In Spite of Everything

by Susan Gregory Thomas

  That third group makes me think about Fast Times at Ridgemont High and the Jennifer Jason Leigh character, Stacy. In one of the final scenes, Stacy and Linda (Phoebe Cates) are chatting at the diner where they both waitress:

  STACY: You know, Linda. I’ve finally figured it out. It’s not sex I want. Anyone can have sex.

  LINDA: What do you want?

  STACY: I want romance.

  LINDA: Romance in Ridgemont? We don’t even get cable TV.

  The scene is even better in context, which is that Stacy had begun the academic year receiving extremely practical, almost clinical, sex counsel from Linda (we never see Stacy’s—or anyone’s—parents throughout the entire movie; the kids are always shown on their own, at work, at home, at school). By this time, Stacy has had sex twice, with two different guys; had an abortion, for which the guy (Mike Damone, the skeevy scalper) neither showed nor paid; and finally fallen for the guy she’d liked all along, the lovely, albeit nebbishy, and smitten Mark Ratner (“the Rat”). In this scene, Stacy has just finished her freshman year. She is fifteen—and she has already had her middle-age “Aha!” moment.

  I totally got this scene. I, for one, was already into my second major relationship by the time I was fifteen. Most X teenagers got it, too, which is why the movie is now considered our classic. For us, it seems the path to dating, sex, and love was utterly retrogressive. Indeed, our approach was categorically different from those of our immediate predecessors. In the 1950s and early ’60s, courtship was reinforced by a cultural environment of Eisenhower-era optimism, friendliness, and civility: Boy meets girl; boy invites girl to soda shop; boy gives girl varsity letter jacket to wear; boy and girl “go steady”—a term that beautifully encapsulates the quaint, reassuring socioemotional gestalt of the era’s budding romantic relationships. “Going steady” gave way to “free love” by the late 1960s and ’70s, the ecstatic abandon that emerged, thanks to Baby Boomers’ having been reared by Dr. Spock–trained parents. It just isn’t possible to act out with such blissful abandon unless you’re fundamentally secure. Neurotic people, however, lack the emotional foundation for such freedom. Neurotic people are guarded, calculating, political, scared. Hello, friends! That was us. The mores of teenage neurosis form the very premise of Fast Times at Ridgemont High, and, for that matter, of most of the greatest hits of 1980s popular culture. Indeed, a thumbnail review of the top movies, songs, and literature of the day—The Breakfast Club; Heathers; Less Than Zero; big hair versus shoe-gazing bands—reveals that the top romantic feelings were sullenness, sarcasm, revenge, fear, and vulnerability. Notorious for the Whartonesque social hierarchies established in high schools and malls, we approached one another with the presumption of rejection, competition, and power struggles.

  All that edgy posturing was the stuff of our crunchy crusts, but what about our gooey centers—particularly, what about the gooey centers of girls like Stacy? Was she looking for a father figure in the skeevy scalper, Mike Damone? Was it Damone’s ethical obligation to refuse her, on the grounds that he was older and occupied a position of relative power? What was Stacy really saying to the Phoebe Cates character by reporting—after her wild, troubled run with a string of coercive older guys—that she now wanted “romance,” not “sex”? Was she saying that she wanted the kind of healthy, nonsexual father-daughter romance with the sweet, nonthreatening Mark Ratner—“Rat”—that she should have been having with her actual father? In the absence of her actual father, what should she have done? That is, what is the best course for those of us in Hetherington’s third group? Are we doomed to quasi-incestuous relations with our mates—with or without sex? What is the safest route? The healthiest route? Even if you’ve spent years in therapy, how do you really sort all this out?

  Not to say that it’s any easier for guys. Studies from Harvard, Penn State, and an array of other major research universities have been reporting since the 1960s that boys who grow up without a regular, involved dad tend to engage in “overcompensatory masculine behaviors” or “protest masculinity.” The basic takeaway from this research is that these boys are so dominated by their mothers, and female authority in general (grandmothers, teachers, babysitters, and so on), that as they grow into men, they need to divorce themselves from it by engaging in behaviors that academics label thus: “rejection of authority, particularly when it is imposed by adult females”; “exaggerated masculinity”; “a relatively exploitative attitude toward females, with sexual contact appearing as important as conquest and as a means of validating masculinity.” Basically, they’re assholes.

  Everyone who grew up with a single mom knows these guys: You either went out with them, you had them as brothers, or, if you’re a guy, you were them. Much of the only truly original music to have been produced in the 1980s—early rap, hip-hop, hard-core punk—was predicated on such “protest masculinity.” Friends of mine from relatively well-adjusted families of origin (or those in which the father was still totally involved, a relative rarity when we grew up) were outraged back in the day by rappers’ gross misogynistic repertoire, especially by Eminem’s psycho-Oedipal brand of it. There is no question that it’s awful from a social and civic point of view, and I share the outrage (especially when I think of my own daughters). But there is part of me that on a primal, genetic level feels a sisterly simpatico with these guys, particularly with Eminem. Out-of-control single mom, no father to speak of, the mother’s and children’s financial collapse and degradation following divorce, the kids belonging to neither this social world nor that one but floating in a purgatorial netherworld of their own, then, after all that, the girlfriend whom he adores fails him, too? Even if this isn’t exactly what happened, it’s obvious from his body of work that this is pretty much what he feels happened—and as such, there’s a part of me that totally gets it. My take on it is that Eminem is mainly mad at his mom and his ex-wife for not being a better mother and wife and that there is some random, boyish spillover from all that abandonment.

  This is not to say that there are not undoubtedly sociopathic freaks who really do hate girls and women; there are also probably those who are confused and unhinged enough to say terrible things just because everyone else does or because they feel that they have to show off. Those people are dangerous. But the standard-issue “protest masculinity” guys? In my mind, they’re all to some extent like my brother, my stepbrothers, and a great many of my guy friends (and to some extent fatherless guys throughout history, like Caesar Augustus, Hamlet, Bill Clinton). There’s just no way around it, as anyone with firsthand experience knows: It’s tough sledding for boys growing up with a single mom.

  Ian was definitely on this continuum. My mother—in part, I think, because she came from a family that had been dominated by generations of intense, supersmart women—seemed to think that my brother needed “special help” because he was more “fragile” than I was, when, in my view, he was just a regular boy, and a really smart boy at that. With the paternal toughening, man-upping influence deleted from his sphere, Ian was alternately coddled and shamefully pitied, leaned on and dissected. I, for one, found this intolerable, enraging. Sometimes, I’d yell at my mother to stop treating Ian like a pathetic moron whose every minor achievement was cause for pom-pom waving, and I’d yell at Ian to stop acting like such a pussy. Other times, I’d attempt to explain to my mother calmly (and, undoubtedly, condescendingly) that her inappropriate nursing of Ian was actually deflating his self-esteem and capacity for genuine competence. I’d give Ian a St. Crispin’s Day pep talk, barking at him that he was as sharp as all get-out and that he needed to stop defaulting to Mom’s characterizations of him to justify his self-pity and inertia—he was better than that. Then I’d yell at both of them for their creepy codependence and feel sorry for myself for not having a parent with whom I could share my own weird codependence.

  Unsurprisingly, this triangulation did not do much for Ian (nor any of us). He resented me for being, by ludicrous default, the “non-pathetic” chil
d, so when I got into trouble, which was incessantly, Ian enjoyed assuming the posture of a powerfully annoying Dickensian Tiny Tim, sorrowfully tucking in under Mom’s wing and sticking his tongue out at me. But every so often, Ian would erupt into a surprise fit of primal male rage. Coming from a massive teenage male of six foot four, these bouts resulted in overturned tables and book ripping. I never blamed him for these. He was, after all, a guy. Moreover, he was a guy sandwiched between two warring maternal figures, each of whom believed she knew what was best for him. What guy wouldn’t lose it and devolve into chest-beating tantrums?

  To this day, Ian alternates between indulging women’s troubles and his own fears, and getting grouchy when a woman close to him (Mom, me, his wife) asks him to do something that might in some unconscious way call his manhood into question (do the dishes, for example). But Ian is awesome, and in spite of it all, he married a fantastic woman; I am close to both of them, and I am rooting for their union. And although Ian got mad at me for getting the lion’s share of the attention (even though it was almost all negative), flaunted his Little Lord Fauntleroy status, and definitely freaked whenever I got bossy with him, he never got mad at me for pushing him. He still doesn’t. Ian needed a father, and that’s what fathers do. They push you. My thinking is this: When you’re the son, mothers want you to do stuff for them; fathers want you to do stuff for yourself. Ergo, misplaced rage betides the man who was raised by the single mom without paternal presence.

  Take my friend “Mark,” for example. Mark was the oldest of three boys whose father left them for a woman with her own children; the father never looked back. So Mark grew up under the alternately asphyxiating and abject wing of his single mother, who constantly implored him to take care of man-of-the-house things for her: mowing the lawn, fixing the sink, patching the roof. While he was occupied at those jobs, she lavished attention on him, but she basically ignored him when he wasn’t, instead lavishing the attention on the younger brothers—which made him mad, though he wasn’t exactly aware that he was mad at the time. Mark subsequently married, and had children with, a woman with whom he had virtually no sexual connection but who asked him to do a lot of man-of-the-house jobs. After he ultimately divorced her in a surprise fit of rage, Mark took a job that worked him fourteen hours a day, six days a week. Although he believes that he would like to be in a relationship, he now gets mad anytime someone he is dating requests anything of him. So he works like a dog and spends all of his free time with his kids.

  Another friend, “Scott,” one of four boys, was the son his single mother felt was most like her and could understand her better than anyone else. Scott grew up listening to his mother’s troubles, trying to help her sort through them, and co-parenting his brothers. When his mother remarried when he was in his late teens, Scott was demoted to being his mother’s backup sounding board, the man she called on when she felt that her husband couldn’t understand her. Scott spent a good part of his thirties with a narcissistic older woman with a young son from a previous marriage, which had ended in an ugly divorce and an absent father. Scott devoted himself to listening to his girlfriend’s troubles, fending off her ex-husband’s dunderheadedness, and co-parenting her boy. In a surprise fit of rage, Scott broke up with her and now longs for a wife and family, dating one woman after another, breaking up with the older ones when they become too needy and with the younger ones when their immaturity is laid bare. He stays in touch with his ex-girlfriend’s son.

  I could go on. But in essence, the results of my armchair field study: The single-mom-and-son dynamic breeds emotional incest. I know there are exceptions, and all blessings and admiration are most deservedly theirs. But in my experience and in a great many others’, these relationships with their sons generally end up codependent—particularly if money is tight, which, statistically, it almost always is for single mothers (a chief risk factor for women falling under the poverty line is divorce). Such circumstances are outrageously stressful on single mothers with little outside help. But unless these women are highly self-aware and can avail themselves of appropriate emotional support, they often lean on their sons. Which often leads to filial dysfunction with a distinctly incestuous undertone.

  No mother but the truly sick wants to do this. But it’s pretty much a gimme that the son is essentially forced to be the husband: a tragic setup on the Greek order. No matter how hard he tries, the son is doomed to feel like an impotent loser. He knows he is powerless to alleviate the mother’s financial and emotional stress, and even if he is too young to know about the mechanics of sex, he has the sense that he isn’t man enough to be a useful partner. But the mother still exerts such emotional pressure, however obliquely, and the son feels every square millimeter of it. Often this powder keg is set off when the son is dumped unceremoniously if a boyfriend or stepfather steps in. Now he feels betrayed and unmanned, his hurt made worse by the boyfriend’s unspoken but clear resentment and competition with the son. The question is, what was anyone expecting other than “protest masculinity”?

  Obviously, this mother-son configuration is at least as old as Oedipus. But because more boys were raised by single mothers in the 1980s than ever before in U.S. history—because there were more divorces—such Oedipal meshugas came to define a respectable margin of X’s generational anthropology, not only of human relations, but also of the culture. While predecessors like Philip Roth, Charles Bukowski, and Henry Miller might have shared similar angry-young-man DNA, Xers were distinguished for their lacerating self-awareness and shame. Think Bret Easton Ellis, Marshall Mathers, Kurt Cobain, Rick Moody, Douglas Coupland, almost all the eighties punk-rock band leaders you can name, and one of my favorite personal cases in point, the poet and Sarah Lawrence College professor Jeffrey McDaniel.

  I met Jeff in the wake of both our parents’ divorces. Because of late (or no) child-support payments circa 1984, my mother, younger brother, and I had moved to a Soviet bloc style, ill-maintained apartment building in suburban Philadelphia inhabited by elderly people and divorcées. Jeff moved in with his dad, who lived down the hall from us, apparently in the wake of some bad goings-down with his mother, who lived in the city. Jeff attended the prep school where my mother was head of the English department (probably one of the reasons Jeff and I, wisely, never really became friends). But I always half-tracked him throughout high school because whenever I walked past his apartment, he was listening to the same music I was. Plus, I liked his whole affect: sneery, punky, writerly, clearly exhibiting protest masculinity. I’d pass Jeff with one of his legion of girlfriends, moodily trudging the streets of Bryn Mawr with his earring and combat boots.

  A lifetime later, when I was groping through the bleakest period of my divorce, I found a book of grown-up Jeff’s poetry next to Pablo Neruda’s at Barnes & Noble. And what do you know? His work nails the kind of narcissistic wound exacted from that whole Generation X son–single mom thing, in a wry, self-lacerating, and street-y way. Consider this poem, “The Jeffrey McDaniel Show”:

  I walk into a candlelit room.

  All the women I’ve ever dated

  are passing around the love poems

  I gave them, and guess what?

  It’s the same poem—My sweet

  [Put Your Name Here] if I was God

  I’d make flowers smell like the back

  of your neck, trees with trunks

  as soft as your thighs. When we kiss

  I feel like a cheerleader being crushed

  to death by a giant pom-pom. Then Alex

  Trebek appears. A game of Ex-

  Girlfriend Jeopardy ensues.

  All the categories about me.

  “I’ll take emotional baggage, Alex,

  for twenty.” “Jeffrey’s mother

  spanked him with this blunt object

  so hard, he couldn’t look in a mirror

  for a week.” “What’s a wire hairbrush?”

  “Correct, you control the board.”

  “Bedroom Arrogance,
for thirty.”

  “The most narcissistic thing Jeffrey

  has ever said while making love.”

  “What is …?” If you hold me real tight,

  you can feel the centrifugal force

  of the world revolving around me.

  And as if to offer a close parenthesis, consider this pithy stanza from another of his poems, “The Jerk”:

  You’re not really my new girlfriend,

  just another flop sequel of the first one,

  who was based on the true story of my mother.

  And there you have it: the ipso facto Oedipal Gen-X man. I have, we all have, known so many of them that describing their basic gestalt is almost like writing a horoscope profile. They are furious and self-incriminating, charming and resourceful. They can seem like consummate rescuers until their scabs are ripped off by women who they feel are manipulating them or treating their efforts with indifference, mockery, or egregious clinginess. Then, look out. They can become Madonna-whore-complex-struggling, redemption-seeking humiliation junkies. Personal observation and experience suggest, however, that this kind of guy comes into his own in a relationship with someone who genuinely values his competence and helpfulness, as well as his masculine virtues in their various forms. My feeling is that guys like this need to feel needed and appreciated, which is why they often make especially doting fathers. This is a man I understand. Why? I had the same mom. I had the same dad, too: the absent one.