Acquainted with the Night by Paul Raeburn

Author:Paul Raeburn
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction
ISBN: 9780307418791
Publisher: Crown/Archetype
Published: 2007-12-17T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER SIX

When Alicia was hospitalized for the first time, in December 1999, she told the admitting doctor that “her parents fight a great deal,” and that she “feels like cutting when she hears them fight.” Alex had said the same thing over and over again, for four years, to psychiatrists, therapists, the school psychologist, and anybody else who asked. His parents fought all the time, he said. He was worried they would get a divorce. He was worried about his sister, who cried when they fought. Neither of them ever said much to Liz or to me. Nor did Matt, who surely would have expressed the same distress if anyone had asked him. He hadn’t seen a therapist or psychiatrist, hadn’t been hospitalized, and so hadn’t had the chance to say how he felt about his parents’ fighting.

Alex and Alicia were right. Liz and I did fight a lot. Sometimes we would shout at each other. More often, we would exchange a few cold remarks, Liz would demand a response, and I’d turn to the newspaper or a magazine and ignore her.

I was convinced that we were responsible, in part, for what was happening with the children. “Healthy parenting does not produce a self-mutilating child,” the therapist Steven Levenkron writes in Cutting. “If a child’s experience with her parents is uncomfortable, neglectful, or painful, the child accepts the pain and assumes that her parents’ behavior is justified because they must be ‘right.’ ” As the child grows older, she relies on the parents less, and “it is then her job to re-create the pain that guided her through her early life, the pain that means home, safety, comfort.” Levenkron is talking about abusive parents, who neglect their children, who are insensitive and neglectful. Surely Liz and I were not abusive parents. We loved our children, we were devoted to them, we would do anything for them. And even though we fought, we never let that interfere with our love for the children.

That’s what I would have said before the children got sick. After years of therapists and psychiatrists, after telling the children’s story, and our story, so many times that I could recite it by rote, I began to have a different view. When we gave the family history to a new psychiatrist or therapist, we would mention the frequent arguments as matter-of-factly as we might discuss the weather. The first few times, it was deeply embarrassing to admit that we fought as often as we did. Later, I would say it without a flicker of sadness or remorse. It was just a fact, another thing to put in the kids’ medical charts, a part of their lives. It wasn’t going to change. The discord was just there, in the house, like the piano, the dining room table, and the gallery of kids’ pictures on the walls in the stairway: part of the family landscape.

Psychiatrists have been speculating for decades about whether bad parenting might aggravate or cause mental illness in kids.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.