Divorce, Sesame Street style
/The Boston Herald
BEVERLY BECKHAM
The saddest story in the news last Friday had nothing to do with crime or politics or the economy. It had to do with the way we live our lives, and the way we treat our children. It was a heartbreaker, yet relegated to the back pages, as if it meant nothing at all.
Sesame Street announced that it was putting its new episode about divorce on hold because the preschool children who had previewed it had become upset and had found it too painful to watch. The Snuffleupaguses were splitting up and the kids didn't like it a bit.
Why was Sesame Street doing this to children, was my first thought. Childhood is supposed to be a happy time. Why were they introducing this subject? What would they do next? A spot on AIDS? Have Ernie demonstrate how to use a condom? Whatever happened to innocence?
Oh, I was all set to tear into the show's producers for their insensitivity, for presenting a subject no little kid should have to deal with, for exposing babies to adult problems, when I realized that I was wrong.
I was totally missing the point.
Sesame Street wasn't the problem. Real life is the problem.
Millions of American children have to deal with divorce every day. Divorce is a fact of life. And yet, how sad it is, because even a small make-believe segment about divorce obviously upset these younsters.
"Divorce is an extremely anxiety-provoking subject for a 4-year-old," said executive producer Dulcy Singer. You bet it is. It's upsetting because of all life's traumas it looms the largest for children today. It is the most likely, likelier than war or sickness or death.
A husband and wife quarrel in front of a child. Maybe it's a nothing quarrel about not paying a bill or forgetting to tape some television show, and the child says later, when the mother is tucking him into bed, "Are you and Dad gonna get a divorce?"
The worry is there, right on the surface, the fear constant.
"Of course not. Why would you think such a thing?"
Why would he not? His best friend's parents are divorced, the girl across the street's parents are divorced, his aunt and uncle just got a divorce. A new kid in his school lives with his grandmother because his parents are divorced. People in movies and on TV are divorced. It is the child's biggest fear.
"It has nothing to do with you," a man will say to his daughter as he's walking out the door. "This is between your mother and me. I still love you. I'll always love you." Then he leaves and moves in with another woman and isn't home anymore for dinner or to take her to the movies and all the "I love you's" in the world don't mean a thing, because his actions show that he loves someone else more.
"We're not divorcing you," is what parents are supposed to say when they break the news. But in a way they are, because divorce is a radical separation of things closely connected. And the thing that is severed in divorce isn't just a marriage, it's family, it's order, it's a way of life.
In its 23 years on television, Sesame Street has dealt with death, adoption, marriage and birth, and all the children for whom "sunny days sweeping the clouds away" is a siren song have watched and learned and accepted.
Divorce they could not accept. The show didn't alleviate their fears. It exacerbated them.
"It's back to the drawing boards," the show's researcher director said after the failed preview. "It didn't work."
It seldom does. That's what the children know that the adults have yet to learn.
