Sleep pretty darlings, do not cry, I will sing a lullaby...
Prologue
The hardest thing I've ever had to do was tell my 8-year-old daughter that her mom and I were getting divorced. The stupidest thing I've ever done was listen to the experts who told us not to have that same conversation with our 3-year-old son. He was too young and wouldn't understand. We'd only confuse him. Ok, so I'm to believe that it was better for my little boy to figure it out all on his own by osmosis? I don't think so.
In this piece, I reflect deeply on divorce, the painful experience of it, and the many things I learned about myself and my children during and ever since that difficult time.
Monster
Divorce was the monster under my childhood bed, the boogeyman that swallowed families whole, and the mad demon that tore childhood's limb from limb.
I grew up in the golden age of divorce in the 1970's and 1980's. Like a relentless wildfire, I watched it engulf family after family. No matter the circumstances it always looked the same to me — a sad, selfish, sudden, secretive, and absurdly farcical drama with the adults seemingly oblivious to the pain and injustices inflicted on bewildered children.
One day there'd be a large group of us — mom, dads, kids, families — sitting at sticky picnic tables eating ice cream laughing about all the funny things that happened that weekend, and the very next day ... POOF … everything would change. Many times we'd never see that one dad or mom or kid ever again. Like they were swallowed whole by monsters we were only just beginning to believe didn't exist.
Divorce is a wrecking ball, a slow-motion derailment everyone sees, but no one can stop. Divorce unravels, disorders, and gravely disrupts families and lives. Given the prevalence of divorce in my youth, I felt it always lurking in the background, a threatening possibility. Would my family be next? Sometimes I worried it was contagious, that my parents would catch it from their divorced friends. At family gatherings, I eyed recent divorcees who still smiled and laughed and told jokes with growing suspicion. Their casual nonchalance felt like a betrayal. But my fiercest contempt of all burned for the parents of young children who relied on, or otherwise capitulated to, divorce. The destructive folly they callously perpetrated on their children's innocence, well-being, and future was criminal to my young mind. Were these secret-keeping cowards and traitors blind to the devastation they wreaked on the lives of their young children? Or, did they just not care?
Reality
Life, as we all know, isn't static or certain. The arrow of time doesn't ask for permission as it relentlessly moves us along from childhood into adulthood, unfolding reality in ways our younger selves could never have fathomed. I was a married father of two young children when my own marriage ended. Suddenly, I was a doppelgänger visitor from my childhood about to inflict the very trauma on my own children I had so vehemently despised all those adults back then for inflicting on theirs. How could this be happening?
Divorce is a long, excruciating process far more complex and emotionally intense than most can ever begin to comprehend. Among its myriad gut-wrenching challenges, perhaps none is more soul-crushing than telling your young children their parents are divorcing and their family is forever separating. Those who've never had to do this may think they understand, but I assure you, they do not. They cannot.
As that dreaded moment inched ever closer for me, I found myself haunted by memories of those adults from my childhood. I thought about them, dreamed about them at night, and reconsidered my many complex feelings regarding them, until finally, in one sudden, searing moment, I realized how wrongly I'd judged them. I may not have liked or agreed with their decisions, but that certainly didn't make them monsters, boogeymen, or mad demons. At worst, they were fallible, imperfect human beings, no different than you or I. What I saw, or thought I saw, back then was what they showed the world on the outside, but now I understood intimately what they had been feeling on the inside — pain, uncertainty, fear, and deep, intense guilt. Still, it didn't much matter. The monster demons from my childhood were back and I was about to unleash them on my own children.
Moment
I will never forget the climb up the staircase in my home on that chilly, overcast October afternoon as my wife and I made our way to our daughter's bedroom to tell her the sad news. I felt like I was drowning. I was praying for some kind of freak force majeure event to collapse the staircase, and with it, extinguish all the pain we were about to inflict. I couldn't breathe. Flashes of that nightmarish boat ride scene on the chocolate river in Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory played over and over in my head. That scene always baffled me, frightened me, and angered me. Made me dislike and distrust not just Gene Wilder's Willy Wonka character, but all adults. Made me question their motives, decisions, and sometimes even, their love for their own children.
We're supposed to care for our children, protect them, keep them safe. We're supposed to teach them and help them and love them. We're supposed to mold their fragility into resilience. What we’re not supposed to do is give them more reasons to feel vulnerable, to frighten them, abandon them, or leave them feeling sad or alone. Everything I'd done, or imagined I could do, to preserve the last remaining vestiges of my children's childhood innocence, had failed. All that remained now was the truth of the matter, and the truth of the matter is that I was about to betray my own children just as I'd seen all those adults in my childhood betray theirs. Having the deeply unfair advantage of knowing what was coming — what my kids, in those days and weeks prior to that day, had no way of knowing — was sickening to me. I was tortured by the pain and confusion they’d soon feel. The very two people in the world who had committed to love and protect them were about to rearrange their futures and forever scar them, and there wasn't a damn thing they could do about it. They didn't have a say. Their opinion wasn't solicited. Their feelings and pain weren't considered. I've thought a lot about who was looking out for and protecting my children that day, because it sure as hell wasn't me.
By the time we were three-quarters of the way up the stairs, I was so overcome with worry and concern for my daughter, I froze. I couldn't take another step. I sat down and buried my face into my hands. I cannot do this. I will not do it. But as we’ve already established, nature doesn't care a lick about human pain and fragility. It doesn't love our children any more or less than a shooting star or a raging hurricane. Without a single consideration whatsoever for our uncertain future, the arrow of time just moves us along from point A to point B, and to wit, my wife and I up those stairs. As we resumed climbing, I prayed my daughter could hear me as I whispered over and over to myself…
I'm so sorry baby girl....
I'm so sorry baby girl....
I'm so sorry baby girl....
I'm so sorry baby girl....
I'm so sorry baby girl....
I knew we'd find her sitting at the little white table in her bedroom coloring or playing with her dolls. I knew she'd be wearing her favorite Ariel nightgown, the one we'd recently gotten her on a family trip to Disney World, the one with the shiny iridescent blue fabric that made her brilliant blue eyes pop and radiate with even more mystery and ethereal beauty.
Stepping from the hallway at the top of the stairs into her bedroom felt like piercing something utterly precious and forever disfiguring it. When she heard us enter, she looked up, and in the split second that our eyes met, I immediately sensed that somehow, she already knew what we were there for. I vomited inside my mouth. I stood there stone-still and silent while my wife delivered the devastating news with a jarring bluntness, devoid of nuance. My god, I thought, you're not giving her a fucking recipe for banana bread. Don't misunderstand—I am not suggesting that my silence was somehow better or more virtuous. Nothing I did that day made me the bigger or better person—not my hesitancy, my horror, or my deep disdain for the moment. We were simply two parents—one who did what needed doing, and one who couldn't.
I locked my gaze onto my daughter's eyes as she took in the monumental weight of her mom's words. The news struck her like a hail of bullets, shattering and reshaping her world. I watched her face transform as wave after wave of turmoil swept away her sunlit smile and extinguished her ephemeral joy. A distant sadness filled her eyes, a mix of resignation and futile hope, as if she were pleading and begging for a rescuers hand always just inches beyond her reach. I could see that her innocence was already in mourning. She looked lost and scared. Though she was sitting just an arm's length from me, she looked like she was a million miles away, stranded and alone. I WANTED TO FUCKING DIE. The look on her face in that moment — vacant, adrift, stunned, frightened, abandoned — is one I will never ever, ever forget. It is forever seared on my brain like a white-hot scar. I wanted to tear the entire universe apart and remake it. But then I realized, we already had. I sometimes wish I didn’t remember the look on my daughter's face, in that moment, on that day, but I will never allow myself to forget it. Too fucking bad for you.
Golden Slumbers Fills Your Eyes
Eight or nine years later I was driving along a pitch-black country road late at night when the gorgeously haunting Beatle's song — Golden Slumbers — began to play. I knew the song. I'd heard it many times before. But until that particular night, I hadn't ever listened to the lyrics or tried to understand the meaning behind them. Golden Slumbers opens with a two or three second piano intro followed by Paul McCartney's always warm and welcome voice.
Once there was a way,
to get back homeward
Once there was a way,
to get back home
Sleep, pretty darling, do not cry
And I will sing a lullaby....
As the lyrics to Golden Slumbers pierced the quiet night and blared through my car's speakers, I was struck, stunned really, by the intensity with which I felt them. McCartney's voice reaches into the upper register as he screams out...
GOLDEN SLUMBERS!!!
before softening ever so slightly and continuing…
fills your eyes,
smiles await you when you rise
sleep pretty darling, do not cry
and I will sing a lullaby.
Those two lines, "Once there was a way to get back home" and "Sleep pretty darling, do not cry" F-U-C-K-I-N-G shredded me. It felt like a nuclear bomb went off inside my car. I was suddenly and viciously mowed over by a wall of emotion I was not expecting and a tidal wave of tears I could not contain. I sobbed uncontrollably.
Through my tear-drenched blurriness, I saw an image of my daughter's face from all those years earlier hovering just above the dashboard like a visiting apparition. I was suddenly thrust back into her childhood bedroom on that day watching the color drain from her golden, olive skin, an ashen sheen taking hold. The deep confusion and sadness in her eyes betrayed the desperate questions in her heart. Who are these people? Why are they doing this to me? My mom and dad would never do this. Her long, dark hair reaching down to the floor to steady and anchor her, holding her upright and in place. Watching that scene unfold before me that day, I distinctly remember feeling a sizable piece of my typically hopeful soul break off and fall away. I haven't found it since.
Digression
Now is probably as good a time as any to tell you that being a father to my two children has been the single greatest joy and honor of my life. Of my many accomplishments, successes, and gratifying victories, it's the one I'm most proud of, by far. No other experience has taught me more, challenged me as much, or given me as many unforgettably beautiful memories. But what you must know is that love and beauty this profound is not free. Life doesn't just serve up the sublime without also increasing the probability of things sometimes going terribly wrong. This is what makes being a parent the ultimate crucible of human experience. A place where the majestic and resplendent stand ominously close to the ever-pregnant possibility for soul-crushing mayhem and catastrophe. Until you are visited by such angels or demons, you have no way of knowing that the potential for experiencing such intense joy or battering anguish is always right there, simmering just beneath the surface.
When that veil is pierced—and it will be, again and again—you and your children are hurled into a hyper-reality that can feel unbearably cruel and cataclysmic. For parents, it's not just that you feel these challenges more deeply than the many others you face throughout life, — I PROMISE YOU, YOU DO — there's also the matter of feeling and experiencing these feelings for your children, too. Double the pain, triple the stakes, quadruple the beauty. This is the paradoxical heart at the center of parenting. A perpetual seesaw of vulnerability where you are simultaneously more powerful and more powerless than you've ever been in your entire life, more loved and loving than you ever thought possible, and more needed and necessary than you ever considered yourself capable of, but where you are also forever teetering on the brink of ecstasy or catastrophe, often unsure which is which until you're already in free fall.
It's an unassailable fact that the unequivocal, incontrovertible, and irrefutable beauty of being a parent owes much to these exceedingly high stakes. Pardon my digression.
Moment continued...
My little baby girl looked terrified and extremely, uncomfortably nervous. I was sick to my stomach. Her eyes darted back and forth, furiously, between her mom and I — first to her mom, then to me, then back again to her mom — moving faster and faster between us like a human sewing machine frantically trying to knit her fallen family back together before it was too late. I was crushed. I could not look at this anymore. I cannot tell you how desperately I wanted to run away, far enough and fast enough until eventually I'd fly off the curved edge of the earth and fall through the darkness forever. BUT, there is no way I was leaving my little girl all alone on that battlefield. Not a chance in hell. I did this, so I will sit right in the fucking middle of it. I will not abandon her or her brother here, or anywhere, ever.
We'd been in my daughter's bedroom for no more than seven or eight minutes when my wife finished talking and fell silent. I still hadn't said a single word when I suddenly noticed a deafening silence begin to fill the room for the very first time since fate, or whatever you want to call it, had brought us all together as a family. You must understand, we are not quiet people. We're a noisy, loud, raucous bunch. As a family that's always used laughter as a love language, we have never done silence, then or since. But there it was. The adults muzzled by the heaviness of it all. But not the little girl standing there with us. That's never been her. She was the bravest, most courageous person I've ever know THEN. She's still the bravest, most courageous person I've ever known NOW. Mustering more courage than most of us exhaust in a lifetime, she lurched herself into that void of quiet, looked up at her mom and I, and said the only words she spoke throughout that entire conversation — It's ok. I vomited inside my mouth again. No honey, it’s not ok. None of this is ok.
Golden gauntlet
Everything I felt and experienced from that moment on, throughout the many difficult days and months and years that followed, especially the earlier years when my kids were still very young, came pouring out of me on that country road that night. I have never cried like that before. Ever. It was animalistic and alien-like — guttural and visceral and loud and messy and painful all the way down in my fucking core. Obviously, it was also necessary.
I didn't know it for sure at the time, but I certainly suspected as much, that the lyrics of Golden Slumbers mourn the safe sanctuary of childhood, the times we're looked after and can never get back once adulthood hits, leaving us to carry that weight ourselves for the rest of our days. Well, FUCK THAT. I cannot tell you the number of times my soul screamed for me to run away, admonished me for failing my children, and chided me for our shallow reliance on divorce as a solution. I also cannot tell you the number of times I listened to those lies and admonishments. Many, many, many. I often believed them, too. But, I never acted on them. I never will. I don't care how old my children are or what challenges any of us face, I will always be right there to help them pick up and carry whatever weight, danger, or challenge they happen across.
Experiences like the ones I've tried to describe here teach us a great deal about the costs and lessons of guilt, the consequences of our decisions, and our responsibilities to one another, especially as parents. Ever since that first night on that dark country road eight or nine years ago, every single time I hear Golden Slumbers, I have the same exact experience — one I came to calling the Golden Slumbers gauntlet — a near-instant emotional reaction that always packs a big, heavy, visceral punch. It begins with my stomach immediately turning sour and heavy. I lean forward and turn the volume up as loud as it will go. I see myself walking up the stairs that day. I see my daughter blissfully playing in her room. And I see us take it all away from her. Finally, when that look on her face from all those years ago appears, as it inevitably always does, I choke with emotion and begin to cry. Big, elephant tears fill my eyes, run down my cheeks, and splash below. Sometimes I scream out loud. Other times I'm quiet. When the song ends and the emotional relief from having cried washes over me, I immediately pick up my phone and call both of my kids. I want to hear the sound of their voices. I want to learn something new or different about them or their lives. I want to know what they did that day, what they saw or learned or experienced. But the thing I want most of all, is for them to hear me say the words — I love you… I'm here — as many times as possible.
Neither of my children know anything about the Golden Slumbers gauntlet, at least not yet. I've never told them. In fact, this is the very first time I've ever mentioned it out loud. What my children do know, what I have told them countless times, and what I have tried to show them all throughout their lives, is that I'm always right here, and that they will forever have my unbreakable, impenetrable, indefatigable, inexhaustible, and enduring promise to always be there for them, no matter fucking what.
I suspect that the Golden Slumbers gauntlet will be with me forever. That's ok though. I don't need to be healed of the song's emotional punch. Over the course of our lives, we give so much to those around us, but we take so much, too. For many years, I obsessed over trying to find a way to give back to my children everything that was taken from them when their family splintered apart. To find some way to repay them. I've always known this was a silly, servile, and futile idea. In time, I came to see the many ways the divorce and the many other challenging experiences they faced throughout their lives has strengthened them, steel-willed their resilience, and fashioned them both as fiercely independent. I also came to see the many ways the experience shaped me and made me the father I became, but likely never would have been without those shape-shifting experiences. It really is true what they say about adversity and the experiences that push us, test us, and challenge us the most. These are the ones that remake us, and often, for the much better.
Triumphant (Addendum added April 2024)
Earlier today I was driving around when Golden Slumbers came on. I paused to take in the lyrics, to feel them and endure them and enjoy them. As usual, I turned up the volume as high as it could go. I felt the deep pinches of pain I always feel. I saw the look on my daughter's face I always see. The tears welled up and ran down the way they always do. But something was different today. The Golden Slumbers gauntlet didn't feel like revisiting an old failure or running my hand over an old scar. It felt triumphant. Good and sad and good again. More like a tie than a win after a bad loss. I'm not sure why.
Both of my children are older now, each at the exciting beginning of their own journeys. The deep, everlasting guilt I've long felt about their broken family has generally been replaced by a deep sense of gratitude that they have a family that loves and adores them. That they both have mine and their mom's shared love and support. And, that despite the imperfections of life and the pains and challenges that living it sometimes presents, they both know that we are both here for them always. That they are loved and cherished and watched over, and that that is never, ever going to change.
So yeah, triumphant.