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CHAPTER 5

Flight

If one is lucky, a solitary fantasy can transform one million realities.

—Maya Angelou

When Mara was a newborn, her mother had an urge to throw her against the wall. She rocked her in a nursing chair each day and night, and all the while she stared at a spot across the room, a target where she imagined hurling her baby girl. One evening when she thought she could resist no more, she turned out the lights so she would not see the spot and wedged herself tightly in a corner, knees to her chest, squeezing Mara hard. This is how Mara’s father found them, both wailing. Don’t turn on the light, Mara’s mother said, confessing everything between terrified sobs. Mara’s father crouched in frozen fear as mother and baby screamed together and, before he could act, his wife’s shrieks reached a piercing crescendo and the baby fell silent. Both parents thought Mara had died when in fact, she had fallen fast asleep. As if a switch inside her had simply turned off, she went from being a squirmy, squealing baby to a limp and quiet, eight-pound source of warmth. That night, Mara’s mother was hospitalized with what the doctors at first thought might be postpartum depression—except that after she came home and Mara went from being a baby to a toddler, it only got worse.

Once a busy caterer who loved to try out new dishes on her family and friends, Mara’s mother became more irritable and unpredictable with each passing year, and Mara and her father never knew if dinner would be on the table or on the ceiling. More than once, Mara packed her child-size suitcase to run away, but because she was not allowed to leave the yard, she sat in the farthest corner of their large wooded lot and stared at the sky. It seemed so empty, it was like looking at nothing, except for the birds and the planes that flew whichever way they wanted. Watching them, Mara could sit out there for hours.

***

In response to fear, our brains are hardwired for fight or flight. Yet when fighting back is not an option and neither is physical flight, many supernormal children stick around and comply with what the situation demands while, on the inside, they find ways to escape. Maybe they fall asleep when they become overwhelmed, or they flee without leaving the yard. Even when their bodies must stay put, they take their minds somewhere else. This is one of the key survival strategies of many resilient children: One way or another, they get away. They resist being defined or engulfed by whatever ails those near to them.

According to psychologists Susan Folkman and Richard Lazarus, there are two ways of coping with stress: problem-focused coping in which the individual works to fix the problem, and emotion-focused coping in which the individual manages his emotional response. Problem-focused coping and emotion-focused coping are somewhat akin to modern forms of fight or flight, and neither approach is inherently better than the other. Rather, much like the Serenity Prayer taught in Alcoholics Anonymous—God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference—the art of adaptation is choosing the right way to cope at the right time. Many resilient children find ways to minimize the impact of their difficult surroundings, often first by trying to fight back, to change things somehow and improve their lot. If that does not work, they do not necessarily accept their situation but they accept that, at least in the moment, they cannot change it, and they distance themselves from the chaos around.

Distancing is a form of emotion-focused coping, one based on the recognition that while we may not be able to change the bad things that happen to us, we can change how much we pay attention to those bad things and how much we let them affect us. In psychology, the oldest and broadest term for such distancing is dissociation, a word that refers to a wide variety of strategies that allow us to disengage from our surroundings. The most extreme forms of dissociation are associated with post-traumatic stress disorder, and tend to be sensationalized and pathologized in books and movies. Maybe this was why, as an adult, Mara wondered what her lifelong tendency toward dissociation meant about her mental health. The most common forms of dissociation, however, are not necessarily sensational or problematic but are typically used as creative and temporary forms of coping. Listen to how, as a child, Maya Angelou minimized the impact of her time spent in Missouri, a place where she lived for many months and where she was chronically sexually abused by her mother’s boyfriend: “In my mind, I only stayed in St. Louis a few weeks.” Or hear how Angelou’s brother, Bailey, handled his own childhood terrors: “He explained when we were smaller that when things were very bad his soul just crawled behind his heart and curled up and went to sleep. When he awoke, the fearful thing had gone away.”

Knowing how and when to separate ourselves from our surroundings may sound sophisticated, but psychologist Harry Stack Sullivan argued that such distancing is “the most basic capacity of the human mind to protect its own stability,” and its use can be seen even in very young infants. This is probably best illustrated in the “still-face” research designed by psychologist Edward Tronick. In these studies, a mother straps her months-old infant into a car seat and interacts with her baby normally for a moment or two. Then she looks away and turns back toward the infant with an expressionless face. This is disconcerting for the baby, who then attempts to engage her, usually first by smiling. When this fails and the mother maintains her stony expression as instructed, the baby escalates his attempts to bring her to life, squirming and flailing his arms and crying imploringly. When he smiles and then cries, the baby is using problem-focused coping—he is fighting back against her disengagement—as he tries to compel his mother to change her indifferent behavior toward him. When this is not successful, the baby switches strategies, looking away and withdrawing into himself, sucking on fingers or arms or toes. This is emotion-focused coping as the baby realizes that, without help from the mother, all he can do is soothe himself. The baby appears to give up looking for help or solutions on the outside, but he escapes on the inside in an attempt to save himself.

Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl wrote that one of the most critical rules of self-preservation in concentration camps was this: “Do not be conspicuous.” So it goes for children who live in homes where they fear for their safety, and even their lives. They may take great care to be quiet. They may play at being invisible by imagining themselves blending into the wallpaper or sinking into the floor. They may practice being immobile and unnoticeable like statues. Decades of research on resilient children shows that, when faced with chronic stress, good copers know how to retreat to safe places and how to take time away for themselves. Mental distancing is relied upon most heavily in infancy and early childhood and its use tends to decrease with age, perhaps as we have other options for physically, literally getting away. Infants can only look away and retreat into themselves while older children can withdraw to their rooms or other hiding places, where they can sleep or play or read rather than think about what is happening; while there, they often snuggle up with and seek comfort from more predictable sources such as stuffed animals or pets.

Whether or not Mara could be conspicuous depended on whether or not her mother took her small white pills with the even smaller numbers stamped on them. Mara knew she had taken her medicine if her mother met Mara’s bus after school. If she was there smiling and waving, then Mara could look forward to an afternoon of extravagant attention. Mara’s mother could bake her daughter’s favorite cakes and cookies for hours, and the girl’s happiest moments were sitting on the counter next to the Mixmaster, licking batter off wooden spoons. On these days, Mara thought she had the best mother in the whole world, and on these days she did.

Sometimes, though, the big yellow bus rounded the corner and no one was there waiting. On those days, Mara waved a self-conscious good-bye to her bus driver and wondered if he knew what awaited her. On days like this, Mara made herself scarce without leaving the house. Her favorite escape was to her bedroom closet, where pillows and blankets lined the long shelf above the clothing rod. Stepping lightly on a small dresser, Mara hoisted herself high up into the top of her closet. It was there that she discovered what she called her “magic trick.” She looked at a spot, like the hinge on the door or a spot on the ceiling, and closed one eye. Then she opened that eye and closed the other eye. Going back and forth, opening only one eye at a time, Mara realized that her eyes saw the hinge or the spot from slightly different angles; binocular vision worked by fixing both eyes on the same thing at the same time. Then, somehow, she trained her eyes or her brain not to do that. She realized that if she let the two images drift apart, the world became doubled and unfocused. By staring into the space between the two images, Mara found a way of looking right at something but not really seeing it at all.

The more she practiced her magic trick the easier it became, so easy that when Mara’s mother’s face changed from light to dark and she grabbed Mara’s arms and would not let her go, Mara did not have to disappear by packing her little suitcase or retreating to her closet. By splitting her vision, Mara could slip into the space between what her right eye and left eye saw anytime she wanted. It made Mara feel untouchable, even when she was standing in front of her mother and the woman shook her as hard as she could.

***

In any given year, one in five adults struggle with some mental health condition, and one in twenty live with what are called serious mental illnesses. While there is no definitive list of mental disorders that qualify as “serious”—nor is there a group of mental disorders that are necessarily mild or insignificant—most psychologists would agree that schizophrenia and bipolar disorder are serious metal illnesses, and any number of psychological problems, from major depression to eating disorders to obsessive-compulsive disorder, can be considered serious mental illnesses if symptoms are severe enough to substantially interfere with everyday activities such as keeping a job, earning a living, maintaining relationships, running a household, or caring for oneself. Of course, in adulthood, one of life’s everyday activities may be parenting. Though we may not think about mental health patients as parents, women with emotional disorders are just as likely as other women to be mothers, and up to 50 percent of women who live with a serious mental illness live with their children as well. Fathers with mental illness are neglected in the research, yet from the available data, it seems that men with emotional problems may be less likely than their peers to have children, or at least to live with their children, although of course many do.

By the time Mara was in elementary school, her mother was diagnosed with bipolar disorder, which is a mood disorder that affects nearly six million adult Americans—and therefore the day-to-day lives of millions of American children like Mara. Symptoms of bipolar disorder include emotional highs characterized by lack of sleep, limitless energy, and chaotic productivity followed inevitably by bottomless lows when sufferers may sleep or cry in despair for days or weeks at a time. As dramatic as the symptoms of bipolar disorder may be, witnessing the mental illness itself is likely to be only a small part of the stress children and families face. As their symptoms ebb and flow, parents with serious mental illnesses struggle to keep their jobs and pay their bills, and this makes it difficult to provide even the most basic necessities for their children. Parents with serious mental illnesses are more likely to be single parents, and on their own, their behavior may be too inconsistent for them to provide the structure children crave. Overwhelmed by their own symptoms and moods, parents like Mara’s mother may be unable to notice or meet the emotional needs of their children. And because many mental illnesses are chronic and episodic, these stressors are likely to impact children not just once, but again and again across years.

Despite these challenges, parents with mental illness—like other parents—often find deep meaning in their roles as caregivers, and their love for their children and their desire to be good parents can be powerful incentives to do well. Children in these families tend to see their parents as good parents, viewing them more positively than do the parents themselves, as they look beyond their parents’ illnesses and connect with the mothers and fathers inside. This benefits everyone, because even when caregivers struggle with emotional problems, children suffer less when they have warm and affectionate bonds with those they love. Just as having a serious mental illness does not automatically make one a bad parent, being the son or daughter of a parent with a serious mental illness does not necessarily mean a ruined life for the child. These children are at greater risk for emotional and behavioral problems of their own, yet studies of children and adolescents with parents who suffer from serious mental illness find that about one-third to one-half do well at school, at work, and in relationships, and are free of mental health problems themselves; they look and function like their peers.

How do they do it?

Some do what many children who live with adversity do: They find a way to get away.

***

Up in the protected space of Mara’s shelf, there were stuffed animals and dot-to-dot books, but most treasured was a black, handheld transistor radio that she kept tucked among the pillows. When her mother cried the afternoon away, Mara sat up on her shelf and shoved the single cream-colored earbud into her ear. “I tried to get the sound as loud as I could,” she recalled. “I didn’t care about my hearing. I wished I was deaf so I would not hear.” Mara rolled her finger along the plastic, toothed tuning dial on the radio, watching its little red needle move stiffly across the stations. Music and then static and then music and then static again. As she did this, Mara felt like she was fine-tuning her attention, and she blocked out the sounds of her mother in one ear by focusing on the music in the other.

One way we tune out of one part of life is by tuning into another. When we become absorbed in a single engrossing activity, we forget about our troubles, big and small. Listening intently to music. Losing ourselves in a book or a movie. Playing an instrument. Daydreaming and fantasy. Watching television. Throwing ourselves into a hobby or sport. These are just some of the ways in which we distance ourselves from the stress of everyday life by attending to something else, usually as a way of relaxing or of lessening the wear and tear of the world around. In his memoir, Instrumental, classical pianist James Rhodes remembers escaping the pain of childhood sexual abuse by getting away to play music: “The school had a couple of practice rooms with old, battered upright pianos in them. They were my salvation. Every spare moment I got I was in them.” And in her memoir, Life in Motion: An Unlikely Ballerina, Misty Copeland, the first African American woman to become a principal dancer at American Ballet Theatre, remembers dance as a way of forgetting about the realities of her childhood: “Whenever I danced, whenever I created, my mind was clear. I didn’t think about how I slept on the floor because I didn’t have a bed, when my mother’s new boyfriend might become my next stepfather, or if we would be able to dig up enough quarters to buy food.”

Any absorbing activity involves a kind of selective attention—or selective inattention—a shifting of focus that allows us to narrow our experience and to shut out awareness of small stressors or even grievous misdeeds. While such activities may sound like escapism, the mind strays from the here and now as much as 50 percent of our waking hours, suggesting that these distancing maneuvers serve some important survival functions. Indeed, researchers have found that absorbing tasks and preoccupations can be quite positive: They reduce stress, preserve feelings of safety and control, restore a neutral mood after bad things happen, and sometimes result in the feeling of “flow.”

Even when Mara was not on her shelf, she was an expert at focusing her attention on the thing of her choosing, seeming not to notice when her mother crashed, in one way or another. So the police saw one evening when they marched her mother in through the back door, after she had run her car into a telephone pole in a hypomanic speeding frenzy. Mara was eating a pizza in front of the television, listening to a game show with one ear and to the police with the other, never once looking their way. “My eyes were glued to the TV,” Mara recalls now, “and I knew it must have seemed strange, but truly, I could not turn my head and look at them.”

Like Mara, Jean Piaget—a Swiss philosopher and father of the field of cognitive development—grew up with a mother who was mentally ill. He coped with, and distanced himself from, her unpredictable moods by immersing himself in the orderly world of science. “One of the direct consequences of my mother’s poor mental health,” wrote Piaget, “was that I started to forego playing for serious work very early in childhood; this I did as much to imitate my father (a scholar of painstaking and critical mind who taught me the value of systematic work) as to take refuge in a private and nonfictitious world.” At the age of seven, Piaget began studying nature. By ten, he had published an article on a rare sparrow in a magazine and was researching and classifying mollusks. By fifteen, he was a recognized malacologist, although the editors who received his work did not know the young scholar’s age.

***

Mara’s private world was not a scientific one. Her shelf was a fantastic place where she listened to music and let her mind wander at will. The term mindwandering may imply a lack of direction, but social scholars remind us that “not all minds that wander are lost.” Mindwandering allows the self to move from one place to another—hopefully better—place, and this sort of mental mobility can set a trapped child like Mara free. As she listened to music, she pictured herself in far-off places, doing far-flung things. She got to live here, she got to live there, but when she was down off her shelf and her mind was not allowed to roam, she felt a sick sort of dread: “I had to be where I was,” Mara recalls. “I had to be me.”

When we are unable to transform reality, sometimes we cope by transforming it in our minds, becoming engrossed in daydreaming or fantasy, at least for a few moments or until another form of escape becomes possible. Many supernormal adults recall having rich fantasy lives as children. Daydreams of being an animal or a superhero are the most common, but the imaginings are as varied and diverse as children themselves. What these fantasies share is their ability to remove the child from a state of fear and helplessness and hopelessness, transporting her to a place where anything she can dream up is possible, even a happy life. After Eleanor Roosevelt’s mother died and she was sent away from her father to live with an aunt, she said, “I wished to be left alone to live in a dreamworld in which I was the heroine and my father the hero. Into this world I withdrew as soon as I went to bed and as soon as I woke in the morning, and all the time I was walking or when anyone bored me.”

An over-reliance on fantasy can be more delusional than productive, to be sure, but when used intentionally and flexibly, fantasy helps children—and adults—survive. In one study of abused children from Israel, the use of fantasy, in conjunction with other coping mechanisms, was found to be an important source of hope, one that predicted doing well in life fourteen years later. “I never knew whether I would live tomorrow, but when evening came, I used to stand near the window and imagine the lights of New York,” one of the study’s participants remembered about her childhood. “I sat for hours and imagined myself entering the great city.” Similarly, Viktor Frankl described how, during the Holocaust, he and other prisoners found their own release by fleeing to an inner world where one could go anywhere, even back home: “In my mind I took bus rides, unlocked the front door of my apartment, answered my telephone, switched on the electric lights. Our thoughts often centered on such details, and these memories could move one to tears.”

Fantasy comes more easily to children than to adults but, for all ages, one of the most accessible ways to become absorbed in a world other than one’s own is through the portal of books. “Writers are often better therapists than we are,” a supervisor once said to me, and many resilient children treat themselves by reading. “I suppose all fictional characters, especially in adventure or heroic fiction, at the end of the day are our dreams about ourselves,” said graphic novelist Alan Moore. “And sometimes they can be really revealing.” Sometimes supernormals identify with fellow fighters who help them feel strong, too, and other times they are drawn to characters who are powerful in other ways. So it was for writer Akhil Sharma who recalls, in his memoir Family Life, how he coped after his older brother was left paralyzed and brain-injured in a swimming pool accident, an event that devastated his family: “I was always lost in a book, whether I was actually reading or imagining myself as a character. I liked books where the hero was a young man, preferably under twenty-five, who had a magical power that he discovered over the course of the book. Vanishing into books, I felt held. I had always believed that I might possess supernatural powers, like flying or maybe seeing into the future.”

What one reads depends on what one needs, and while some, like Jean Piaget, use books to stay connected with order and reality, Mara used books the same way she used music—as a way of being someone and somewhere else. The Boxcar Children were her first favorites, and she envied their adventures without parents. Mara pretended her closet shelf was her very own boxcar, and she relished spending time in a world that was the opposite of her own. “The kids had brothers and sisters to keep them company but they didn’t have any parents to worry about. And they had their own space,” she recalled. When Mara got hungry, she made like a Boxcar Child sneaking into town to steal food from a store as she tiptoed down the stairs and into the kitchen, where she quietly pocketed boxes of Jell-O gelatin from the pantry. Back in her closet, Mara licked her finger and dipped it in the sugary powder, again and again, until her finger turned red and she felt warm inside. The pillows on her shelf were often grainy, as if dirtied with sand, but no one could expect an old boxcar to be spick-and-span.

***

For Mara, middle school was a series of temporary escapes. Her closet shelf was not strong enough to hold her anymore so, like many supernormal children as they age, Mara often found a way not to be home. During the week, she busied herself with activities after school, and on the weekends she slept over at friends’ houses. In the summers, she went away to camps—soccer camps, youth camps—for as long as her father would permit her to be away.

Some of her getaways were more planned than others. One afternoon, Mara had just hopped off the school bus and kicked off her shoes by the back door when she saw cookbooks strewn about, splayed open, all over the kitchen. For an instant her heart soared: It had been such a long time since her mother had made her favorites. Then Mara noticed that the pages were marked up with different-colored pens, and her mother was lying on the floor. There would be no baking today, her mother said warily. The cookbooks contained messages that she had worn herself out trying to decode.

Mara went into the bathroom and climbed out the window—the routineness with which she did so was lost on her at the time—and she walked barefoot some four blocks to a friend’s house. Her friend’s mother eyed her curiously when she opened the door and there stood Mara, uninvited and without anything on her feet. “It’s freezing!” she exclaimed. “Where are your shoes?” Mara smiled and shrugged as she entered the front hall. Her silence was automatic. She and her friend passed the afternoon playing video games, and Mara relaxed into the feeling of being in a house where nothing strange or frightening might be about to happen. When enough time had gone by that she could smell dinner cooking, and she thought her dad might be home, Mara borrowed some sneakers and walked back toward her house.

At home, Mara often spent her evenings rearranging her bedroom furniture and imagining she lived in an apartment in a high-rise, far, far away. Her light switch, she pretended, was an intercom through which she spoke with an imaginary doorman. Eventually, she moved into the basement and pretended more of the same. It would be years still until Mara would be old enough to really leave home, but in her mind she was already gone.

***

By high school, Mara’s favorite place to get away to was the public library. An institution known since ancient Egypt as the “healing-place of the soul,” the library was where Mara went to recuperate from her life. In the center of the building, in a round skylighted atrium, stood a giant globe, probably twenty feet in diameter, which rotated slowly on its tilted axis. The library was built in a two-story circle around it, and Mara liked to climb the stairs to the second floor and look down at the blue-and-green swirls as they slowly made their way around. From up there, with its whispering sounds and uniform lighting, the library was like being off in space. When she was there, Mara felt as far away as she could get.

There was a table she liked up on the second floor where, just as she had once become absorbed in her radio and her books, Mara became immersed in her homework. Maybe like it had been for Piaget, it was an orderly world that Mara escaped to now, and she kept her mother out of her mind by staying occupied with tests and term papers and calculating her grade point average. Not surprisingly, Mara made straight A’s.

Sometimes, to relax, she borrowed self-hypnosis tapes from the audiovisual section—those who are good at becoming absorbed in fantasies are usually quite skilled at self-hypnosis—and she pushed two square, padded, even-armed chairs together, making a little crib-like bed where she could curl up. Just as she had once trained her eyes to split her vision, Mara now trained her mind to do what the tapes said. One taught her to erase her thoughts like chalk on a chalkboard, and she would lie there, eyes closed, willing the eraser in her mind to be stronger and more persistent than the words that popped up in the blackness on the back of her eyelids. Her favorite tapes, though, helped her visualize who she might be one day; they were guided meditations in which she met up with her future self.

For many supernormals, the most wide-open place to escape to is the future. For the child with an average and expectable life, living in the present may represent being able to be carefree and spontaneous, while thinking about the future may feel scary and uncertain. For many supernormals, however, rather than being afraid of change, what they fear most is that life will stay the same. In looking ahead, in being bold, they have nothing to lose.

In this way, some resilient children and teens, like Mara, use fantasies about the future not just cathartically as a way of disengaging from the here and now but also proactively as a way of arming themselves for the there and then. And this is where emotion-focused coping can start to look a lot like problem-focused coping; where fight and flight begin to merge. Daring to have a vision of one’s future self furthers achievement, and this sort of autobiographical planning may be especially important for the resilient child. Studies of transcendent individuals, or those who overcome obstacles in their way, show that they tend to be self-determined, intentional, and future-oriented.

Up on her second-floor table, Mara pored over test prep books and college guides and maps of faraway places. She set her sights on a particular Ivy League school, not because she knew anyone who had been there but because she had heard of it and it sounded far away. The librarian printed out admissions information, and she toted those papers around in her backpack like a secret, elaborate getaway plan. A friend gave her a key chain with the school’s logo on it and she held on to it for years, like a talisman. “He was the only person who knew about my dream and, when he gave me that key chain, it was like he gave me permission to take my dream seriously,” Mara recalls. “Before that, I think it really was just a fantasy.”

When we fantasize about future selves, the more concrete and actionable a vision the better—and sometimes, the supernormal child begins by setting her sights simply on some specific thing. A particular job. A faraway city. A quiet home. A safe relationship. An apartment with a doorman. A red car. A school that looks good. For actor Alan Cumming, it was a set of plates he bought at a country fair that allowed him to imagine one day being free of his father: “They were my ticket out,” Cumming said of the treasured plates in his memoir, Not My Father’s Son. “I would be eating off them in a place where there were buses and taxis and where I would never have to wait in a public place for hours, cold and damp, wondering if my father had concluded his liaison, and if or when he would come for me.”

Ultimately, Mara’s ticket out would be her hard work in school, but it was her key chain and her college guides, too. They were proof that life existed elsewhere, that there were other places that she could escape to once and for all. Set up at her table on the second floor, watching the world turn below, she did not yet know that she would grow to be an adult who would travel far and wide, and who would ultimately do exactly as she planned—attend that Ivy League school and live her life far away from where she sat. For now, it was enough to feel like she was above it all, in an otherworldly place, as she plotted her tomorrows and decided where on Earth she was going to go next.