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

  When he was ten, Avery lived with abusive foster parents whose rigid rules kept him in constant turmoil. He couldn’t comply with all of the requirements imposed on him, so he was frequently locked in a closet, denied food, and subjected to beatings and other physical abuse. When his behavior didn’t improve, his foster mother decided to get rid of him. She took him out into the woods, tied him to a tree, and left him there. He was found, in very poor health, by hunters three days later. After recovering from serious medical problems relating to his abandonment, he was turned over to authorities, who placed him back into foster care. By the time he was thirteen, he had started abusing drugs and alcohol. By fifteen, he was having seizures and experiencing psychotic episodes. At seventeen, he was deemed incapable of management and was left homeless. Avery was in and out of jail until he turned twenty, when in the midst of a psychotic episode he wandered into a strange house, thinking he was being attacked by demons. In the house, he brutally stabbed to death a man he’d believed to be a demon. His lawyers did no investigation of Mr. Jenkins’s history prior to trial, and he was quickly convicted of murder and sentenced to death. The prison would not let me bring Mr. Jenkins a milkshake. I tried to explain this to him, but at the start of every visit, he’d ask me if I’d brought one. I’d tell him that I would keep trying—I had to, just to get him to focus on anything else. Months later, we were finally scheduled to go to court with the evidence about his profound mental illness, material that should have been presented at trial. We contended that his attorneys had failed to provide effective assistance of counsel at trial when they didn’t uncover Avery’s history or present his disabilities as relevant to his criminal culpability and sentence. When I got to the court where the hearing would take place, about a three-hour drive from the prison, I went to see Avery in the court’s basement holding cell. After going through my usual protocol about the milkshake, I tried to get him to understand what would happen in court. I was concerned that seeing some of the witnesses—people who had dealt with him when he was in foster care—might upset him. The testimony the experts would provide would also be very direct in characterizing his disabilities and illness. I wanted him to understand why we were doing that. He was pleasant and agreeable, as always.

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

  I drove from Montgomery through South Alabama to Florida and then along a tangle of wooded back roads to get to the Santa Rosa Correctional Facility in the town of Milton to meet Joe for the first time. Santa Rosa County borders the Gulf of Mexico at the western end of the Florida Panhandle and had long been known for agriculture. Between 1980 and 2000, the county’s population doubled in size as the coastal areas attracted beach homes and resort properties. Many affluent families left Pensacola for Santa Rosa County, and military families from nearby Eglin Air Force Base settled there. But there was another industry in town—incarceration. The Florida Department of Corrections built the prison to house 1,600 people in the 1990s, when America was opening prisons at a pace never before seen in human history. Between 1990 and 2005, a new prison opened in the United States every ten days. Prison growth and the resulting “prison-industrial complex”—the business interests that capitalize on prison construction—made imprisonment so profitable that millions of dollars were spent lobbying state legislators to keep expanding the use of incarceration to respond to just about any problem. Incarceration became the answer to everything—health care problems like drug addiction, poverty that had led someone to write a bad check, child behavioral disorders, managing the mentally disabled poor, even immigration issues generated responses from legislators that involved sending people to prison. Never before had so much lobbying money been spent to expand America’s prison population, block sentencing reforms, create new crime categories, and sustain the fear and anger that fuel mass incarceration than during the last twenty-five years in the United States. When I arrived at Santa Rosa, I didn’t encounter any staff who were people of color, although 70 percent of the men incarcerated there were black or brown. This was a bit unusual; I frequently saw black and brown correctional officers at other prisons. I was subjected to an elaborate admission process and given a beeper to activate if I was ever threatened or distressed while inside the prison. I was escorted to a forty-by-forty-foot room where more than two dozen incarcerated men sat sadly while uniformed correctional staff buzzed in and out.

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

  We have been blinded to this fact by the sheer numbers of people affected and by the speed at which our society has been transformed. Many people today think divorce is a perfectly normal experience. It’s so common, children hardly notice it. No stigma. No big deal. After all, if half the child’s schoolmates come from divorced families, how could divorce be so traumatic? And isn’t it true, they say, that children raised in bad intact families are no better off? Everyone who grows up in America today is affected directly or indirectly by divorce, so everyone has the same worries. In other words, they argue that divorce places no special burdens on individuals (remember, it’s a normal experience). Indeed, if researchers were to compare groups of eighteen-year-olds from divorced and intact homes and then groups of twenty-two-year-olds and so forth they would probably find that most children of divorce and children from intact homes often hold similar views. It’s true that most young people are worried about similar things. But I have found what I think are deeper truths to this superficial impression. First, each child experiences divorce single file. Just because others are suffering does not reduce their suffering. Would it lessen a widow’s sorrow to have five other widows on the same street? Would that make her feel less pain? Numbers provide no consolation for children or adults in many of life’s traumas. People who believe that numbers mute the individual child’s suffering have simply not talked to the children. Each child in a classroom half full of children of divorce cries out, “Why me?” Moreover, by following the life of one child of divorce, and then another and another, from early childhood through adolescence and into the challenges of adulthood, I can say without a doubt that they have worries apart from their peers raised in intact homes. These worries are reshaping our society in ways we never dreamt about. That is the subject of this book and a challenge to all of us in coming years. THE PAGES THAT follow contain many themes that are entirely new to our understanding of the long-term effects of divorce. For example, Karen was the first grown child of divorce who described that she lived with the fear that disaster was always waiting to strike without warning, especially when she was happy. As I soon found out, these fears were common among young adults who grew up in divorced families. If happiness increases one’s odds of experiencing loss, think how dangerous it must be to simply feel happy.

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

  We hated it when they went to their room because then their yelling would change into sounds of them having sex. We could hear them. Later, Dad would come out and tell us to get our own dinner. He’d take something to eat and disappear into his study for the rest of the night. We’d put ourselves to bed. It was so lonely and awful.” 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.

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

  Eventually the boys thought Cannon had passed out and tried to steal his wallet. Cannon was startled awake and jumped on Evan. The older boy responded by hitting the man in the head with a bat. Both boys started beating him and then set his trailer on fire. Cole Cannon died, and Evan and his friend were charged with capital murder. The older boy made a deal with prosecutors and got a parole-eligible life sentence, while Evan was convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment without parole. I got involved in Evan’s case right after his trial and filed a motion to reduce his sentence, even though it was the mandatory punishment for someone convicted of capital murder who was too young to be executed. At a hearing, I asked the judge to reconsider Evan’s sentence in light of his age. The prosecutor argued, “I think he should be executed. He deserves the death penalty.” He then lamented that the law no longer authorized the execution of children because he just couldn’t wait to put this fourteen-year-old boy in the electric chair and kill him. The judge denied our motion. When I visited Evan at the jail, we would have long talks. He loved to talk about anything he could think of when we were together to extend our visits. We talked about sports and exercise, we talked about books, we talked about his family, we talked about music, we talked about all the things he wanted to do when he grew up. He was usually animated and excited about something, although when he didn’t hear from his family for a while or had to deal with some bad incident at the prison, he would become extremely depressed. He couldn’t understand some of the hostile and violent behavior he saw from prisoners and the other people around him. He once told me that a guard had punched him in the chest just because he had asked a question about meal times. He started crying as he told me this because he just couldn’t understand why the officer had done that. Evan was sent to the St. Clair Correctional Facility, a maximum-security adult prison. Not long after he first arrived, he was attacked by another prisoner, who stabbed him nine times. He recovered without serious physical problems but was traumatized by the experience and disoriented by the violence. When he talked about his own act of violence, he seemed deeply confused about how it was possible he could have done something so destructive.

• 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.