We Had to Be Unlike Others to Survive

I’ve just been a bystander at another family near tragedy and I’ve also just reconnected with my long-lost (to me, and for decades to himself) adult stepson, and so new thoughts about the way we are raising our sons are uppermost in my mind.

The approach I used years ago when raising mine—love, love, and more love, and the abjuration, “Have fun” failed in two out of three cases, including my stepson’s early years. So I recognized a new wisdom in Kathryn Jezer-Morton’s recommendation in her post on The Cut of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road as the best child-rearing book she has ever read.

What a surprise. I’ve never read anything by McCarthy because I hate macho renditions of endless violence. Apparently The Road is different: the violence has already happened, destroying the landscape a man and his son are trudging through, hoping to reach a coast that may also have been destroyed. It’s a manual on survival, on trudging for miles without adequate food or water when complaining is pointless. The only alternative is to lie down and die.

This, novel, I think, points to our failure as mothers (fathers being less involved) to prepare our sons to survive, even if they are born into privilege and have all its advantages. Nothing makes this world safe and big helpings of love and advice to “have a good time” are more and more irrelevant.

Practicing walking away from disasters—motorized escape is usually impossible—means forced marches NOW with little water and no food, a practice most of us would abandon in the face of our sons’ complaints.

I am not including daughters because it seems we already know something about surviving; the most pampered girl has witnessed by the time she’s a teenager the endemic violence she faces and may have learned willy-nilly how to get away.

But what about “We had to be unlike the others to survive”? Conformity almost always seems the better choice, especially because of our worship of “being popular.” How many teenagers are willing to sacrifice popularity by being “unlike others”?

This line comes from Anne Badkhen’s essay The Book of Conjuring that centers on the passionate childhood friendship between two girls in 1952 postwar France and in Russia at the same period. Agnes worships the glamourous, risk-taking Fabienne whom she introduces to a source for heroin, finding years later that the girl she admired has grown into a woman destroyed by addiction. Would early lessons in surviving have saved Fabienne?

Impossible to answer. But I don’t think our easy going ways have worked.

I remember post-war Paris, the gloom of the recently invaded city, the somber faces of strangers on the bus I rode to school. I didn’t understand it, at twelve, but I did know that the gloom had a link to the recent history of France. During the Nazi invasion, constant risk and hardship taught survival lessons that the never-invaded U.S. has not needed to learn. Global warming and the following devastation may provide the equivalent—but will our loved and protected sons have learned means to survive it?

I’m finishing a short story next week titled, “How to Handle a Drunk.” It follows the torturous path of a boy who started smoking and drinking as a seven-year-old in a situation of desperate poverty and group addiction. As a teenager, he was drunk and drugged most of the time until one night, when he stumbled home inebriated, his powerful and respected grandfather threw him down and wrapped him in a buffalo robe, securing it with twine so he couldn’t escape.

In my story, his sister is horrified and wants to free him; he is screaming and crying. Their grandfather gives her a knife and says, “You might as well kill him right away.”

My story doesn’t go into what happened next. But for me, the portrait of a valued older relative taking a drastic step to try to save his grandson is refreshing.

Are we mothers ever able to take this approach rather than endless hugging and counseling?

A friend told me the other day about an acquaintance, a dedicated yoga teacher (which may or may not be relevant) who responded to the first emergency call, “I don’t have a daughter.” The daughter did eventually shed her addiction without her mother’s help or hindrance.

Can we admire this woman’s act as heroic, as the grandfather’s act surely was?

What price our tender hearts?

In My Family Favorites of 2023