51 pages • 1 hour read
Barbara O'NealWhen We Believed in Mermaids: A Novel
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2019A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
The Lasting Effects of Childhood Trauma
Content Warning: The source material for this guide includes descriptions of alcohol/drug addiction and recovery, the sexual assault of a child, suicidal ideation, abortion, and parental neglect.
The childhood trauma that affects both Kit and Josie/Mari in the story often stems from their neglectful parents but also stems from tragic world events both were exposed to in their adolescence. The earthquake that kills their father and destroys their home, and the bombing that affects Josie and, by extension, her family, are just two of the major events that have had a hand in shaping the personalities of the girls. Lacking the stable foundation with their mother prior to these events and throughout their healing has also played a part in their lingering childhood trauma while also being a direct cause.
Kit begins her description of her childhood by stating that “it’s hard to be the children of parents who are obsessed with each other” (4). She calls her father “a massive personality” and her mother as “a charming coquette” (3). These descriptions set up a picture of two people who were deeply in love with each other to the point of exclusion. Kit’s parents struggle to make time to be parental. There’s a description later in the novel in which Kit complains about not going to school on Mondays because it is the only day of the week the restaurant is closed, and her parents prefer to sleep in rather than make sure the girls get to school.
This pattern of parental neglect leads to several situations that create trauma for Kit and her sister, Josie. When Dylan is taken in by the family, he naturally takes on a parental role with the girls. However, Dylan has his own childhood trauma that he is struggling with, and he does not have the maturity or context to give Kit and Josie everything they need. Dylan is successful in making sure the girls attend school on Mondays, and he is there to rescue them on a Christmas morning when Kit and Josie’s parents destroy the Christmas presents and decorations during a fight. However, Josie is left vulnerable to a guest of the restaurant, and Dylan is unprepared to help her when she informs him of the sexual assault. Dylan is distrusting of adults, and he instead teaches her to control her panic attacks associated with these assaults with drugs and alcohol, just as he treats his own trauma. This leads to a pattern of abuse on both his and Josie’s part. While Dylan’s presence generally comforts and helps the girls in their childhood, their parents were largely absent and didn’t intervene when the children were having long-lasting, traumatic experiences. Each of the girls learned to be self-sufficient in their own way and lacked the security typical of a parent-child relationship.
There is a two-week period in which Josie and Dylan are left unsupervised while the Biancis are at a restaurant conference. During this time, Josie acts on her attraction to Dylan and convinces him to become intimate with her while they are using hard drugs. This event not only causes tension between Dylan and Josie, but it also causes Josie to become pregnant at the age of 15. Dylan dies shortly after this, and her father dies in the earthquake following Dylan’s death. Although Kit did not experience sexual assault or an unwanted pregnancy, she was the one who found Dylan after his death, and she was with her father the day he died in the earthquake. In the aftermath, Kit’s mother was consumed first with her grief, and later with her need to provide for her family while Josie was consumed by addiction. Due to this, Kit was abandoned by those who should have been there for her, and she was forced to seek companionship and support in other areas, such as her love affair with her coworker, James, and through the message boards on Prodigy. Where Josie’s trauma led to a drug and alcohol addiction, Kit’s trauma led to a mistrust of people and an aversion to romantic relationships. Childhood trauma overshadowed Kit and Josie’s lives and had lasting impacts that they work to overcome through the course of this novel.
Addiction as a Coping Mechanism
In the 1980s, the use of cocaine became widespread in the United States even as Congress passed the Anti-Drug Abuse Act that enacted mandatory prison sentences for drug offenses. O’Neal plays with this atmosphere of drug use when describing the customers of Eden, the restaurant belonging to Kit and Josie’s parents. It is also suggested that Kit’s mother was also caught up in this world when she talks about her decision to go into recovery after Josie’s reported death.
The roots of addiction are often traced back to trauma, peer pressure, mental illness, genetic predisposition, parental example, or rebellious behavior. It can be inferred that Kit’s mother often used alcohol and/or drugs in a way to bury her feelings or to get back at her husband, as seen in this quote: “My mom was kind of out of it, laughing really loudly, and I knew she was mad at my dad” (180-81). This, too, can be seen to be a cause of Josie’s struggle with addiction with the addition of a genetic predisposition, peer pressure, and trauma. It is clear that the odds were stacked against Josie from an early age due to her parents’ lack of a good example and the parental neglect that allowed Josie to be sexually assaulted by a guest of the family restaurant.
Kit and Josie’s mother changed significantly after receiving help for addiction. She became a more attentive mother and took on more responsibility for her actions. The same can be said of Josie. However, for Josie to recover, she had to leave behind her old life, essentially killing the person she’d been to become someone who could move past addiction and seek help for the trauma that defined her childhood. While both Kit’s mother and Josie/Mari are in recovery for their addictions, their relationships remain defined by this addiction and its aftermath, making addiction an important theme of the novel.
The Fear of Emotional Connection
With the foundation of parental neglect and traumatic life events, Josie/Mari and Kit both show a fear of emotional connection in their adult lives, albeit in different ways. This is something that both characters become self-aware of and begin to overcome as they work on healing in the second half of the novel. It is notable that they come together in order to overcome this fear of connection, which is rooted so deeply in their childhood and shared experiences.
Kit’s character displays a fear of connection in a more direct sense, particularly in her relationship with Javier. When she begins to feel she could fall in love with Javier, she leaves the situation to avoid him entirely. When they run into one another again at the pool in their high-rise building, their relationship begins to develop further. As they spend time together, Kit openly refers to their relationship as a “fling,” even when Javier protests and wants to be considered more to Kit. Kit hangs onto this idea of their “fling” for much of the novel, despite all signs pointing to a healthy, emotionally intuitive relationship.
Josie/Mari displays a fear of connection in a different way because of her false identity. She has created the character of Mari to rid herself of her past life and residual trauma. As Mari, she can start new and never have to visit these past events in her present life. She even keeps her true identity from her husband, Simon, who notably hates lying and who she knows would be angry with her if he ever found out. Connecting emotionally with her past self and then letting others in to understand her true identity is a major part of her character’s growth at the end of the story. Her fear of emotional connection is more directly with her past self and indirectly with those in her life who she withholds her identity from.
