Gideon's River

The Virginian, cowboy hero in Wister’s Western of the same title, started life with nothing except confidence in his own ability.  What happens when a child never has a chance to build that confidence?  James Garbarino wrote Lost Boys in the 1980s.  The subtitle of the book is Why Our Boys Turn Violent and How We Can Save Them. He advises reaching unhappy boys before the age of eight when they tend to become so sealed off in distrust that we can’t help them.

Rosalie, raising Gideon in the 1990s knows about Garbarino’s book through her job in social work.  She worries that it may be too late for Gideon.  While Gideon is not violent, she recognizes that the pattern is the same.  His angry outbursts are emotionally violent.  And how can she reach out to him when anger in her family history has left her wounded?  Rosalie lacks confidence in her ability to raise her child.  She lacks information and doesn’t know where to find it.

Gideon’s River explores the drama of “the bully and the wimp” as it has come down through families since ancient times.  It’s not only women and children who suffer in domination culture.  Most men suffer, too.  Even at the top, men are terrified of losing their edge—and they terrify every man, woman, and child of less physical strength or, perhaps, less willingness to be cruel.  When outright violence is not used, threats of violence and destructive criticism become accepted—and by destructive criticism we mean those comments calculated to reduce confidence.

Confidence is the key to Gideon’s happiness.  What is it about divorce that shakes a kid’s confidence?  James Garbarino tallied the number of strikes that had gone against the boys he interviewed–divorce, parents living in different cities, no father, father in jail, father on drugs, mother on drugs, raised by grandmother or foster parents,…  Garbarino explained that a kid could have one or two of these challenges to overcome in early life, but if he had three or more, chances are he would be overwhelmed by the excess of confusion and the lack of value others placed in him.

Garbarino has made a career of compassionately following the pathway from childhood to prison for some of our children.  You and I, as caring parents who are about good enough, are looking at a subtler level of the same issue.  Even one of the factors above can impact a child.  The most common is divorce.  With divorce often comes parents living far apart so that the child must always give up one to see the other, perhaps making a difficult and scary trip.  Add the different lifestyles in two homes, each one a silent criticism of the other.  Often, too, one parent complains about the other.  After all, they have parted ways for a reason.  What this all adds up to is that parents like Rosalie, in Gideon’s River, face challenges that require more than the simple love with which they began life with this child.