Making history
I HAVE some friends who are at the brink of divorce, and have been for years. They stay to keep the family together. Our daughters hang out together. Over the weekend, the girls attended a movie with another friend, and afterwards, my daughter said her friend told them she didn’t want to be home on weekends due to her parents’ arguments. She gave details of one argument that ended in the little brother crying for fear of them divorcing.
My daughter told me; now I don’t know what to do with this information. Do I talk to my friend and tell her what her daughter said, to help her realize how she is affecting her children? Or do I offer support without telling her what I know?
I don’t want to betray my daughter either. I feel sorry for all involved. How can I help, or can I?
Zoe

Zoe,
Jon Krakhauer’s book, ‘Into the Wild’, is about a young man from an affluent family who graduates from college, gives his savings to charity, breaks all contact with his family, and becomes a tramp. After various exploits, the young man goes into the Alaskan wilderness,
unprepared, and dies through lack of planning.
Some young people see his story as a quest for meaning or freedom. Most Alaskans see it as a story of foolhardiness; we see it another way. Early in the book, Krakhauer shows the young man as a small child, growing up listening to the furious barrage his parents launched
on each other every single day.
Most psychopathology originates in the family. It is a mystery why parents who are otherwise intelligent are dimwits when it comes to understanding the damage they do their children. The young man in Krakhauer’s book spent his life trying to flee his parents’ fighting,
and by disappearing and dying, he paid them back.
Krakhauer quotes the young man’s father, a brilliant aerospace engineer, as saying, “How is it that a kid with so much compassion could cause his parents so much pain.” He still doesn’t get it; and neither does his wife.
Neither would your friend. If she and her husband can’t see the evidence before their own eyes, nothing you say is likely to matter. And if you say something to your friend, it could create an unpleasant fallout for her daughter, your daughter, or you.
What you can do is be good to the kids, and tell your daughter to tell her friend to confide in a school counsellor. Twenty years from now, there may be handwringing over what happens to these children, especially the boy. The parents will ask: Why, why? But the answer has been in front of them for 20 years.
Wayne & Tamara

The gift
I’M GETTING locked up for a few years. I love my wife, plus she’s having my baby while I’m locked up. We are great together, and she says she will wait. I can’t deal with going and not being there to help her with our kid.
Emmett

Emmett,
The snide answer is: If you can’t do the time, don’t do the crime. But the right answer is found in Charles Dickens’ ‘A Christmas Carol’.
When Ebenezer Scrooge finally understands how to live, he says, “Men’s courses will foreshadow certain ends, to which, if persevered in, they must lead. But if the courses be departed from, the ends will change.”
You have to depart from the course which led you to this point. Take full advantage of whatever opportunities there are in prison to redesign your life. In each area—job, education, family—what can you do?
Take a hard look at everyone around you. Boot the wrong people from your life; you are embarking on a complex self-improvement project.
Act as if you chose it. This experience will be the making of you or the ruin of you. Which do you want?
Wayne & Tamara