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Opinion | Culture
Take a Break From Disjointed Capitalism
From self-destruction to phobia, cultural forces influence our unwitting minds.
Some of the fondest memories of my life are of my father. When I was two years old, like many other kids in the eighties, my parents divorced. Though my father fought valiantly for custody, the late-eighties were a different era, when courts almost unquestionably passed custody to mothers in most cases. That’s still the case, but we’ve seen a drastic decline in mothers with sole custody and a corresponding rise in parents with joint custody. Often, courts won’t let a parent take a child out of state when custody is shared. My mother wanted to move from California to Florida, which, in a rather unusual move, the courts allowed.
An agreement was struck— I’d stay with my mother in Florida during the school year and with my father during out-of-school breaks. Until my teenage years, every summer and every winter, I would visit my father in Ohio, where he’d gone from California to rebuild his life after my parents’ fierce divorce. He’d sunk his savings into the grueling court battle.
I remember the feeling of the sunshine and the wide-open skies during the long car rides when he’d come to pick me up from Florida and drive me all the way to Ohio — a 947-mile trek, 1,524 kilometers. It felt like the world was at our fingertips, like my dad and I could do absolutely anything we put our minds to. It was also a nice break from my mother’s house which, in adulthood, one of my childhood friends would later describe as “anarchy.”
Alcohol flowed late into the night as loud music pounded through the speakers. Loud party guests showed up at all hours. Fights—often alcohol induced—broke out. Televisions blared constantly, the only semblance of “normal,” I experienced, except those intermittent voyages with my father.
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My parents couldn’t have been more opposite in their approaches to parenting. My dad wasn’t strict or stern, but loving, compassionate, forward-thinking, and provided structure; my mom provided nothing of the sort, just a massive, confusing party that would regularly descend into screaming chaos, one…
