The Myth of Normal 145

freeway coursing along it and, on the other side, a drive-through McDonald’s and a gas station.) How quaint such memories seem now, almost like something out of Sesame Street. Local stores are an endangered species. Notwithstanding thriving communal settings in some localities, in general more and more of us drive, often by ourselves, to work or to shop at some soulless and/or windowless facility far away. In place of people we know, we encounter strangers purveying mass-manufactured products. Economic interactions once informed by personal relationships, whether at the bank, gas station, or large-store checkout counter, have been increasingly replaced by emotionally sterile and ever more mechanized transactions. Suburban sidewalks, largely vacant, are no longer enlivened by the raucous play of children of mixed ages: for the most part, kids attend schools segregated into same-age groupings. The need to make a living impels many people to move far away from their extended families. Church attendance and other vectors of socially minded participation are on the wane. “Without at first noticing, we have been pulled apart from one another and from our communities over the last third of the century,” Harvard professor of public policy Robert D. Putnam wrote in 2000.[26] Social creatures by natural design, we have become fish out of water. Mothers, whose need for connection is an especially high-stakes matter, are among the hardest hit by these shifts. Adrienne Rich notes that during the relative affluence of the mid-twentieth century, “the move to the suburbs, to the smaller, then the larger, private house, the isolation of ‘the home’ from other homes . . . The working-class mothers in their new flats and the academic wives in their new affluence all lost something: they became, to a more extreme degree, house-bound, isolated women.”[27] Such tendencies are exerting themselves internationally and with growing force under the sway of globalized capitalism. While there is no sense in pining for some idealized once-upon-a-time, a decline in cohesion and community support is discernible, and lamentable. “In earlier decades, the social ties were in place,” James Garbarino, a lifelong student of child development and a professor of humanistic psychology at