Real Boys

by William Pollack

  Second, I suggest using sports and athletic activities as another venue for the healthy expression of these feelings. As long as strict limits are set—and, if necessary, proper safety equipment is utilized—the boy can engage in activities such as boxing, wrestling, or just playful roughhousing to release his rage and aggression. I recently observed a game where one boy wore a helmet and safety pads and then mounted a balance beam (with lots of well-cushioned mats below to catch him safely when he fell). Other boys, wearing protective foam-rubber equipment, were permitted to try to bounce up against the boy on the beam, and were even allowed to try to knock him off it. The boys I observed playing this game appeared to love it. Clearly it gave them a chance to let out their aggressive energy and, for some of them, it probably provided a measure of relief from internalized feelings of anger. These kinds of safe, low-risk activities, supervised by an adult, provide healthy channels for such feelings and, in my opinion, can do much to remove the need boys may feel to act out their feelings in less healthy, more violent ways.

  ENCOURAGE ACTION, DISCOURAGE VIOLENCE

  Boys have fantastic energy and exuberance, a willingness to venture into the unknown, to test their limits, to take action. When these traits are applied to positive endeavors and relationships, the results can be spectacular—boys will build and create wonderful things and manage and sustain long-term friendships and productive collaborations. It is when boys are not allowed to express the full range of their emotions—when they are forced to wear the mask—that’s when their energy and need for action may come out as violence. We must let them know that power need not mean power over another person; it can mean power with other people. To do that, we must begin by acknowledging the pain they have experienced themselves, allowing them to speak their feelings, and ridding them of the seeds of shame that too often grow into the thorns of violence.

  — 14 —

  DIVORCE

  “Why do my parents hate each other so much?

  Is it my fault?”—Vinnie, age eleven

  THE THIRD TRAUMA

  When Oliver turned seven, his parents began to go through a difficult period. His mother, Anne-Marie, was not happy in her job; his father, Carey, was working long hours to start a small business. They both agreed that Anne-Marie would stick with her job until Carey could get his business off the ground. They were both tired; money was tight and so was time. At first they bickered only now and again, but then their relationship began to disintegrate into a perpetual series of heated arguments. As Carey’s business went through problem after problem, his tendency to drink a glass of wine at dinner spiraled into nightly binges that left him drunk, loud, and incoherent.

  One morning, Anne-Marie woke up Oliver and explained to her son in a whisper: “Oliver, it’s time for you and me to go live in our own apartment.”

  “But what about Daddy?” Oliver wondered.

  “Daddy’s staying here. Don’t worry—you’ll have plenty of chances to visit him. But right now Daddy and Mommy need to live in two separate places. So you’re gonna come with me for starts.”

  “But . . .”

  “There’ll be no ‘buts’ about it. Get up and take your bath. And then it’ll be time to go on a trip together—to our new apartment,” Anne-Marie said, struggling to cover her anger with a cheerful tone.

  When the two left the family home that morning, what neither knew was that they would never return again. Anne-Marie and Carey never reconciled. In fact, the daily arguments they had had when they lived together simply continued over the phone.

  “I really don’t think I can take this much longer,” Anne-Marie had said to Carey, talking about her job during one of their early-morning phone calls that always started in whispers but ended in shouting.

  “All right,” Carey snapped, “then quit! It’d be better than hearing you complain all the time.”

  “I would if it weren’t for Oliver,” she replied.

  “It’s not about him,” said Carey.

  “Of course it’s about him,” Anne-Marie snapped back. “If I don’t earn any money, how are we going to send him to camp? Who’s going to pay for his needs?”

  Carey took her comments as a personal affront to his ability to support the family. “I’m doing the best I can!” he barked. “You know what I’m trying to do.”

  “All you can think of is yourself,” she snapped back. “I’m sick of it. I’m sick of everything,” she shouted. And, with that, she hung up.

  Ann-Marie, who always tried her best to keep the fights to these early-morning phone calls when Oliver was still asleep, turned to discover her son standing at the other side of the kitchen. He obviously had heard the entire encounter, but said nothing. But Anne-Marie, who realized she was late for an appointment already, sidestepped the issue. “Daddy and I were just talking about work,” she said. “Let’s get you ready to go.” Oliver went off to the bus stop without saying a word.

  Anne-Marie felt guilty. After several months of couples therapy, she and Carey both realized that their differences were irreconcilable and that divorce was the only viable solution. Yet both of them found it hard to face, and neither one of them could find a way to tell Oliver.

  That afternoon, Oliver said nothing to his mother when he got home from school. He dashed up to his room and slammed the door. Before she could follow him, the phone rang. It was the mother of one of Oliver’s friends, a boy named Lee. It seemed that, on the bus coming home, Oliver had jumped on Lee, pushed him down, sat on him, and bounced on him, hard. The driver had stopped the bus, and hauled Oliver away from his friend. Fortunately, Lee’s mother was as concerned for Oliver, whom she knew well, as she was for her own son, who, after all, had not been hurt. According to Lee, it was just a bit of roughhousing that got a little out of hand.

  At last, Anne-Marie realized that something was seriously bothering her son. She went to Oliver’s room to talk about it, but he refused to let her in. Finally, she told him—through the door—that she knew what had happened, that she wasn’t mad at him, and just wanted to talk about what was bothering him.

  After a moment the door opened and Oliver appeared, his cheeks streaked with tears.

  “What is it, Oliver?” she asked tenderly. “What’s bothering you?”

  “Are you and Dad going to get divorced?” he blurted out, and then burst into sobs and threw his arms around his mother.

  Anne-Marie was stunned. Although she had known for weeks that she and Carey would be getting divorced, somehow she had thought she should wait awhile before discussing it with Oliver. But now it was obvious that Oliver was well aware of the seriousness of the situation. She hugged Oliver tightly.

  “It’s all my fault,” Oliver said in a confessional tone.

  “Oh, honey,” Ann-Marie consoled him, “it is not your fault. That’s just not true.”

  “What you said this morning,” Oliver explained, his voice cracking. “You said it was all because of me and you were sick of everything. So now you’re sick of me. Are you going to get divorced from me too?”

  Now Anne-Marie began to cry with him. “I’m sick of what’s happening at work,” she said. “I’m sick of not having enough money sometimes. But I could never be sick of you. Never!”

  It is a fact of our lives that divorce affects millions of children every day. Even for children whose parents’ marriages remain intact, the fear of divorce hangs over them ominously. Almost every little boy knows another little boy who sees his dad only on weekends, or whose mother expects him to do more chores than most other little boys. By the time he is a teenager, it is the rare boy who doesn’t have a friend with a stepparent, or whose mother has a live-in boyfriend, or has become a member of a blended family with three new siblings, or whose father has left the family. “It seems like everybody’s divorced,” nine-year-old Timmy told me.

  Divorce has become such a pervasive phenomenon today that, for the millions of boys whose parents do divorce, I believe it amounts to a third trauma of b
oyhood. All the issues we have discussed in relation to the other two traumas of boyhood come into play during divorce—and, often, more intensely so: the disconnection from parents, the shame, the wearing of the mask to cover painful feelings of loss and loneliness, and the gender straitjacket that restricts boys from expressing these emotions.

  The divorce itself is a wrenching disconnection for a boy. He feels disconnected from the family and home that once were that safe space. The majority of boys are in the custody of their mothers, so they may feel especially disconnected from their fathers. A boy may see his dad only on weekends or never see him at all. At the same time, he may feel distanced from his mother, who may herself be so upset and overburdened that she simply has little time or energy left for her son. The boy has, in essence, been pushed away from family and home—just as he may be pushed away during the other two typical disconnections of boyhood.

  But with divorce, there is no positive benefit claimed for the disconnection, and there is no sanction or support from society for it. Unlike the pushing away at age six that is supposed to help a boy “cut the apron strings” or the separation at adolescence that is supposed to encourage a boy to become an independent man, any positive result from a disconnection by divorce for the boy is much harder to discern. A divorce may bring relative peace to the couple after a particularly strife-torn period of marriage. Or it may bring relative emotional health to one or, sometimes, both of the divorced parents. But society does not tell the boy that divorce is good for him, and rarely does he see it that way.

  Fifteen-year-old Dennis explained: “Everyone says to me, like, ‘When are your parents coming to pick you up?’ or ‘Are you going away with your parents this summer?’ And I’m like ‘No. My parents are divorced. My father doesn’t even speak to my mother anymore.’ ”

  Jake, age twelve, told me: “I don’t tell anybody about my parents. It’s not their business and anyway they won’t say anything nice about it.”

  David, seventeen, emphasized: “As a guy, I’m not about to go around talking about my parents. I mean, the other kids will be, like ‘Grow up—get a life. You’re not the only one!’ ”

  Even given the prevalence of divorce, the boy still behaves in accordance with the Boy Code. Rather than show his feelings of sadness, vulnerability, helplessness, despair, and loss, he will retreat behind the mask. He may act out, become difficult, fight, talk back to the teacher, argue, hit things and people, but—whatever he does—he knows that he must not show the shame that torments him—the shame that he feels at not measuring up, feeling weak, not being a real man.

  And divorce is seldom as simple and “clean” as two adults separating and one of them taking primary custody of the boy. The divorce rearranges all the members of the family, the extended family, and everyone who comes in contact with the family—like pieces on a chessboard. The relationship of mother and son changes, the relationship of father and son changes. The relationship of mother, father, and other caregivers, including teachers, changes. What’s more, a whole new set of players may come on the scene, all of whom have differing and bewildering stakes and roles in the matter: counselors and lawyers, baby-sitters or nannies, grandmothers or family friends, boyfriends and girlfriends, new “parents” and siblings in a remarriage. Even the family pet may leave home.

  The problem for boys of divorce is that their reactions to it are often misinterpreted and misunderstood. There has been a great deal of discussion in recent years about the relative effects of divorce on boys and girls. Judith Wallerstein, founder of the Center for the Family in Transition, talks about the “sleeper effect” of divorce on girls. During a divorce, girls may seem to be coping successfully, they seem “fine.” But, years later—sometimes many years later—the dormant negative feelings will surface and disrupt their lives. Boys, on the other hand, are more likely than girls to act out during the divorce. Their voices, in fact, may become loud and strident. But what we are hearing is not a boy’s true inner voice—it is an angry cry, disconnected from the genuine pain he feels within. So while boys and girls tend to behave differently in a divorce situation—boys often make noise, girls tend to suffer in silence—both behaviors are meant to cover the deeper pain they feel within.

  “I’m not ever getting married,” seventeen-year-old Jason once told me, “it’s just gonna be all day long arguing about money, arguing about who said this and who said that, and yelling at the kids. You’ll just end up alone, so why even get married in the first place?”

  If divorce were a rare phenomenon in our society, perhaps we would not need to pay such close attention to this third childhood trauma. But, according to Lawrence Beymer of Indiana State University, the parents of some three-thousand kids get divorced or separated every day. Half of all Caucasian boys live in a single-parent home (usually headed by the mother); three quarters of all African American boys are in the same situation. Most of these boys are under the age of eighteen. Many studies show that boys of divorced families are more at risk for a range of problems than boys of intact families. Author S. H. Kaye reports that they tend to be more aggressive, are absent from school more often, and score less well in both reading and math. A study by D. M. Fergusson of more than one thousand New Zealand children from birth to age fifteen, showed that the children of divorced families were more likely to become sexually active earlier, more likely to abuse drugs, and were twice as likely to drop out of school altogether.

  The good news is that boys can cope successfully with divorce, as can girls and parents. The third trauma of boyhood—like the other two—can be ameliorated. The problem comes if a family has been unsuccessful at dealing with either of the other two traumas. If parents expect their boy to “tough it out” when he goes to school or when he reaches puberty, they may well expect him to do the same during divorce. On the other hand, if parents have developed a strong relationship with their boy that provides him with ample opportunities to be himself and express his true emotions, he is more likely to get through a divorce without retreating behind the mask. To do so, however, parents must separate their feelings about each other, and the situation they are in, from their feelings about their son. Although this can be extremely difficult to do, it can and must be done.

  LEARNING TO READ THE ACTION “BAROMETER”

  The emotions involved in a family on the brink of divorce, during divorce, and after divorce, are extremely complex and constantly changing—sometimes gradually, sometimes violently and suddenly. A boy may respond to these changes through various types of action: sometimes a wild and unexpected spike of activity, such as Oliver’s episode on the school bus, sometimes a new and obsessive kind of activity such as constant talking or teasing, and sometimes it may be “anti-activity”—the boy will withdraw into silence and sullenness. A parent must learn to read the boy’s action barometer.

  The most typical emotions for a boy of divorce include shame, guilt, vulnerability, and anxiety. He may suffer intense feelings of shame, that he is unable to be a man and cope with this difficult storm alone. “I’m always wondering now—if I hadn’t been such a baby about everything, maybe my parents would still be together,” Raphael, aged sixteen, explained. “My father always yelled at my mother and told her she was too easy on me. He said I was a spoiled brat, that I got everything I wanted. I think he was sick of both of us.” Indeed, a boy like Raphael may feel guilt, that somehow he is to blame for the breakup of his parents and the destruction of his family. He often feels vulnerable and powerless—there is nothing he can do to repair his family or to connect with them. He feels fear and anxiety about the future. What will happen to me? Who will look after me? Will I have to move to a new house, a new neighborhood, a new school? Above all, he feels a tremendous sense of disconnection. Not only is the connection to an intact family shattered, he may be unable to connect with his father or mother individually, because they are so distraught themselves. They may be so consumed by their own anger, remorse, worry, and guilt, they may have diffi
culty focusing on the feelings of their son. All of which causes the boy to disconnect from his own genuine feelings.

  J. W. Santrock, who interviewed forty-five fifth-grade boys, argues that divorce is so traumatic and painful, it is actually more difficult for a boy to deal with than a parent’s death. A death, even a tragic and unexpected one, is more clear-cut than a divorce. The boy will long for the parent and miss him or her, but the parent is gone; there is no possibility of his or her return. Sons of a divorced couple, by contrast, may harbor hopes that their parents will reunite, and may work very hard—for years, in some cases—to bring about a reconciliation, when none is possible. “I tried everything,” Kent, now aged eighteen, remembers, “I tried getting them to come to my tennis matches together; I tried organizing a Christmas party where we could all be a family; once, when I was only eight years old, I ran away from home to go see my dad to beg him to come back to be with us. Nothing worked. It was definitely over. I was pretty much devastated.”