Time heals all wounds, they say. For children of divorce
like Joanne, though, time has a way of baring old wounds too.
For Joanne, the fears that her parents' split unleashed-of
abandonment, of loss, of coming home one day and noticing
something missing from the bedroom-deepened as the years went
by. Bursts of bitterness, jealousy and doubt sent her into
psychotherapy. "Before I met my husband," she remembers, "I
sabotaged all my other relationships with men because I assumed
they would fail. There was always something in the back of
my head. The only way I can describe it is a void, unfinished
business that I couldn't get to."
For the children of divorce-a million new ones every year
in the U.S.; over 50,000 in Australia-unfinished business
is a way of life. For adults, divorce is a conclusion, but
for children it's the beginning of uncertainty. Where will
I live? Will I see my friends again? Will my mum's new boyfriend
leave her too? Going back to the early '70s-the years that
demographers mark as the beginning of a divorce boom that
has receded only slightly despite three decades of hand wringing
and worry-society has debated these children's predicament
in much the same way that angry parents do: by arguing over
the little ones' heads or quarreling out of earshot, behind
closed doors. Whenever concerned adults talk seriously about
what's best for the children of divorce, they seem to hold
the discussion in a setting-a courtroom or legislature or
university-where youngsters aren't allowed.
That's changing. The children are grown now, and a number
are speaking up, telling stories of pain that didn't go away
the moment they turned 18 or even 40. A cluster of new books
is fueling a backlash, not against divorce itself but against
the notion that kids somehow coast through it. Stephanie Staal's
The Love They Lost (Delacorte Press), written by a child of
divorce, is part memoir and part generational survey, a melancholy
volume about the search for love by kids who remember the
loss of love too vividly. The Case for Marriage by Linda Waite
and Maggie Gallagher (Doubleday) emphasizes the positive,
arguing that even rocky marriages nourish children emotionally
and practically.
The most controversial book comes from Judith Wallerstein,
78, a therapist and retired lecturer at the University of
California, Berkeley. In The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce
(Hyperion) she argues that the harm caused by divorce is graver
and longer lasting than we suspected. Her work raises a question
that some people felt was settled back in the early 1970s:
Should parents stay together for the kids?
Listening to children from broken families is Wallerstein's
lifework. For nearly three decades, in her current book and
two previous ones, she has compiled and reflected on the stories
of 131 children of divorce. Based on lengthy, in-depth interviews,
the stories are seldom happy. Some are tragic. Almost all
of them are as moving as good fiction. There's the story of
Paula, who as a girl told Wallerstein, "I'm going to find
a new mummy," and as a young woman-too young, it turned out-impulsively
married a man she hardly knew. There's Billy, born with a
heart defect, whose parents parted coolly and amicably but
failed to provide for his pressing medical needs.
It's the rare academic who can make a reader cry. Maybe that's
why, with each new installment, Wallerstein's study has created
shock waves, shaping public opinion and even the law. Her
attention-getting style has proved divisive. For experts in
the field of family studies (who tend to quarrel at least
as bitterly as the dysfunctional clans they analyze), she's
a polarizing figure. To her admirers, this mother of three
and grandmother of five, who has been married to the same
man for 53 years, is a brave, compassionate voice in the wilderness.
To her detractors, she's a melodramatic doomsayer, an eccentric.
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