Supernormal. Мэг Джей
new stressors, new responsibilities, and their own feelings about the divorce, and each parent may be only half as available as before. In an effort to cheer up their children and themselves, parents may tout the benefits of growing up with two bedrooms, two families, and two sets of everything. Life will be twice as good, some may say, but children are not fooled. “Even a good divorce restructures children’s childhoods and leaves them traveling between two distinct worlds,” says author Elizabeth Marquardt. “It becomes their jobs, not their parents’, to make sense of those two worlds.”
None of this is to say that unhealthy, unhappy families ought to stay together. There are no easy answers to troubled partnerships. This is simply a recognition of something that as adults we may be pained to acknowledge but that children already know: Like marriage, divorce is for better and for worse. In one study, 80 percent of young adults agreed that “Even though it was hard, divorce was the right thing for my family.” Children do best when parents are willing to talk about breakups from the other side, too: that even though divorce may be the right thing, it is hard. Otherwise, adolescents are left alone with their grievances and young children are left alone with their grief.
***
On the October morning Sam’s father left, no one in his family spoke of it. As odd as this may seem, it is not unusual. Twenty-three percent of children report that no one talked to them about divorce as it was happening, and 45 percent recall only abrupt explanations such as “Your dad is leaving”; just 5 percent of children report feeling fully informed about what was happening between their parents and being encouraged to ask questions. So off Sam went to school that day—and on all of the days that followed—as if nothing had changed. This was easy to do because, unlike home where he simply pretended nothing had changed, school was a place where this was actually true. Mornings still began with the same Pledge of Allegiance. At snack time, Sam still ate cheese crackers and drank chocolate milk from little cartons. Playing soccer at recess was still the best hour of the day. School was still where new things came in the form of fun and faraway facts, like about weather or Egyptians, and these new things were presented thoughtfully and stepwise, making them understandable and never overwhelming or personal.
Then, not so long after Sam’s father left, his fourth-grade class was learning about the mail: how to write letters with proper salutations like “Dear So-and-So” and “Sincerely, So-and-So” and how to prepare envelopes with addresses and return addresses in the right places. For practice, Sam’s teacher asked each student to write a real letter to a real person who did not live at home. Sam sat at his desk and stared at his paper. He rolled his pencil in its pencil holder. He could not begin. After a time, Sam walked up between the rows of desks to where his teacher stood writing on the blackboard, her back to the class.
“Miss Leonard . . .” he started.
She turned around.
“I can’t write the letter,” Sam continued, blankly.
“Why not?” she asked, leaning toward the boy, ready to get back to her task.
“I don’t have anyone to write,” Sam insisted, before he broke eye contact to study the chalk in her fingers and the powdery smudges on her roomy round-cut skirt.
“Surely you can think of someone,” she pressed.
“I can’t. There isn’t anybody . . .” Sam insisted again. Rigidly.
Mrs. Leonard looked at Sam and then blew him away with nonchalance: “Why don’t you write a letter to your dad?”
Sam stood there—stunned, shocked, breathless. Then, without a word, he walked back to his desk and wrote a letter to his cousin who lived in Texas.
In November, Sam’s mother gave him a full-size Bible with a floppy black cover. They did go to church every Sunday, but Sam had never had his own Bible before. Unsure of what else to make of it, Sam took this to mean that, with his father gone, he was going to need all the help he could get. At night, he flipped and fanned his way through the flimsy see-through pages, and to his surprise he discovered that the Bible was more helpful than he expected. It went into some significant detail about topics that everyone else took great pains to avoid. Sex. Love. Marriage. Even divorce. When Sam came across passages that described people who divorced as adulterers, he read and reread those night after night, trying to make sense of the strange language and of his strange new life. One afternoon in the car, Sam worked up the courage to ask his mother a question. “Did Dad leave because he’s an adulterer?” Sam inquired casually as he hunched down in his seat and forced himself to stare straight ahead. Sam’s mother slowed the car like she was waiting for her son to continue, so he said, “You know, was there some other woman?”
Sam’s mother put her foot back on the gas and exhaled quickly. “God, no,” she scoffed. “No one would want him.”
Sam did not read the Bible anymore after that.
That December, Sam thought Christmas would never come. Christmas was something so special, so magical—and so wonderfully scripted and ritualistic—that it, and now it alone, seemed untouched by his new circumstances. Santa Claus brought the presents and Santa Claus had not changed. On Christmas Eve, some time after going to bed, Sam needed something—water, maybe—so he tiptoed down the hallway toward the kitchen. When he closed in on the den, it took a moment to understand what he was seeing, but soon he recognized that his mother was wrapping and arranging presents that were supposed to be coming from the North Pole. Sam turned around and sneaked back up the hall, and as he crawled into bed, he realized that all of the men in his life were gone: his father, God, and Santa Claus.
***
Sam recalls these moments so vividly because they are what are sometimes called flashbulb memories. Flashbulb memories are recollections that feel illuminated and frozen in time, like snapshots in the mind. Harvard psychologists Roger Brown and James Kulik introduced this term to the scientific community in a 1977 paper in which they suggested that when we find out about events that are shocking or significant, we permanently imprint those surprises in memory, like photographs. Prototypical flashbulb memories are those of iconic, culturally newsworthy moments, such as the way almost everyone can recall where they were and what they were doing on the morning of September 11, 2001. We probably all remember with great clarity and brightness how we found out that planes had crashed into the World Trade Center, as well as what we did just next.
While Brown and Kulik were interested in how we remember shocking public events, their findings revealed that the cultural and the personal intersect. In their survey of white and black Americans, equal numbers of respondents reported flashbulb memories for hearing about the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, while far more blacks than whites also reported such memories for learning about the assassinations of civil rights leaders Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X. This underscores the fact that flashbulb memories are not simply a catalog of events that are objectively important or out of the ordinary. Most crucial is how relevant or consequential an event feels to the individual. That is, flashbulb memories are emotional memories, and such memories have long been known to carry special significance in our brains and in our lives. In fact, the power and permanence of emotional memories was one of the founding—and remains one of the most enduring—questions in the study of the mind.
In 1890, the father of American psychology, William James, wrote that some memories seem indelible because “an impression may be so exciting emotionally as almost to leave a scar upon the cerebral tissues.” Though in the nineteenth century no one understood quite how this scarring might work, many of James’s contemporaries were reaching similar conclusions. The French neurologist and founder of modern neurology Jean-Martin Charcot puzzled over how memories of shocking events were not only persistent but could also be all-consuming, functioning as “parasites of the mind.” In Austria, the neurologist and father of psychoanalysis Sigmund Freud similarly posed that his patients “suffer mainly from reminiscences,” from memories of moments when they felt unbearable feelings such as fright, anxiety, shame, or pain. Back in France, pioneering psychologist Pierre Janet suggested that such “vehement emotions” caused patients to have “the evolution of their lives checked.” Although much of what was first known about