In Praise of Messy Lives Read Online Free PDF Page A

literal to think that love has to come from two parents, like water from hot and cold faucets.
    But is it more stable or secure to grow up in a house with two parents? There is arguably an absence of what people like to call borders in my house. For instance the baby seems to have caught my insomnia. Before going to bed he howls like a wolf, then says, “I am a wolf,” then says, “Where is my bottle? Where is my mango? Where is my ketchup?” then very deliberately climbs out of his bed and walks through the dark halls saying, “I am lost, Mama, I am lost.” It occurs to me that in this unfiltered, unmediated environment I am passing everything along to him. In any event, that’s exactly how I feel at two in the morning—somewhere smack dab in the middle of “I am lost” and “Where is my mango? Where is my ketchup?”
    I am quite prepared to believe that in a household with two adults, there is generally a little more balance, a healthy dilution of affection, a diffused focus that makes everyone feel comfortable. One morning I overhear Violet saying to the baby, “You can’t marry anyone. You are going to live with me.” When I first separated from her father, she said, at three, “Mommy, it’s like you and
I
are married.” And this would pretty accurately reflect the atmospherics of our house: a little too much love, you might tactfully say.
    Quentin Bell once wrote about growing up with his single-ish mother, the painter Vanessa Bell: “We had to balance the comforts of being so well loved against the pain of being so fearfullyadored.” And that seems like a fair assessment of what goes on in my house and those of other single mothers I know. (The grown son of one of them refers to this as “the unparalleled intimacy.”) But if I am being honest, I like the fearful adoration, the too-muchness of it, the intensity, the fierceness. I don’t actually believe “healthy” is better.
    I also can’t help noticing that the people talking about a “healthy” environment are often the same people talking about “working” on their relationships. They are often the denizens of couples therapy and date nights in restaurants that serve hand-cured pancetta and organic local fennel; I have no doubt that they do create a healthy, balanced environment, but I like to think there are some rogue advantages to the unbalanced and unhealthy environment, to the other way of doing things.
    Here someone is bound to say, “Studies have shown …” And as far as I am concerned the studies can continue to show whatever they feel like showing. There are things that can’t be measured and quantified in studies, and I imagine the multitudinous varieties of family peace are among them. Not to mention what these stern and admonitory studies fail to measure, which is what happens when there is anger or conflict in the home, or unhappy or airless marriages, relationships wilting or faltering, subterranean tensions, what happens when everyone is bored.
    One also has to take into account that the realities of American family life no longer match its prevailing fantasies. One of the reasons children born outside of marriage suffer is the culturally ubiquitous idea that there is something wrong or abnormal about their situation. Once it becomes clear that there is, at least, nothing abnormal about their situation—i.e., when the 53 percentof babies born to women under thirty come of age in the majority—the psychological landscape, at least, will be vastly transformed.
    Even people who are certain that the children of single mothers are always and forever doomed to a compromised existence are going to have to await more information about a world in which these kids are not considered illegitimate or unconventional or outsiders, where the sheer number of them redefines and refreshes our ideas of family.
    There is no doubt that raising a child on your own is different than raising a child with a partner, it’s apples and oranges,