A Mother's Reckoning
Jun. 10th, 2016 02:34 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
osprey_archerI've been reading Sue Klebold's book A Mother's Reckoning: Life in the Aftermath of Tragedy - Sue Klebold is the mother of Dylan Klebold, one of the shooters at Columbine - which is really good, but in a way where I would be very leery of recommending it because it's so emotionally intense. Like, "I spent the first half of the book crying" emotionally intense. And I feel like it would be even worse for a parent, because Dylan seems so normal that I think it would be hard for a parent not to imagine their own child into his place. "How would I feel if...?"
The first half is mostly memoir about the hours and days and weeks after Columbine, as Sue Klebold tries to grapple with the fact that her son Dylan is dead and also a murderer and dead, and everyone blames her and her husband for the shooting (they should have known! They should have seen what their son was up to!) and they're being sued, and also a media inferno has descended on the town. And, because her son died killing lots of people, it's like he died twice over: she has to rethink everything she ever thought she knew about him, and everything about herself as well, and also about parenting.
I think it's fairly easy to wonder about bias in a book like this: Sue Klebold is clearly reacting to accusations that Columbine was all her fault and she must have been a bad parent, so it's natural to wonder if this is all a rationalization. I've read two outside sources that largely confirm Klebold's characterization of herself and her son, though (David Cullen's nonfiction book Columbine and Brooks Brown's memoir about his friendship with Dylan), so while there are a couple of specific points where I think Klebold might be biased (she really wants Dylan's depression to have psychotic features - and under the circumstances, who wouldn't want to believe he was losing contact with reality?), on the whole it's a painfully honest book.
And also a terrifying book, because if there's one main point that you should take away, it's that people - parents, in particular, but also other relatives, friends - very rarely know the things they "should" have known. It's not that they're unengaged (the Klebolds were clearly very engaged parents), but that people in general and children especially don't open up about what's wrong with unless you pry it out of them.
(When I was eleven, one of my friends confided to me that she was suicidal, and I wrote pages and pages fretting about this in my diary but never told anyone. She had sworn me to secrecy and even if she hadn't, it just didn't occur to me as an option. And I'm sure that same thinking only applies more intensely to bigger and more painful secrets; the surprising thing is not that children don't tell but that they ever tell at all.
I feel compelled to add that the young lady in question is to the best of my knowledge still alive and kicking.)
Speaking of diaries - Klebold mentions that she wishes that she had read Dylan's. Under the circumstances, I think that's an understandable wish, I'm really ambivalent about it as wider parenting advice, though. Dylan Klebold is an extreme case and perhaps ought not to be generalized from?
But on the other hand, Sue Klebold's comment reminds me eerily of a story in David Cullen's Columbine, about one of Dylan's classmates and eventual victims. When Cassie Bernall was a young teenager, her mother went into her room and read some private letters Cassie had exchanged with a friend, which said things like "You should kill your parents and then yourself so you don't have to go to jail" and basically made it clear that Cassie was miserable and depressed. Mrs. Bernall and her husband forced Cassie to break off the friendship and grounded her from pretty much all unorganized activities and basically took over her life.
And it saved her. She didn't become a social butterfly or even get a prom date, but she was doing well and was happy when she died.
...I still have a kneejerk "WHO READS SOMEONE ELSE'S PRIVATE DIARY" reaction to all this. But just because a reaction is kneejerk doesn't mean it's right. (Or that it's wrong. I go back and forth on this.)
I may post about it at more length later; there's a huge amount of thought-provoking stuff in this book. I need to think it over a bit more before I write.
The first half is mostly memoir about the hours and days and weeks after Columbine, as Sue Klebold tries to grapple with the fact that her son Dylan is dead and also a murderer and dead, and everyone blames her and her husband for the shooting (they should have known! They should have seen what their son was up to!) and they're being sued, and also a media inferno has descended on the town. And, because her son died killing lots of people, it's like he died twice over: she has to rethink everything she ever thought she knew about him, and everything about herself as well, and also about parenting.
I think it's fairly easy to wonder about bias in a book like this: Sue Klebold is clearly reacting to accusations that Columbine was all her fault and she must have been a bad parent, so it's natural to wonder if this is all a rationalization. I've read two outside sources that largely confirm Klebold's characterization of herself and her son, though (David Cullen's nonfiction book Columbine and Brooks Brown's memoir about his friendship with Dylan), so while there are a couple of specific points where I think Klebold might be biased (she really wants Dylan's depression to have psychotic features - and under the circumstances, who wouldn't want to believe he was losing contact with reality?), on the whole it's a painfully honest book.
And also a terrifying book, because if there's one main point that you should take away, it's that people - parents, in particular, but also other relatives, friends - very rarely know the things they "should" have known. It's not that they're unengaged (the Klebolds were clearly very engaged parents), but that people in general and children especially don't open up about what's wrong with unless you pry it out of them.
(When I was eleven, one of my friends confided to me that she was suicidal, and I wrote pages and pages fretting about this in my diary but never told anyone. She had sworn me to secrecy and even if she hadn't, it just didn't occur to me as an option. And I'm sure that same thinking only applies more intensely to bigger and more painful secrets; the surprising thing is not that children don't tell but that they ever tell at all.
I feel compelled to add that the young lady in question is to the best of my knowledge still alive and kicking.)
Speaking of diaries - Klebold mentions that she wishes that she had read Dylan's. Under the circumstances, I think that's an understandable wish, I'm really ambivalent about it as wider parenting advice, though. Dylan Klebold is an extreme case and perhaps ought not to be generalized from?
But on the other hand, Sue Klebold's comment reminds me eerily of a story in David Cullen's Columbine, about one of Dylan's classmates and eventual victims. When Cassie Bernall was a young teenager, her mother went into her room and read some private letters Cassie had exchanged with a friend, which said things like "You should kill your parents and then yourself so you don't have to go to jail" and basically made it clear that Cassie was miserable and depressed. Mrs. Bernall and her husband forced Cassie to break off the friendship and grounded her from pretty much all unorganized activities and basically took over her life.
And it saved her. She didn't become a social butterfly or even get a prom date, but she was doing well and was happy when she died.
...I still have a kneejerk "WHO READS SOMEONE ELSE'S PRIVATE DIARY" reaction to all this. But just because a reaction is kneejerk doesn't mean it's right. (Or that it's wrong. I go back and forth on this.)
I may post about it at more length later; there's a huge amount of thought-provoking stuff in this book. I need to think it over a bit more before I write.
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no subject
Date: 2016-06-11 12:22 pm (UTC)What you say about people not sharing unless you pry stuff out of them dovetails with two things I've been mulling over. One is that people sometimes don't have words or even thoughts to articulate how and what they're feeling (sometimes they completely do; but sometimes they don't)--I'm thinking of accounts I've heard of, for instance, transgender people growing up in very conservative communities and just not even knowing how to articulate what they're experiencing. But with less dramatic things, too. And that, I think, contributes to its being hard to share.
The other thing is the to-pry-or-not-to-pry question, and how hard we try to uncover what's wrong with someone and why we do or don't push harder. I know in a lot of circumstances I haven't pushed as hard as I (in retrospect) should have because I was afraid of angering the person and alienating them. At the time, those seemed like legitimate reasons for holding back, but the end result was that I put my own comfort above really helping them. ... And yet, sometimes you really do just drive a person away if you probe too insistently.
A hard takeaway to accept, but that I think is present in this and other stories of being unable to see signs or reach people, is that sometimes terrible things happen, and there's nothing you could have done to forestall it anymore than you can forestall death in an earthquake or getting cancer. With natural events, we accept that there's nothing we can do (though we do our best to prepare as much as is practical), but with stuff relating to human beings, with mental illness and even just ordinary interactions without that as a complicating factor, we feel like we (or others) ought to have known or to have been able to do something, and we Monday morning quarterback about what we would do in a similar situation--a sort of self-protection ("I won't ever be in this position, because **I** would do X thing that that person didn't"), but in some cases, maybe bad things just happen, like earthquakes. And that's scary and sad.
no subject
Date: 2016-06-11 01:47 pm (UTC)The question of to-pry-or-not-to-pry can be so complicated. I actually did once pry so hard that it destroyed a friendship (it wasn't the only factor, but I think it was the reason the friendship ended so abruptly rather than petering quietly off), so I think that is a legitimate worry. The best outcome might be for a friend to open up, but trying to make them open up when they don't want to can create the worst outcome, where the relationship falls apart just when they might have needed it. And I think being a friend who provides fun times can be valuable in itself, even if it doesn't get to the root of the problem.
Besides, I think there's an important difference between adults and children in this instance, in that with adults you really have to allow more freedom of choice. They get to decide who they feel comfortable confiding in.
In the book, Klebold talks about being alert for signs of depression in teens, but many of these things are so subtle - an inexplicable stomach ache, crankiness, staring into space - I do wonder if this is a case of the pattern-seeking human mind finding a pattern to comfort itself. (Not just Sue Klebold, but the field of suicide research.)
Like, if you compared cases of teens who died of suicide and teens who died in tragic accidents, would you find stomach aches and crankiness and staring into space in both groups in the days before their deaths?
Which is not to say that parents shouldn't try to open lines of communication if they're worried about their kids, but to a certain extent asking the right questions, and asking them at a time when the kid wants to/feels capable of answering, is a matter of luck.
no subject
Date: 2016-06-11 02:02 pm (UTC)I totally agree with what you say about being a person who can provide fun times, too. Sometimes I think that's really the lifeline a person needs. Again, I would never say always about any of this, but while there's a place for probing and uncovering, there's also a place for just creating healthy, other experiences. Blah blah it's complicated blah blah.
And the last thing you say, about its being a matter of luck, I wholeheartedly agree with, and I think that's what makes it scary to think about. ... And I think it's a reason for people to be exposed to lots of parent-like figures, because sometimes a different person may have a way of being, or a way of talking, that allows for communication *better*. It has nothing to do with parents' love not being enough and just about different styles.
no subject
Date: 2016-06-11 02:30 pm (UTC)Sometimes I find it frustrating that with social interactions, although there are definitely wrong answers - it's probably never constructive to tell someone "Your sadness is so boring, ugh, I'm going to find better friends" - there's almost never one right answer. There might be a bunch of right-ish answers, but there's no way to be confident that you're doing the right thing. Life is all about successfully navigating uncertainty.
no subject
Date: 2016-06-11 02:45 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-06-11 02:48 pm (UTC)