’m sad. I wish my parents would have tried harder and maybe they could have worked it out.” “Do you think they might still get back together?” Billy looked startled by my question.

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

  Most large studies of divorce are conducted using questionnaires or other survey techniques administered by people who never see those they are questioning. Researchers gather data from large numbers of families and then segregate children into two big categories—from a divorced family or from an intact family. Such “controlled” studies indeed show that children of divorce and those raised in second marriages are a whole lot more troubled than children from intact marriages are. Researchers have found significant differences in learning problems, school drop-out rates, early sexual behavior, incidence of divorce, physical illness, anger toward parents, and a host of other very important social measures. 1 But these large-scale studies, while worrisome, usually don’t answer the questions that parents want answered. And one reason for this is that subgroups (within the larger legally defined samples of divorced versus not divorced families) are not examined separately. If we really want to tease out the long-term effects of divorce on children in contrast to the effects of being raised in a culture where divorce is rampant, we need to look at similar kinds of families in both groupings. For example, some intact families are characterized by enduring love and friendship with a primary commitment to parenting. Some divorced families are characterized by a lasting sense of attachment with a similar commitment to parenting, despite the breakup. These would be roughly comparable. However, some intact families are enmeshed in mutually destructive behavior, driven by alcoholic rages, in which the children are not protected. Similarly, some divorced families suffer the same kind of chaos where the children are not protected either before or after the divorce. Again, these subgroups are worth comparing. The middle group, where parents are very unhappy in the marriage but want to protect their children, is the largest of all, and indeed, this is where the question is hardest to answer. Many parents in our divorce group had marriages that were of “middling” quality but they decided on balance to go their separate ways. And most of the young adults who were raised in intact families in our study described their parents’ marriages the same way—not very happy but they stayed together anyway. Until this study, no one to my knowledge has ever directly compared the experience of growing up in divorced or remarried families with what it’s like to grow up in intact families—yet this is exactly what we, as a society, need to know. Parents want to know how the lives of their children will be different if they decide to stay married or to get a divorce. That said, these young adults did indeed describe three kinds of intact families. At one end of the spectrum are the highly dysfunctional, bordering-on-cruel families revealed by Carol’s story in Chapter 7 .

• From Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption (2014)

  Black defendant and white victim pairings increased the likelihood of a death sentence even more. Many poor and minority victims complained that they were not getting calls or support from local police and prosecutors. Many weren’t included in the conversations about whether a plea bargain was acceptable or what sentence was appropriate. If your family had lost a loved one to murder or had to suffer the anguish of rape or serious assault, your victimization might be ignored if you had loved ones who were incarcerated. The expansion of victims’ rights ultimately made formal what had always been true: Some victims are more protected and valued than others. More than anything else, it was the lack of concern and responsiveness by police, prosecutors, and victims’ services providers that devastated Mozelle and Onzelle. “You’re the first two people to come to our house and spend time with us talking about Vickie,” Onzelle told us. After nearly three hours of hearing their heartbreaking reflections, we promised to do what we could to find out who else was involved in their niece Vickie’s death. — We were getting to the point where, without access to police records and files, we wouldn’t be able to make more progress. Because the case was now pending on direct appeal, the State had no obligation to let us see those records and files. So we decided to file what is known as a Rule 32 petition, which would put us back in a trial court with the opportunity to present new evidence and obtain discovery, including access to the State’s files. Rule 32 petitions are required to include claims that were not raised at trial or on appeal and that could not have been raised at trial or on appeal. They are the vehicle to challenge a conviction based on ineffective counsel, the State’s failure to disclose evidence, and most important, new evidence of innocence. Michael and I put a petition together that asserted all of these claims, including police and prosecutorial misconduct, and filed it in the Monroe County Circuit Court. The document, which alleged that Walter McMillian was unfairly tried, wrongly convicted, and illegally sentenced, drew a lot of attention in Monroeville. Three years had passed since the trial. The initial confirmation of Walter’s conviction on appeal had generated significant press in the community, and most people now felt that Walter’s guilt was a settled matter. All there was left to do was wait for an execution date.

• From Saint Thomas Aquinas Collection (22 Books) (2016)

  Nevertheless we must know that the passions were in Christ otherwise than in us, in three ways. First, as regards the object, since in us these passions very often tend towards what is unlawful, but not so in Christ. Secondly, as regards the principle, since these passions in us frequently forestall the judgment of reason; but in Christ all movements of the sensitive appetite sprang from the disposition of the reason. Hence Augustine says (De Civ. Dei xiv, 9), that “Christ assumed these movements, in His human soul, by an unfailing dispensation, when He willed; even as He became man when He willed.” Thirdly, as regards the effect, because in us these movements, at times, do not remain in the sensitive appetite, but deflect the reason; but not so in Christ, since by His disposition the movements that are naturally becoming to human flesh so remained in the sensitive appetite that the reason was nowise hindered in doing what was right. Hence Jerome says (on Mat. 26:37) that “Our Lord, in order to prove the reality of the assumed manhood, ‘was sorrowful’ in very deed; yet lest a passion should hold sway over His soul, it is by a propassion that He is said to have ‘begun to grow sorrowful and to be sad’”; so that it is a perfect “passion” when it dominates the soul, i.e. the reason; and a “propassion” when it has its beginning in the sensitive appetite, but goes no further. Reply to Objection 1: The soul of Christ could have prevented these passions from coming upon it, and especially by the Divine power; yet of His own will He subjected Himself to these corporeal and animal passions. Reply to Objection 2: Tully is speaking there according to the opinions of the Stoics, who did not give the name of passions to all, but only to the disorderly movements of the sensitive appetite. Now, it is manifest that passions like these were not in Christ. Reply to Objection 3: The “passions of sins” are movements of the sensitive appetite that tend to unlawful things; and these were not in Christ, as neither was the “fomes” of sin. Whether there was sensible pain in Christ?Objection 1: It would seem that there was no true sensible pain in Christ. For Hilary says (De Trin. x): “Since with Christ to die was life, what pain may He be supposed to have suffered in the mystery of His death, Who bestows life on such as die for Him?” And further on he says: “The Only-begotten assumed human nature, not ceasing to be God; and although blows struck Him and wounds were inflicted on Him, and scourges fell upon Him, and the cross lifted Him up, yet these wrought in deed the vehemence of the passion, but brought no pain; as a dart piercing the water.” Hence there was no true pain in Christ.

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

  Becoming a Caregiver ChildSIX MONTHS AFTER the divorce, Dr. James married a much younger woman whom the children liked very much. She was lively, funny, and did not try to intrude into their lives as a rule-making stepmother but rather befriended them and treated them warmly. Unfortunately, Dr. James carried some baggage into his second marriage and it, too, was stormy, featuring many unexplained weekend departures by the second wife. Three years later, she kissed the children good-bye and left to marry another man. “I was a basket case,” Dr. James told me during one of our follow-up interviews. The children were stunned, bereft of explanation for the second loss in their family life. Nor did Mrs. James find much happiness in the years after her divorce. She had several love affairs followed by a second marriage. The new husband, who ran a landscape business, could not tolerate the children and soon grew bored with his pretty wife. The marriage lasted less than five years, throwing the mother into continued turmoil. For Karen, the legacy of divorce was that she moved into the role of substitute parent for her younger siblings and of confidante and adviser to her troubled mother and father. It was an entirely new role for this child who, like many others before the divorce, had been leading a fairly protected life. Yet Karen undertook the classic role of caregiver or “parentified” child with aplomb and grace. In fact, she was a model parent. “My brother is scared of a lot of things,” she once warned me. “What is he scared of?”

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

  Like quality time, parallel parenting—a term coined by mediators to mean that two parents who raise a child separately are comparable to two parents who raise a child together—is a great slogan, but it can’t replicate the cooperative parenting that children and parents need. In a good intact family, a constant parental dialogue revolves around the day’s events and interactions within the family. Daily conversations and the pillow talk that follows literally shape the child’s environment to fit her needs as she grows up and changes. Such parental dialogue, if it existed, is abruptly shut off by divorce. As a result, the role of the parents as the child’s champion is weakened. This is a serious loss in our crowded, fast-moving society, especially for the child who has special needs or who may be a late or an early bloomer. Of course single parents can take on this role to the extent that their busy schedule permits, but as they often tell me, they feel weighed down by the responsibility for making all the decisions themselves and by the pressures of time. Remarried parents can and do reinstate the invisible parenting structure, but that may not happen for several years. Even then, it takes on a different cast, as we’ll see later in the book. O THREE Growing Up Is Harder ne of the many myths of our divorce culture is that divorce automatically rescues children from an unhappy marriage. Indeed, many parents cling to this belief as a way of making themselves feel less guilty. No one wants to hurt his or her child, and thinking that divorce is a solution to everyone’s pain genuinely helps. Moreover, it’s true that divorce delivers a child from a violent or cruel marriage (which we will soon see in Chapter 7). However, when one looks at the thousands of children that my colleagues and I have interviewed at our center since 1980, most of whom were from moderately unhappy marriages that ended in divorce, one message is clear: the children do not say they are happier. Rather, they say flatly, “The day my parents divorced is the day my childhood ended.” What do they mean? Typically parent and child relationships change radically after divorce—temporarily or, as in Karen’s family, permanently. Ten years after the breakup only one-half of the mothers and one-quarter of the fathers in our study were able to provide the kind of nurturant care that had distinguished their parenting before the divorce. To go back to what Gary said about his parents being “offstage” while he grew up, after a divorce one or both parents often move onto center stage and refuse to budge. The child becomes the backstage prop manager making sure the show goes on.

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

  I reminded him of the awful night that he left after hitting my mom a whole lot of times. I said to him, ‘You could have dealt with things a little better.’” Larry looked up with a pained expression. “He hardly heard me. He just didn’t get it. You know, it still makes me sad not to have had a father in my life. I know I still have a lot of pent-up anger. I try not to think about it.” Larry sat back and then responded to my unspoken question. “I don’t really see a road for me to be able to work through all of the anger and hurt from my childhood. It comes up now because of my own children. I want to do for my children everything that my dad didn’t do for me.” This last remark rang familiar. Karen had said the same. These young people do not want their children to have a childhood like their own. They want something better and are willing to fight for it. I was also very interested that none of the adults who had felt rejected or misused by their fathers as children rejected their importance or denied their longstanding wish to have had a loving, concerned father. How Fathers Rate AFTER DECADES OF minutely recording mother-child interactions as if they existed in a “daddy-less” world, researchers have finally discovered fathers and how important they are to a child’s development. Today’s answers to the question “What good are fathers?” would fill a small library. Children with sensitive, involved fathers surge ahead in their cognitive and social development as they explore their environment and play with other children. One important study that followed children for twenty-five years showed that those who were closely involved with their fathers at age five were more empathic as adults and were happier as husbands and as parents than those who had not experienced close relationships with their own fathers a quarter of a century earlier. 1 And just to dispel the strange notion that fathers are more important to their sons than to their daughters, a study of young women who excelled in their academic studies at Stanford and Berkeley revealed that they attributed their high ambition to their father’s long-standing encouragement. 2 In my own work on good marriages, I found that women who maintain a passionate relationship with their husbands throughout many years of the marriage had a healthy, loving relationship with their fathers as children. 3 But in divorced families, father-child relationships run a different course. Because the child lives only part-time or even half-time with her father or sees him according to a set schedule, their interaction is not a given. Coming and going as they do, father and child don’t take one another for granted (this is true for visiting or joint custody arrangements). Instead, their relationship must be created from the more limited interactions they enjoy or, if things are not going well, do not enjoy.

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

  As Carol described these scenes, a heavy sadness fell over her small frame and her spirit seemed almost crushed. But she was not finished. “The worst times,” Carol said, crumbling a cookie on the plate in front of her, “was when they’d go for us. I was the favorite target. It only happened a few times a year but I remember every detail. They’d spot me or hear me in the kitchen making dinner and then they’d call me into the living room. Dad usually started it with a question about dinner or school that then escalated into a verbal attack by both of them. Before you knew it, they were hitting me. If I tried to say anything in self-defense, they hit me harder. I remember one time being chased into my bedroom, where my dad held me down and my mom slapped me over and over like she couldn’t stop.” Carol’s voice trailed off. I was stunned by her story. “And no one protected you?” “My little sister used to come in my room and lie down beside me on the bed. She’d wrap her arms around my neck and pat my cheek. We’d lie there and hug each other. We were frightened our whole childhood. We never knew what to expect or when it would get real bad again.” Carol fell silent as the memories flooded her body and caused her throat to constrict. Unable to speak, she stared vacantly at the flowers, holding back her pain. I waited a good thirty seconds for her to regain her composure and leaned closer, “Carol, what an awful way to grow up.” She was stone still as the next words came out in a slow monotone, stripped of inflection because her emotions were on the brink. “The worst part wasn’t being hit.” She rocked slowly with each word. “It was the wishing and hoping that things would change and especially that my mother would become another person—a mother who loved her children and cared for them and protected them.” She put her face in her hands. “I longed so desperately for the parents that I never had.” We sat in silence for another minute until Carol recovered enough to say, “I’ve been in and out of therapy since I was thirty years old. And I’ve thought about this and know now that they couldn’t change. All my life I wanted a mom or a dad or someone I could rely on even a little. I’ve tried to stop hoping for what I’ll never have and I’ve tried to get some comfort from being a better mother someday—if I ever have children.” “You’ve had so much pain, Carol. Do you have any happy memories?”

• From Saint Thomas Aquinas Collection (22 Books) (2016)

  BASIL. (in Reg. Brev. ad int. 217.) We shall receive the kingdom of God as a child if we are disposed towards our Lord’s teaching as a child under instruction, never contradicting nor disputing with his masters, but trustfully and teachably imbibing learning. THEOPHYLACT. The wise men of the Gentiles therefore who seek for wisdom in a mystery, which is the kingdom of God, and will not receive this without the evidence of logical proof, are rightly shut out from this kingdom. 18:18–2318. And a certain ruler asked him, saying, Good Master, what shall I do to inherit eternal life? 19. And Jesus said unto him, Why callest thou me good? none is good, save one, that is, God. 20. Thou knowest the commandments, Do not commit adultery, Do not kill, Do not steal, Do not bear false witness, Honour thy father and thy mother. 21. And he said, All these have I kept from my youth up. 22. Now when Jesus heard these things, he said unto him, Yet lackest thou one thing: sell all that thou hast, and distribute unto the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven: and come, follow me. 23. And when he heard this, he was very sorrowful: for he was very rich. BEDE. A certain ruler having heard our Lord say, that only those who would be like little children should enter the kingdom of heaven, entreats Him to explain to him not by parable but openly by what works he may merit to obtain eternal life. AMBROSE. That ruler tempting Him said, Good Master, he ought to have said, Good God. For although goodness exists in divinity and divinity in goodness, yet by adding Good Master, he uses good only in part, not in the whole. For God is good altogether, man partially. CYRIL OF ALEXANDRIA. Now he thought to detect Christ in blaming the law of Moses, while He introduced His own commands. He went then to the Master, and calling Him good, says that he wishes to be taught by Him, for he sought to tempt Him. But He who takes the wise in their craftiness answers him fitly as follows, Why callest thou me good? there is none good, save God alone.