Filed under: Abandonment, Alcoholism, Astrology stuff, Exemplary Children of Divorce, Immigration and Divorce, Living with Aunts and Uncles, Suicide, creativity
One of the great old time masters of detective mystery writing, Raymond Chandler, was a Child of D. Chandler’s Mother was an Irish Immigrant. His Father was a civil engineer who was alcoholic. The family moved around quite a bit because the father worked for the railroad. Dad was absent a great deal of the time and eventually abandoned the family. Chandler was raised by his Mother. His uncle supported the pair financially.
I’m not sure when the divorce actually occurred. Chandler’s Mother took him to Europe for awhile when he was around 11 or 12. Supposedly they took a boat in June, 1900. Chandler was going through his Jupiter Return at that time.
Since I’ve found multiple examples of kids who go through their parents’ split during or around the time of their Jupiter Return who tend to become successful in Jupiterian Professions like Law, Publishing, Higher Education, Religion, etc. I’m pretty excited to find this prominence in Chandler’s chart. I’m finding a lot of published writers whose parents split apart during this Return phase at any rate.
Success doesn’t guarantee happiness, of course. Chandler suffered his own struggle with alcoholism just like his Father. His Jupiter was in Scorpio (murder, crime, the dark side, detective work) opposing Neptune (escapism, addiction). The Wikipedia biography on Chandler is really interesting. He married a woman who was 18 years his senior (Venus c. Saturn-Sun-NN) and it seems that when she died he became despondent and tried to commit suicide. It sounds like he suffered from serious depression his whole life.
Since I was fourteen when my parents got their divorce I had a “normal” early childhood. My brother and I had the ideal home life for being able to just run off and play. And I wonder if there is a huge difference in this for young Children of Divorce. I can’t imagine being able to take the mental and imaginary leaps that I did when I was a kid. If a child has changing households and multiple parents someone will always be interfering, either with a scheduling conflict or some sort of judgment about the child that will make him/her too self-conscious.
I’ve found a great book on child development called The Yale Child Study Center to Understanding Your Child by Linda C. Mayes, M.D. and Donald J. Cohen, M.D. There’s a chapter in the back on Divorce which is included right before the Chapter on Death. Both Chapters seem more concerned with the parents and their problems. Out of 548 pages, there are only 16 set aside for this phenonmenon that half of the kids in the United States are growing up in. That’s always distressing for me.
But, tucked into another Chapter called “Child’s Play: Child’s Work,” is an interesting insert called “The Child Who Cannot Play.” It addresses how a stressful divorce lifestyle can affect a young child’s development in this area. It even lumps it together with the Autism problem. Although Autism is no doubt a real problem, I tend to suspect that it’s a real problem of mis-diagnosis in the Medical profession.
The book states that the ages of 3-7 are the major years for developing through play. Man, kids from intact families don’t know how good they have it just to be allowed to go through this phase uninterrupted. Parents in these families just love letting their kids go off and do their own thing.
From pp 222-223:
“Because their external lives are so rushed and stressed, their time to daydream, imagine and reflect upon their mental world is foreshortened. In this tragic situation, children who are caught in the middle of a divorce, or whose parents are fighting constantly or are depressed, or who are growing up in unsafe neighborhoods with littlesense of security, often cannot play.”
Did you see that? It mentioned “Divorce.” Divorce as a problem as seen from a child’s point of view, not a parent’s. It just tucked it in there all hidden like. How rare is that?
Going on it then says to send the child for counseling if this becomes a problem. Shouldn’t the parents just do the counseling? Counselors are often invasive presences like step-parents. They seldom have enough talent to do their jobs effectively so why bother with them?
I think often that the parent thinks of his children as pals in which he plays in his new single life with. Many of the movies that have come out recently use this “hip, friendly parent” to tell their stories. Hip parents are great. Often they have huge egos and don’t know when they are drowning out their children’s spirits, though. But, that’s another story. Maybe playing sidekick to Mom and Dad’s single life is a good substitute for play. I personally think it’s neurotic. Mostly I think it’s responsible for a whole generation of people who can create no new Arts. I’ve never been a fan of Reality TV myself because it definitely seems to be a mediocre product of half-baked minds. Just when we need inventors and risk takers who can make great intuitive leaps to solve the problems of the environment our society is loaded up with young people who have been used to shrink their parents’ problems non-stop. These skuttled around kids probably have hyper advanced social skills that replace the imagination thing and that’s probably better for survival during a deluge because people will be less likely to fight over who gets kicked off the raft.
Filed under: College Drop Out, Exemplary Children of Divorce, Religion, creativity
Biographies of Modern Artists are difficult to come by. Artists speak through their work first and if they’re successful a biographer comes along and explains the life experience from which the art springs. I was really pleased to find that Artist Liza Lou is from a divorced family. Lou is an American Artist who makes unbelievably beautiful sculptures which are covered in tiny beads. She became famous for her life-size portrayal of a modern american kitchen which sparkles and gleams. It’s a feminist commentary. It’s also interesting that she chose to show an idealized version of something related to home.
Lou’s childhood seems very strange. Her parents were bohemian artists living in New York until they found God and became Born Again Christians and moved to the suburbs. Lou’s Father seems to have gone off the deep-end. She has performed a piece about his abuse. Lou has a sister. I don’t know what age she was when her parents divorced. She is said to be still close to her Mother.
Excellent article (with pictures) here.
From the article:
“Liza’s work is an imitation of life, where nothing is real,” says her Paris gallerist, Thaddaeus Ropac. “At the same time, it’s so present that it can be very frightening.” According to art historian and critic Robert Pincus-Witten, it offers a unique synthesis of issues deriving from conceptualism, Pop art and feminism. “There’s that ambiguity between the extremely luxurious and the politically terrifying,” he says.
You don’t have to dig very deeply into Lou’s personal history to find the wellsprings for her works’ conflicting themes. Her parents lived determinedly bohemian lives in Manhattan until 1965, when they attended a revival meeting and became born-again Christians. After burning all of their books and artworks, including Roy Lichtenstein paintings that were gifts from the artist, they moved to Minnesota, where they worked for various fundamentalist churches. Lou and her sister grew up watching exorcisms and speaking in tongues.
At a certain point in her teens, Lou began to question some of the tales she’d been told: Did King David really speak to her mother in the hospital after Lou was born, to explain that the baby was a blessing unto this world? (Today, although not exactly an atheist, Lou says she isn’t a believer, either: “Certain things have to line up for me in terms of logic.”) In 1989 she took a summer trip to Europe, and in the cathedrals of Florence and Venice, she experienced revelations, though they had less to do with Jesus than with mosaics and Byzantine domes. “As an American kid who grew up in the suburbs—postmodern churches with plastic chairs and all that crap—it was totally transforming to be in a place that took hundreds of years to make,” Lou says. “That blew me away.”
Filed under: Abandonment, Alcoholism, College Drop Out, Exemplary Children of Divorce, Foster Children, Raised by non-relatives, creativity
“Once upon a midnight dreary”
was written by a Child of D. I suppose it makes sense…
Last week’s New Yorker magazine published an article about Poe’s life called “The Humbug” written by Jill Lepore.
(http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/atlarge/2009/04/27/090427crat_atlarge_lepore)
Edgar Allen Poe was born to an actress. A year after he was born his Father left. Two years after Poe was born his Mother died. Poe and his siblings were separated and Poe was raised by a wealthy merchant and his wife. He was never adopted by these people. It seems that wild swings in financial fortunes and power plays dominated the household of Poe’s childhood and Poe was out on his own by the time he was 17.
He also had drinking and gambling problems from very early on. Financially strapped, Poe joined the military for a while and then attended West Point. He wrote for money. It seems he moved around a lot. His love life seems equally difficult. The women in his life seemed to have suffered illnesses and to have passed away. At age 27 Poe married his 13 year old cousin. The marriage lasted about 12 years before Virginia, his wife, died of tuberculosis. Poe died at Age 40.
Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edgar_Allan_Poe
Filed under: Custody, Exemplary Children of Divorce, Movies About Growing Up in Divorce, creativity, separate households
Noah Baumbach is the Director/Writer of one of the few true movies about going through a Divorce, The Squid and the Whale. It is said to be based on experiences he went through during his own parents’ divorce. Baumbach’s biography is a little sketchy so I’m not sure of his age at the time of his parent’s divorce. I’m assuming he was around Age 15 or 16.
The Squid and the Whale is about a family living in Brooklyn in the mid-80s. The parents are intellectuals, both writers, the Father is going through a mid-life crisis and down-turn in his career and ego and the Mother’s career is just taking off. The sons are age 12 and age 16. The movie does a great job of showing the strangeness of going through adolescence while also going through the parents’ divorce.
I saw the movie a while ago and thought it a little dry. The significance of the Squid and the Whale is explained at the end but I was spacing out at that point. Sorry.
Supposedly the first words were the 12 year old Son saying: “Me and Mom against you and Dad.” That definitely sums it up pretty well.
There’s a great article at indiewire which analyzes the relationships. http://www.indiewire.com/article/noahs_arc_noah_baumbachs_the_squid_and_the_whale
Here’s a quote about how narcissistic parents raise their kids in divorce. Can hardly wait for the sequel with Step-Parents and siblings:
“the parental choice to treat children as equals can be admirable but also suggests a deeper selfishness that seems fundamentally at odds with the job.”
Filed under: Abandonment, Books, Exemplary Children of Divorce, Immigration and Divorce, creativity
Junot Diaz is an MIT professor and Pulitizer Prize Winner and Child of D. I’ve passed by his novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao often in the library and in bookstores, but I didn’t know until I heard an NPR show this morning (Nov. 27 or 28, 2008? sorry I’m publishing this a few weeks behind) that Junot Diaz writes variations on memoir about his childhood which includes long separations from his Father. Diaz was born in the Dominican Republic. His Father went to America early in his life and so was absent for much of Diaz’s childhood. Later on the family joined the Father in New Jersey but his Father left them at that point. This happened in 1979 when Diaz would have been around 11 years old. In the NPR Interview Diaz says that he writes from the point of view of growing up as a poor immigrant but he also describes life with an erratic Father presence. I haven’t read his writings but it sounds like he does touch a bit on the subject of separation. Mostly he seems to speak from the point of view of immigration — there’s a bigger audience for this, a complaint that America is proud of rather than interested in sweeping under the rug, ah hem…
Divorce among Immigrants is certainly an interesting topic. Although I have no personal experience in this area, I’ve heard a couple of times that Immigrant families will stick together out of necessity because of moving to a strange place. If that tends to be true a separation connected with a move to a foreign land would make for an extra complicated childhood.
Filed under: College Drop Out, Exemplary Children of Divorce, creativity
As I’ve said before I don’t like to add a whole lot of Actors and Actresses to the Exemplaries List. Not because their lives and feelings don’t count, but just because Superstardom is sort of an unusual life experience that doesn’t apply to a lot of people. A whole lot of it depends on having the “It” factor and so much of real success in life comes from hard work, determination, self-confidence, intelligence, etc.
(Also, I suspect that Children of D might overall be more attractive than kids from Divorce. I think that it might be more difficult for attractive and magnetic Parents not to give in to temptations like having affairs (and being vain and egocentric and arrogant) and so might be more likely to do things which lead to having multiple relationships in life. They are more likely to want to pursue something better and bigger and more perfect in life. Their kids might be better looking and more genetically enhanced from a physcial stand-point in this regard and so more easily successful in fields that require such attributes. This is just a supposition of mine).
Actress Courtney Cox is the Actress best known for her hilarious portrayal of Monica in the Friends series on TV. Turns out she’s a Child of D. Cox’s parents divorced in 1974 when she would have been around Age 10. Her childhood is described on Wikipedia here:
Cox was born Courteney Bass Cox in Birmingham, Alabama to a wealthy Southern family. Her parents were Courteney (née Bass) and Richard Lewis Cox, a contractor.[1] Cox has two older sisters (Virginia McFerrin and Dottie Pickett), an older brother (Richard, Jr.) and nine half-brothers and half-sisters. Her parents divorced in 1974, and her father eventually settled in Panama City, Florida, where he opened a company called Cox Pools, while Cox grew up with her mother and her stepfather, New York businessman Hunter Copeland.
She is speaking out in the link listed below about how her own attitude to her marriage is reflected in her Father’s attitude to his Divorce.
http://omg.yahoo.com/news/courteney-cox-divorce-is-not-an-option/16824?nc
This is the revealing part:
Cox’s parents parents divorced when she was a child. “Before my dad died, he said one of his big regrets was that he hadn’t worked on their marriage enough. I don’t know what the future’s going to hold, but divorce isn’t really an option,” she said.
How much is “enough?” Who knows? Each family is different. What’s right for one person, or family, isn’t right for another person or family. Thing is, the kids are part of the marriage. They also have to live with the divorce for the rest of their lives. Something that the parents don’t really have to do.
Filed under: Birth Order, College Drop Out, Exemplary Children of Divorce, High School Drop Out, Mentally Ill parents, Movies About Growing Up in Divorce, Nutrition, School Drop Out - High School or College, creativity, self injury
Johnny Depp gave an incredible performance of an oldest Son growing up while living with a helpless, obese, single mother and younger brother in the movie: What’s Eating Gilbert Grape?
Probably not really good Holiday Viewing, though. Just happened to think of it right now.
Johnny Depp is a Child of D. His parents would have divorced around the time that Depp was 15. Here’s an except from his biography on Wikipedia.
Depp was born in Owensboro, Kentucky, the son of Betty Sue Palmer (née Wells), a waitress, and John Christopher Depp, Sr., a civil engineer.[3] He has one brother, Danny, and two sisters, Christie (now his personal manager) and Debbie. … The family moved frequently during Depp’s childhood, and he and his siblings lived in more than 20 different locations, settling in Miramar, Florida, in 1970. In 1978, Depp’s parents divorced. He engaged in self-harm as a child, due to the stress of dealing with family problems and his own insecurity. He has seven or eight scars from practicing self-harm. In a 1993 interview, he explained his self-injury by saying, “My body is a journal in a way. It’s like what sailors used to do, where every tattoo meant something, a specific time in your life when you make a mark on yourself, whether you do it yourself with a knife or with a professional tattoo artist”.[8]
1980s
Depp’s mother bought her son a guitar when he was 12, and Depp began playing in various garage bands. His first band was in honor of his girlfriend, Meredith. A year after his parents’ divorce, Depp dropped out of high school to become a rock musician. As he once explained on Inside the Actors Studio, he attempted to go back to school two weeks later, but the principal told him to follow his dream of being a musician. …
