In Praise of Messy Lives Read Online Free PDF

but what progressive American culture is not currently prepared to acknowledge is that there are advantages to each. My friend Cristina Nehring, who is also a single mother, writes in an email from Paris that she has observed that kids in single-parent households “are often rendered more mature, caring and empathic. Kids in two-parent households risk viewing their parents as an amorphous unit of authority, as a kind of faceless ruling elite, a wall of adult power. This can be useful for crude discipline in the short term, but it’s less useful in terms of the development of empathy and imagination in the long term. Kids of mono-parental families have more and earlier opportunities than their peers to recognize that adults have stories and sensitivities and struggles of their own. In today’s age of imperious, entitled super-children, the kids of single parents often grow up a bit more modest and humane.”
    It’s fascinating to me that she would say this because of course part of what people think children miss in a single mother’s home is the steadiness and security of that “amorphous unit of authority.”Part of what seems threatening or unsettling about the single mother’s household is precisely that sense that the mother may be glimpsed as more of a person, that these children are witnessing a struggle they should not be seeing, that their mother is very early on a regular, complicated person, rather than simply an adult who is part of the opaque, semi-separate adult culture of the house.
    One day at dinner, Violet is playing a game where she is listing impossible things. Like it’s impossible to talk when you are dead, or it’s impossible for a human to fly without a machine, when she suddenly comes out with “It’s impossible to be normal.” The family member in attendance shoots me a look that eloquently points out that Violet might not think it was so impossible to be normal if instead of piles of books on the floor I had a little financial security, if I had a man around the house. If I stopped running around like I do, in other words.
    It’s near dawn when I finish
The Scarlet Letter
and I had forgotten the ending. Hawthorne is careful to tell us that Pearl, wild, untamed, radiant, spritelike Pearl, grows up and leaves for Europe, where she is happy and flourishing; the suggestion is that she is perhaps a bit happier than the children of the drab Puritan town she has left behind.
    It’s getting dark and I am stepping into a taxi, the parlor window is lit, the children at home in their pajamas, smelling of Johnson & Johnson’s, domestic peace descending, and I go off in a car to meet a man at a hotel bar. This will seem like the wrong structure to many people; they will tell me how unhealthy it is, how unsustainable, how unstable, and they may be right, but there I am speeding across the bridge nonetheless. There are other possible ways I could conduct my life, other forms andstructures. But I remember hearing somewhere: “You have one life, if that.” And one sometimes feels like mentioning that to some of the more blinkered respectable couples, to those purveyors of wholesome and healthy environments, to those who truly believe the child of a single mother is not whole or happy in his room playing with his dinosaurs: You have one life, if that.

Unquiet Americans
1
    I spent more time than was strictly necessary in the plush red corridors of the Hotel Metropole in Hanoi. For some reason, I had convinced myself that I needed to see the inside of suite 228, which was otherwise referred to in the voluminous hotel literature as “the Graham Greene Suite.” Greene, whom I had been mildly fixated on for some time, had stayed there during the fifties. I was staying next door in suite 226, and after several days of wondering how I was going to get into his room, I noticed the maid’s cart outside. When she finally ducked out to refill her stash of aloe shampoo and little almond soaps, I slipped