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Book by Staal Stephanie
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Extrait :
The Reluctant Heart
Home is where one starts from. As we grow older
The world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated
Of dead and living. Not the intense moment
Isolated, with no before and after
But a lifetime burning in every moment
— T. S. Eliot, The Four Quartets
A couple of years ago, my mother went to the twenty-five-year reunion of her graduate school class, held on the very same university campus where she and my father first met. She tells me how, as she roamed through the reception, weaving among all those almost-recognizable faces peering nervously at name tags and clutching sweaty cocktails, she bumped into three old friends. The four of them had lost touch over the years, and with so much catching up to do, they got off to an awkward start. The conversation moved slowly, touching upon all the usual bases of idle chitchat, until suddenly they found the hook that broke through the proverbial ice.
“We almost had to laugh,” my mom mused wonderingly, “because we were all divorced.”
“Mom.” I sighed, a little petulantly. “Who isn’t divorced?”
The brief extent of this exchange illuminates the gap in perception between my mother and me when it comes to divorce: Both my parents grew up during the fifties, when divorce was relatively unusual; they married during the early seventies as the divorce rate started to hit its peak, and divorced during the eighties. For them, divorce was a difficult choice; for me, divorce is a fact of life.
Our parents are the architects of the culture of divorce we live in today. To some extent, every generation wrestles with the legacy inherited from the one before, and with our parents’ generation, millions of couples — more than ever before — entered into marriages that disintegrated to the point that divorce seemed like the best way out. I know splitting up was often a painful process for them — sometimes devastating — but while our parents endured their divorces armed with the resources of age and experience, we were confronted with new and complicated emotions before we were fully capable of understanding them. For those of us who bore witness to the wave of divorce that engulfed our parents, their breakups defined our childhood, leaving imprints that may last a lifetime.
I can name the date when my mother and sister moved out, and my family as a whole ceased to exist; the boundaries of the emotional reverberations of my parents’ divorce, however, are more difficult to identify. After the age of thirteen, I never again lived under the same roof with my mother and sister. Unlike the overwhelming majority of children whose parents separate, I remained with my father, living in the house we once shared as a family. Yet nothing was the same. The rooms rang with loss, reducing my home to four walls from which to escape, not seek refuge. The holidays and weekends turned into days dissected into hours claimed by each parent. Protected by a carefully constructed armor of indifference, I sailed through these changes, my emotions tightly self-contained. I never once allowed myself to miss having two parents as one unit, residing in one home. Why would I? I knew my parents had been unhappy together, so it was for the best, really, that they were apart. I never engaged in any of the Parent Trap fantasies that my parents would reunite; on the contrary, the mere thought of having them in the same room, tense and silent, sent me into a panic.
After I left home, I spent the next eight years trying to get as far away as possible from the memories of childhood. At seventeen, I packed up a large duffel bag with most of my belongings and moved across the country to attend college, without ever looking back. In the years that followed, I zigzagged from coast to coast, spent time living abroad, and eventually landed in a three-hundred-square-foot apartment in New York City, furnished mainly with leftovers I collected off the street. During those early years of being on my own, I had convinced myself that I had outgrown my parents’ divorce, and whatever losses I had sustained had been taken care of by time.
Here’s the thing, though: Time flirts with us, flashing what could have been, what should have been, what was. When a parent dies, children are at least given the pretense that they will travel through the five stages of grief in accepting the death: Denial. Anger. Bargaining. Disorganization. Acceptance. But with divorce, there is no rubric detailing how we should act or feel, especially as we get older. Lacking the finality of death, divorce can start to mimic a film negative. We become hooked on what’s missing, where blank spaces have replaced substance.
At some point, as I crossed the line from childhood to adulthood, the experience of divorce was no longer limited to my past and present, but began to infect my future as well. It became harder to put a finger on my feelings, to relate the confusion, the wariness, the lingering sadness to my parents’ divorce. A year or so out of college, my “tough girl” facade from childhood started to slip. Small slips at first. I would see a mildly sad movie and, surrounded by the safe cloak of darkness in the theater, dissolve into tears. I skipped through relationships, ending them abruptly for the most minor of transgressions. I constantly felt anxious, worried about my future, yet never fully satisfied when things appeared to be going well. Every decision, from my relationships to my career, was harnessed by my own ambivalence. What if I’m hurt? What if I’m making the wrong choices? What if, just what if, I am starting down a path that will take me back to those empty rooms of childhood? These questions swirled in my head, leaving me paralyzed. Strange as it may sound, it wasn’t until I left home that I started to acutely feel the effects of growing up in a divorced home.
Apparently, my experience is not unusual. In a 1995 study of adult children of divorce, researchers noted what seemed to be a contradictory finding: At the age of twenty-three, some of their subjects appeared to be more negatively affected psychologically by their parents’ divorce than they were at the age of eleven. On the basis of this finding, the researchers suggested that the “developmental challenges of adolescence and young adulthood may have reinvoked certain vulnerabilities for the divorced group, evinced by deleterious effects of the aftermath of divorce in their early twenties.” This increased vulnerability could be due to a variety of reasons, from a “continued or renewed sense of parental loss” to more tangible factors such as a decrease in economic status resulting in fewer educational opportunities.
In other words, going out on our own is scary, especially if we don’t feel that we have been launched from a firm base of support. The pressures of adapting to being on our own and realizing our actions now have serious implications can leave us feeling confused and exposed. As adults, we have entered the opaque sphere of our own potential mistakes, with only the past as our guide. And for many of us, the suppressed emotions from our parents’ divorce are sprung loose once we face the prospect of our own relationships.
“My father always blamed their divorce on Cosmopolitan magazine,” says twenty-eight-year-old Denise, whose parents divorced when she was two. “I think it goes a little deeper than that. My mom just recently admitted to me that she was pregnant when she got married. I actually already knew because, interestingly enough, she had filled out one of those surveys in a magazine, and I had picked it up to read and saw what she had written. It made me really sad when I found that out. Empty.” She pauses. “My mom always said the best thing she ever did in her life was to have my brother and me, but I still feel like I don’t want to get married. I don’t want to have kids and have them go through what I went through.”
Our fears in love are often dictated by the past, sometimes without our being fully aware of it. Our parents’ divorce offers a powerful lens through which to view both parental and romantic love, two types of love that are more intertwined than they may appear at first. The raw power of a child’s love is fragile, and the literary canon is filled with perceptive stories about the feverish bond that develops between parent and child and how the nature of that bond affects the ability to love in adulthood. In his epic tale Remembrance of Things Past, Marcel Proust depicts the exquisite pleasure of a young boy waiting for his mother’s kiss, his small world hinging on his parent’s affection and care; as the narrator subsequently grows older and searches for women to love, the memory of his mother’s kiss inspires his every pursuit. Proust illustrates a simple truth: Across the distance of years, the moments of hurt and longing from youth continue to instruct us in the present, surging to the forefront during adulthood with renewed and explosive force, particularly if we never confronted our emotions the first time around.
And so, adult children of divorce often speak of a void that cannot be filled, an empty space that continues to expand and contract during our daily lives. As thirty-three-year-old Tammy, whose parents divorced when she was five years old, remembers, “I thought it meant I no longer had a father, which in many ways turned out to be true. I have never known, and probably never will, what it means to have a father. My father never took the time to get to know me, and I don’t think my mother has ever fully realized the impact this had on me. She always assumed that I would be fine if I had her, food, clothing, good grades, a job. But there’s a big hole in my life. I still struggle to accept love, to trust love and maintain relationship...
Présentation de l'éditeur :
Home is where one starts from. As we grow older
The world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated
Of dead and living. Not the intense moment
Isolated, with no before and after
But a lifetime burning in every moment
— T. S. Eliot, The Four Quartets
A couple of years ago, my mother went to the twenty-five-year reunion of her graduate school class, held on the very same university campus where she and my father first met. She tells me how, as she roamed through the reception, weaving among all those almost-recognizable faces peering nervously at name tags and clutching sweaty cocktails, she bumped into three old friends. The four of them had lost touch over the years, and with so much catching up to do, they got off to an awkward start. The conversation moved slowly, touching upon all the usual bases of idle chitchat, until suddenly they found the hook that broke through the proverbial ice.
“We almost had to laugh,” my mom mused wonderingly, “because we were all divorced.”
“Mom.” I sighed, a little petulantly. “Who isn’t divorced?”
The brief extent of this exchange illuminates the gap in perception between my mother and me when it comes to divorce: Both my parents grew up during the fifties, when divorce was relatively unusual; they married during the early seventies as the divorce rate started to hit its peak, and divorced during the eighties. For them, divorce was a difficult choice; for me, divorce is a fact of life.
Our parents are the architects of the culture of divorce we live in today. To some extent, every generation wrestles with the legacy inherited from the one before, and with our parents’ generation, millions of couples — more than ever before — entered into marriages that disintegrated to the point that divorce seemed like the best way out. I know splitting up was often a painful process for them — sometimes devastating — but while our parents endured their divorces armed with the resources of age and experience, we were confronted with new and complicated emotions before we were fully capable of understanding them. For those of us who bore witness to the wave of divorce that engulfed our parents, their breakups defined our childhood, leaving imprints that may last a lifetime.
I can name the date when my mother and sister moved out, and my family as a whole ceased to exist; the boundaries of the emotional reverberations of my parents’ divorce, however, are more difficult to identify. After the age of thirteen, I never again lived under the same roof with my mother and sister. Unlike the overwhelming majority of children whose parents separate, I remained with my father, living in the house we once shared as a family. Yet nothing was the same. The rooms rang with loss, reducing my home to four walls from which to escape, not seek refuge. The holidays and weekends turned into days dissected into hours claimed by each parent. Protected by a carefully constructed armor of indifference, I sailed through these changes, my emotions tightly self-contained. I never once allowed myself to miss having two parents as one unit, residing in one home. Why would I? I knew my parents had been unhappy together, so it was for the best, really, that they were apart. I never engaged in any of the Parent Trap fantasies that my parents would reunite; on the contrary, the mere thought of having them in the same room, tense and silent, sent me into a panic.
After I left home, I spent the next eight years trying to get as far away as possible from the memories of childhood. At seventeen, I packed up a large duffel bag with most of my belongings and moved across the country to attend college, without ever looking back. In the years that followed, I zigzagged from coast to coast, spent time living abroad, and eventually landed in a three-hundred-square-foot apartment in New York City, furnished mainly with leftovers I collected off the street. During those early years of being on my own, I had convinced myself that I had outgrown my parents’ divorce, and whatever losses I had sustained had been taken care of by time.
Here’s the thing, though: Time flirts with us, flashing what could have been, what should have been, what was. When a parent dies, children are at least given the pretense that they will travel through the five stages of grief in accepting the death: Denial. Anger. Bargaining. Disorganization. Acceptance. But with divorce, there is no rubric detailing how we should act or feel, especially as we get older. Lacking the finality of death, divorce can start to mimic a film negative. We become hooked on what’s missing, where blank spaces have replaced substance.
At some point, as I crossed the line from childhood to adulthood, the experience of divorce was no longer limited to my past and present, but began to infect my future as well. It became harder to put a finger on my feelings, to relate the confusion, the wariness, the lingering sadness to my parents’ divorce. A year or so out of college, my “tough girl” facade from childhood started to slip. Small slips at first. I would see a mildly sad movie and, surrounded by the safe cloak of darkness in the theater, dissolve into tears. I skipped through relationships, ending them abruptly for the most minor of transgressions. I constantly felt anxious, worried about my future, yet never fully satisfied when things appeared to be going well. Every decision, from my relationships to my career, was harnessed by my own ambivalence. What if I’m hurt? What if I’m making the wrong choices? What if, just what if, I am starting down a path that will take me back to those empty rooms of childhood? These questions swirled in my head, leaving me paralyzed. Strange as it may sound, it wasn’t until I left home that I started to acutely feel the effects of growing up in a divorced home.
Apparently, my experience is not unusual. In a 1995 study of adult children of divorce, researchers noted what seemed to be a contradictory finding: At the age of twenty-three, some of their subjects appeared to be more negatively affected psychologically by their parents’ divorce than they were at the age of eleven. On the basis of this finding, the researchers suggested that the “developmental challenges of adolescence and young adulthood may have reinvoked certain vulnerabilities for the divorced group, evinced by deleterious effects of the aftermath of divorce in their early twenties.” This increased vulnerability could be due to a variety of reasons, from a “continued or renewed sense of parental loss” to more tangible factors such as a decrease in economic status resulting in fewer educational opportunities.
In other words, going out on our own is scary, especially if we don’t feel that we have been launched from a firm base of support. The pressures of adapting to being on our own and realizing our actions now have serious implications can leave us feeling confused and exposed. As adults, we have entered the opaque sphere of our own potential mistakes, with only the past as our guide. And for many of us, the suppressed emotions from our parents’ divorce are sprung loose once we face the prospect of our own relationships.
“My father always blamed their divorce on Cosmopolitan magazine,” says twenty-eight-year-old Denise, whose parents divorced when she was two. “I think it goes a little deeper than that. My mom just recently admitted to me that she was pregnant when she got married. I actually already knew because, interestingly enough, she had filled out one of those surveys in a magazine, and I had picked it up to read and saw what she had written. It made me really sad when I found that out. Empty.” She pauses. “My mom always said the best thing she ever did in her life was to have my brother and me, but I still feel like I don’t want to get married. I don’t want to have kids and have them go through what I went through.”
Our fears in love are often dictated by the past, sometimes without our being fully aware of it. Our parents’ divorce offers a powerful lens through which to view both parental and romantic love, two types of love that are more intertwined than they may appear at first. The raw power of a child’s love is fragile, and the literary canon is filled with perceptive stories about the feverish bond that develops between parent and child and how the nature of that bond affects the ability to love in adulthood. In his epic tale Remembrance of Things Past, Marcel Proust depicts the exquisite pleasure of a young boy waiting for his mother’s kiss, his small world hinging on his parent’s affection and care; as the narrator subsequently grows older and searches for women to love, the memory of his mother’s kiss inspires his every pursuit. Proust illustrates a simple truth: Across the distance of years, the moments of hurt and longing from youth continue to instruct us in the present, surging to the forefront during adulthood with renewed and explosive force, particularly if we never confronted our emotions the first time around.
And so, adult children of divorce often speak of a void that cannot be filled, an empty space that continues to expand and contract during our daily lives. As thirty-three-year-old Tammy, whose parents divorced when she was five years old, remembers, “I thought it meant I no longer had a father, which in many ways turned out to be true. I have never known, and probably never will, what it means to have a father. My father never took the time to get to know me, and I don’t think my mother has ever fully realized the impact this had on me. She always assumed that I would be fine if I had her, food, clothing, good grades, a job. But there’s a big hole in my life. I still struggle to accept love, to trust love and maintain relationship...
Stephanie Staal’s parents divorced when she was thirteen. But it wasn’t until years later that she realized the devastating impact of her parents’ divorce on her own search for love.
She sought help. There was none. So she wrote the book she was looking for: a personal history of, by, and for the first generation of divorce.
Drawing on extensive interviews with one hundred and twenty adult children of divorce, The Love They Lost gives voice to their struggle to reconcile the emotional blueprints their parents left them with the lives they want to build as adults.
Here we meet men and women from all walks of life who share painful common ground: They are all living with the legacy of their parents’ divorce. What emerges, as they tell their compelling stories, are profound new insights that will resonate with anyone dealing with the wide-ranging consequences of divorce ... how abandonment and betrayal, both real and perceived, impact adult relationships and careers ... what happens when money becomes a substitute for love ... healing ways to move forward while living with the past.
Weaving reporting and memoir, storytelling and social observation, The Love They Lost is essential reading for every adult child of divorce who longs to make peace with the past and build a rewarding life — and for everyone who cares about the future of the American family.
She sought help. There was none. So she wrote the book she was looking for: a personal history of, by, and for the first generation of divorce.
Drawing on extensive interviews with one hundred and twenty adult children of divorce, The Love They Lost gives voice to their struggle to reconcile the emotional blueprints their parents left them with the lives they want to build as adults.
Here we meet men and women from all walks of life who share painful common ground: They are all living with the legacy of their parents’ divorce. What emerges, as they tell their compelling stories, are profound new insights that will resonate with anyone dealing with the wide-ranging consequences of divorce ... how abandonment and betrayal, both real and perceived, impact adult relationships and careers ... what happens when money becomes a substitute for love ... healing ways to move forward while living with the past.
Weaving reporting and memoir, storytelling and social observation, The Love They Lost is essential reading for every adult child of divorce who longs to make peace with the past and build a rewarding life — and for everyone who cares about the future of the American family.
Les informations fournies dans la section « A propos du livre » peuvent faire référence à une autre édition de ce titre.
- ÉditeurDelta
- Date d'édition2001
- ISBN 10 0385334109
- ISBN 13 9780385334105
- ReliureBroché
- Nombre de pages246
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