What I am wondering is this: Is it ever the right thing to stay with someone for reasons that have not so much to do with one's personal happiness? What reasons are good enough for leaving someone -- just because you want to be happier? Are relationships really about happiness, or growth?

I feel like I have been placed on a path, since the unplanned birth of my child, that is about making other people happy instead of myself; it's about hard work and drudgery and the ideal of the "family" rather than passion. Cary, I am not enamored of this path (understatement) or skilled at it -- but it seems like one I must embrace in order for my heart to grow bigger and that is what's so confusing. I am frequently angry at my 2-year-old and resentful, though I am also loving and nurturing toward her when I can feel it in me, but the "angry" times are more than I would wish (and I feel that raising her would be much easier with a better, more involved and supportive partner, if there was a space for one to show up); and I am sick of living with someone (my boyfriend) who is also frequently angry and resentful and negative (he's an Iraq vet with PTSD ... and he won't get help with it, no matter how much I suggest it -- we've done couples therapy, too); it feels like living in a pressure cooker or walking on eggshells constantly.

This is the same way I felt about my parents in my childhood home. I feel no passion for this person anymore, which to me matters a great deal. I am usually angry with him and I think we bring out the worst in each other, at this point. But I also feel I have to be bigger than this, though I can't seem to be ... he suffered so much at war and doesn't have a family (father is dead, mother mentally ill) ... I feel somewhat responsible for his happiness and also, for his relationship with his child and this idea of being a family.

Problematically, my own early associations with family are far from positive or simple, as my home was full of physical and verbal abuse; and I suspect that this has more to do with my relationship problems, and whom I am drawn to, than anything else -- yet my friends and family have always disliked him and are very clear that they don't think he treats me well or respectfully (in terms of being loving, compatible and supportive; and my answer is always "he really loves me but often can't show it well; and we have a child together" which is definitely true but sounds like an excuse).

You can see how complicated it is. I want to leave, but don't know how or if it is "right" or when it would be. I know I'm able to do so and survive; I have left a marriage, in the past, to a man who was nicer to me. I know I can be on my own. But I have never done this kind of shift with a small child also relying on me. So the main question, recapitulated: Is it worth sticking it out until I am really, really sure; should I look into my early family stuff first (I've been in and out of therapy for 15 years already); should I just split it off (I have tried to do this several times already -- before I moved with him, we had lived apart for months), even though I just made a cross-country move with him? What do you think would be a useful way for me to frame this situation when I am thinking about it, to bring greater clarity and joy not just for me but for everyone involved?

On Eggshells, Internal and External

Dear Eggshells,

Sometimes, despite my allegedly poetic tendencies, I would like to be Dr. Phil. That way, when you say you moved across the country with a man you don't want to be with anymore I could say, Whoa, Whoa, Whoa, Whoa, Whoa, stop right there, young lady, you did what? and we could all have a collective moment of generalized self-righteousness.

But I do not represent the conscience of America's status quo. I have heard too many stories that start out with such revelations but which when told to completion make a difficult, riveting, beautiful sense. That is why at Salon we run such letters at such length, because we have faith in the ability of adults to tell their whole story until it does start making sense.

So you told the truth, and you asked the big questions:  "Is it ever the right thing to stay with someone for reasons that have not so much to do with one's personal happiness? What reasons are good enough for leaving someone -- just because you want to be happier? Are relationships really about happiness, or growth?"

What do I think? I think it is legitimate to act according to your deepest and truest necessities, because your deepest and truest necessities do not spring from you and are not controlled by you; they spring from where you exist in the world; they come to you as instructions from the world and are thus not selfish and narrow as you might fear; they are broad and universal and thus poetic and heroic.

They are bigger than any narrowly conceived right-or-wrong principle.

You were happy in that town you left. You said so yourself. It met your deepest and truest necessities. Yet you left that happy town because you thought you had to follow a narrowly defined principle of loyalty to a man and protection of your child.

In a broader sense, you can be loyal to this man, protect your child and also do what you feel driven to do. These things can be in harmony. At some point, at a point in the exact center of the frame we have put around this picture, they are indeed in harmony. They converge at the center of this picture.

This framework I suggest says: Trust in the community of things beyond you; be in harmony with your deepest self, because that is the bigger way of truth; it is the bigger way; it may seem full of tragedy and apparent misstep, of apparent moral failing; it may bring down upon your head the judgment of others, of family and loved ones and later your own offspring; it may make you seem to be a person of questionable judgment; it may cause you to be an outcast. But if it is true to your destiny in this deep sense -- which can only be discovered by relentless self-inquiry and relentless allowing-in of the necessary, by allowing the earth to move you toward the place you belong, by trusting that it's not just about you and your decision but about where the world requires you to be -- then I think in the end there is some justice in whatever  decision you might make.

Some people will say you have to remain with the man and with the child because that is the way it is. Some people will say, Whoa, young lady, stop right there.

So here are a few things I believe to be true: Kids can grow up in a variety of ways. Kids can grow up with two parents who love each other, or who stayed together in a bleak simulacrum of relationship "for the children" and who therefore offer to their children a model of distorted and repressed relating; they can grow up with the uncertainty and chaos of a parent who follows her heart in a narrow, selfish way without regard to larger principles at work and thus does not provide what the child needs; they can grow up with at least one parent who is fully a provider, who finds in the world what her child needs, whether embodied in a single partner or in a community of people, some of whom may become significant guides for the child, and who collectively provide safety, continuity and support.

Children can grow up all kinds of ways. They're going to be wounded by life no matter how they grow up. They will be unprepared for certain things by definition. So you set the stage for the child to do what the child has to do: to learn the world and acquire confidence and safety and grow strong.

Here is how I would frame it. You thought of your child's needs, which is admirable, but you  lodged them in their symbol, i.e., you lodged your child's need for the masculine in the narrow body of your boyfriend. Your child needs a relationship with the male principle, the masculine, which is balanced and rooted; your child needs to sense that you are rooted and safe and cared for; you need to care for her and give her rootedness. But that can be found in the world. It need not be found in one specific romantic partner who is, as you indicate, wounded in his own way and in need of care, and resistant to care, and thus weakened. Because he is wounded and resistant, he may not be the best person to help you care for this child. He needs care of his own. So it might be best for all concerned if you go back to the place you were happy, and let him seek the care and the rootedness that he needs, and then if you are getting what you need, the child will also get what she needs.

Everyone will get what they need. Maybe not what they want, but what they need.

Get grounded. Go back to your town and stay there. Find support there. Have a routine. Get time to yourself. Get physical separation from your boyfriend, but keep him in the picture. Provide a stable home for the kid. Get yourself connected with other mothers. Stay true to your passionate nature. Sing to your baby. Rock your baby in a rocking chair and sing to your baby. Sleep. Get a place with a porch. Have your family visit.

That's how I would frame it, not in terms of right and wrong but in terms of needs, and what is available to the child. And in a more general sense, thinking of the child's need for a father not as embodied in a particular man but embodied in masculine properties of rootedness, strength, competence, at-homeness in the world. It might be that the community will be the father, in a sense.

The child needs initiation into the world of competence, steadiness, mastery over the forest and the machine, confidence, simplicity, camaraderie, practicality, soldierly discipline. This is interesting -- that the village might be the father.

And what of the actual father and his rights? Who is he and what does he need? Obviously he is wounded. His father died and his mother was not stable; she was disarranged, not present, unavailable, strange and perhaps frightening. So he went to war. He went to war and was further wounded. So he is a wounded man, capable of love but angry, uncared for, resistant to care, perhaps resistant to reliving or refacing the true horrors that exist in his mind. It may seem like a cliché, but we can often do people a favor by setting them free. He needs more than you can give him.

To speak of the nation's political actions as the actions of a unified psyche is pushing it, definitely. Yet there is something glimmering on the edge of this picture about the distorted relationship to masculinity our nation has evolved. Sure, I'm conflicted about masculinity. But it's not just me. We have evolved as a nation, as a result of complex social changes, a distorted and unhelpful view of masculinity, of fatherhood, of the beauty and grandeur of the masculine. It manifests itself in many ways. One way this manifests itself is the way an army on a religious crusade has come to substitute for the missing family. Another way is in the rise of disembodied techno-combat, the killing of phantasmagorical monsters with fingers on a button. As nationhood itself is a crumbling anachronism, what are our orphaned, stateless, villageless young men fighting? Some phantasmagorical Other. Always the Other. Because we have a problem with the Other in our own souls.

Thank you for indulging me one paragraph of speculation on a matter about which I probably should not speculate.

Also one more paragraph about the therapy you have been in, and then I am done. Over the past year my thinking about therapy has evolved, as I have experienced the difference between therapy practiced primarily to help the individual adjust to a society's demands, and therapy practiced to help the individual discover her deeper nature, confront it and find the courage to live according to it. I sense that the work you now need to do involves some kind of transformative, somatic reexperiencing and embodiment of the powerful wounding in your past and in your boyfriend's past. I'm not sure where you are, or who is available. So I say: Genuinely ask for help, and find a path to a therapist who has a poetic soul, who has been through the fire, who has a grounding in archetypal patterns. After all, you are a poet. So you need a therapist who can guide you across the river, no matter what you find on the other side.

Finally, do this for me, OK, today: Picture yourself being OK. Find an image of being OK. How can you be OK for today? Is there a place you can sit on the steps in the sun and be OK for a while? Can you wheel your child through a leafy park and be OK for today? Find a way to be OK just for today. Then maybe repeat it tomorrow, and the next day, as you make your plans to return to the town where you were happy.

I picture your going back to your happy town with the child and establishing a stable place there, in community, and providing your child what she needs of the masculine, not necessarily embodied in a specific man, but in certain qualities. I picture you being OK. I picture the reconciliation of apparent opposites. I picture some tiny dot of justice in the center of the frame.

---

What? You want more advice?

• Read more Cary Tennis in the Since You Asked directory.
• See what others are saying and/or join the conversation in the Table Talk forum.
• Ask for advice. Letter writers: Please think carefully! By sending a letter to advice@salon.com, you are giving Salon permission to publish it. Once you submit it, it may not be possible to rescind it. So be sure. If you are not sure, sleep on it. You can always send tomorrow. Ready? OK, Submit your letter for publication.
• Or, just make a comment to Cary Tennis not for publication.
• Or, send a letter to Salon's editors not for publication.

 

For this reason, I was fascinated by two pieces this week: One in Time magazine on an Italian family accused of child abuse for coddling their 12-year-old son too much; the other, a piece in today's New York Times about how yelling seems to be replacing spanking among affluent, educated parents. Taken together, these two stories seem to point to the way culture shapes our perception of what "normal" parenting standards look like.

Child abuse, by definition, most often involves parents who neglect or hurt their children. But one Italian family -- a mother who was raising her young son in an extended family with the child's grandparents -- is being prosecuted because their love for the boy was deemed "so intense, it could be considered a form of child abuse." How intense? According to prosecutors, the boy -- aptly named Luca, which fans of '80s music might remember as the name of the title character in Suzanne Vega's song about an abused child -- was not allowed to "play with other children, go to church, participate in sports or leave the house before or after school." Also, he was sent to school with his food pre-cut into "bite-sized portions" and was so "physically and psychologically stunted from such around-the-clock doting" that, according to the lawyer on the case, "he had the motor skills of a three-year-old child."

It's hard to tell from the details given whether this is the case of a (perhaps criminally) over-zealous prosecutor or a genuine case of parents inflicting harm on a child. (If it were the latter, the operating term wouldn't be too intense "love," but the kind of "control" that is an aspect of many abusive relationships -- well above and beyond the level of control that is an aspect of healthy parent-child relationships.) But what is interesting about this case is that it taps into a cultural fear that is apparently widespread in Italy: that overly indulgent mothers are raising a nation of sissified "mama's boys" -- called mammone in Italian.

The fear of the overbearing, castrating mother reached its apotheosis in the United States in the '50s and '60s, when stay-at-home mothers were the preferred middle-class norm. Their darker version was the mother pathologically attached to her sons who, in extreme cases, could even be blamed for "turning" her son into a gay man. (Both "Rebel Without a Cause," released in 1955, and "Psycho," released in 1960, owe a great deal of their plot to playing on the Freudian fears of the time.) In the post-feminist years, our bad mothering narratives have shifted, if anything, toward the dangers of too little mother love (though, mark my words, I wouldn't be at all surprised if the latest crop of stay-at-home mothers brings back a new, surprising version of this fear).

But in Italy, the fear of the emasculating power of mother love is still going strong. A full 37 percent of men between the ages of 30 and 34 still live at home with their mothers, according to a study published last year in Psychology Today and quoted in the Time article, and two Italian economists tell the magazine that they have found parents who "will actually pay their grown children not to move out." (This was particularly interesting to me, because my boyfriend grew up in a close-knit Italian-American family in New York, in which the family tradition was for children to live at home, often through their 20s and early 30s, until they were married or bought a house. Both of us had always assumed this came out of the New York immigrant tradition, but it was fascinating to think that the roots might go even deeper than that.) In this, Italian parents differ dramatically from parents in other parts of Europe, according to Henriette Felici-Bach, a Paris-based child psychologist who specializes in ethno-clinical psychology, a field that looks at cross-cultural differences in human development. "In Germany, children are educated early on to [execute] a task on their own from beginning to end. In Southern [European] countries, children are dependent on what people tell them to do." This makes a kind of practical sense, according to Felici-Bach: Italy was traditionally a "poverty-stricken place with weak governments, meaning the family was the only source of protection and economic support for people." When you can't rely on Uncle Sam to take care of you, you can always rely on Mom.

Although this generation of American parents has taken a lot of flak for closely supervising their children (see: "helicopter parents"), the parenting model we hear most about is closer to that of northern European parents. Sure, kids may walk to school less often and have more supervision of their homework and scheduled activities, but the major goal of professional-class parents tends to be toward breeding intellectual curiosity and independent thinking, with the ultimate goal of sending a kid off at 18 to live semi-independently at the college of his or her choice (even if Mom and Dad do stalk them on Facebook). But this isn't always true across class lines. To speak in vast generalizations (the only kind available when speaking of great swaths of people, though these conclusions are supported by the work of many sociologists), professional-class American parents tend to be more likely to emphasize internal standards, self-directed learning and critical thinking, and be more tolerant of nonconformity and egalitarian about gender roles; whereas working-class parents tend to be more likely to emphasize external standards, deference to authority and conformity. (As a not-completely-random aside, this made me wonder if the fashion for rewarding underachieving students with cash payments for improving their schoolwork, which I wrote about a few weeks back, might have something to do with educators' canny -- or prejudiced -- view that working-class kids are more likely to identify with a clearly defined external reward for achievement.)

Just reading those comparative lists of traits, one might be tempted to further classify the former as the values of more liberal, educated parents and the latter as the values of more conservative, traditional parents. But given that researchers themselves are almost always, by definition, members of the professional class, one has to wonder if there's no small amount of class bias involved in even the way one frames the question. Just as a German parent might look at an Italian parent as an excessive coddler and an Italian parent might see a German parent as excessively cold, what a parent sees as "enlightened" can easily be seen by another as "overly permissive."

Which brings us to spanking. Although it was a common practice among even middle-class parents at mid-century, physically disciplining one's children has been frowned upon by middle-class parents for at least a generation and is, for the most part, verboten in this generation of American parents. But Amy McCready, the founder of Positive Parenting Solutions, tells the New York Times today, "I've worked with thousands of parents and I can tell you, without question, that screaming is the new spanking." According to one survey quoted by the Times, two-thirds of parents reported that yelling at their kids was their greatest source of parental guilt, and according to another, 88 percent of parents reported "shouting, screaming or yelling at the kids at least once (though it didn't specify how many did it more often) in the past year."

My first reaction was: Only once? I'm not much of a screamer (though my mom, who adamantly opposed physical discipline, certainly was), but it still seems rather far-fetched to think that any parent could refrain from raising one's voice 100 percent of the time (and to be honest, I had a rare-ish shouting match with my daughter this morning when I was trying to get her out of bed for school). But the Times piece seems to suggest that yelling is a hallmark among this generation of high-achieving parents. And this makes me wonder: Are we yelling more because we are spanking less? Or is yelling just one more thing to be added to the list of things parents can't do without feeling guilty about it?

Parenting has many moments of undeniable frustration, anger and hostility, and it seems counterintuitive to expect that a "good" parent is one who is able to repress those feelings in every instance. What's more, it's hard to imagine that a parent who could wouldn't produce the unfortunate side effect of raising an emotionally stunted zombie (though another cultural stereotype, that of the emotionally repressed WASP, certainly comes to mind).

So are good parents ones who express their feelings, or teach their children emotional restraint? Ones who shelter their children from harm or give them the means to protect themselves? Ones who sacrifice a good part of their adult lives to tending to their children, or ones who model strong independent adulthood? Parents, as individuals, differ from one another as much as one would expect from any group of diverse adults. But societies undeniably construct models of bad, better and best behavior. And as much as we like to think of grand categories of universally "good" human behavior, these models seem to be as much situational as anything else. When affluence and safety are taken as a given, it may make more pragmatic sense to encourage risk-taking in a child; when resources are scarce, thrift and tradition might give that same child a better chance. Weirdly enough, the analogy that comes to mind is the history of drugs: When women were expected to stay home and care for children, they were given Valium to calm them and speed to pick them up; when they were expected to juggle many roles, anti-anxiety meds ruled the day. Sure, parenting is about knowing yourself and your child. But maybe it's an awful lot more culturally constructed than we like to think. 

Or not. I can certainly understand the concern about letting a 13-year-old spend a year alone on a boat, and I think it's probably a good thing that Dekker's been forced to cool her young heels. And just in general, the idea of a world record for "youngest person ever to pull off a life-threatening stunt" is a bit unsavory, given where it must inevitably lead. But still, it's hard to say what the minimum age for such a trip should be, since A) so much depends on the individual, and B) attempting to sail around the world alone is extremely dangerous and slightly bonkers at any age. My grad school classmate Tania Aebi did it at 18, pre-GPS, with very little sailing experience and a boat plagued with problems. That she lived to tell the tale in two books and make a career out of sailing doesn't make her original decision to go one iota less batshit, in my opinion, but I am neither a sailor nor a particularly adventurous soul. What I've learned from Tania, and from reading about all these teenage voyagers, is that those of us whose personalities are fundamentally incompatible with the thought "Solo circumnavigating the globe sounds like a hoot!" really just don't understand enough to offer a useful opinion.

Meanwhile, I can't help noticing that there's been a lot more hand-wringing about Watson doing it than there was about Sunderland and Perham -- both of whom I only heard of after their trips were complete. "I do not want to shatter your dreams but to undertake such a voyage requires more experience than you currently have," wrote sailor Andrew Cape in a painfully condescending letter to Watson. Recently, the L.A. Times asked "Is the girl strong enough, mentally and physically, to deal with considerable hazards at sea, or the long, lonely calm stretches she's sure to face?" and fretted that the color of Watson's boat, "Ella's Pink Lady," would "announce to other mariners the presence of the fairer sex." Hmm, I wonder why folks are so much more worried about Watson than they were about those other two teenagers. There must be some difference there, but I can't quite put my finger on it.

Watson's been sailing for half her life, has logged over 5,000 nautical offshore miles, and knows damned well what she's up against, as do her parents. Her father, Roger, has explained the calculation they've all made quite bluntly: "It would be devastating if we lost her ... but I still think it would be worse to say 'no you can't go' because of that risk, because of what she's put into it." Again, I have trouble imagining myself coming to a similar conclusion, but setting world records for perilous tests of human endurance is really not my thing. So I will defer to the opinion of someone whose thing it was, and who paid the ultimate price for her adventurous spirit: Amelia Earhart, whose new biopic comes out this Friday, 72 years after her disappearance. In a letter she left for her husband before her final flight, Earhart wrote, "Please know I am quite aware of the hazards. I want to do it because I want to do it. Women must try to do things as men have tried. When they fail, their failure must be but a challenge to others."

As far as I can tell, that's what it comes down to for Jessica Watson: She is quite aware of the hazards, but she wants to do it because she wants to do it. And in light of that, I'm with Australian Deputy Prime Minister Julia Gillard: "I'm nervous for her. But my words at this stage, given that she's determined to go, would be to wish her the best of luck and to urge her to keep safe."