My Father's Keeper: The Story of a Gay Son and His Aging Parents by Jonathan Silin (free novels .txt) 📗

to absorb their anger and despair. I see this kind of commitment in the detached but mindful ways that Catherine and Stephanie respond to their students. I remember that, like them, I too can be tough in the morning, setting limits and accepting the hostile accusations that follow in their wake, and filled with appreciative laughter at night. The early childhood classroom is the first place where I became responsible for others and independent of my parents.

Now, as I make my weekly trips between Manhattan and my research site, it is teaching me further lessons about attachment and separation, loss and recuperation, the young and the very old.

3

The Future in Question

People don’t have to stop being children, they just have to be able to be adults as well. If we cultivate unbearable choices, we create impossible lives.

a da m p h i l l i p s , On Flirtation

Early childhood educators pride themselves on knowing about transitions. We are experts at convincing anxious parents to leave the classroom in the morning and at cajoling others to spend a few more minutes with a distressed child in need of their attention. Despite the chaos engendered by young children anxiously stuffing half-eaten lunches into backpacks, grasping library books and PTA notes while trailing extra sweaters behind them, at the end of the afternoon we try for one final moment in which our students review the day’s successes and failures. Endings are important to us. In between these events we have managed to get twenty-six rowdy first graders up to the art room and down to the gym, into math lessons and out of reading groups, onto the playground and back to the classroom just in time for music.

As a teacher educator I continue to help people make transitions—from other fields to education, from roles as parents to roles as teachers, from childhoods spent in traditional schools to more pro-31

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gressive settings, and the reverse. All of these changes have in turn been negotiated to help young children make the monumental shift from intimate, domestic worlds to disciplined, public spaces.

Despite my skills at assisting others, I am always unprepared for my own transition back to school each fall. In mid-August, as the days become cooler and shorter, I inevitably find myself scrambling to revive the writing projects, course outlines, and research proposals that have wilted in the heat of the summer sun. There still seems to be time even as I begin to relive that mixture of excitement and anxiety which as a child I anticipated the new school year with. And no matter what the outcome of my efforts, I always feel unready when September finally arrives.

In the late summer of 1998 the practical and emotional preparations for my return to work were interrupted by my mother’s increasingly anxious reports about my father’s extreme weakness and recurring moments of disorientation. Monitoring my parents care from a distance and taking into account their multiple health problems, I have tried not to act precipitously and to listen carefully for signs of critical changes. I fear that my own life may all too easily be subsumed by their many needs. I guard my energies as well so as not to squander them on false crises and to exhaust myself before the more serious, terminal events have begun.

On Sunday my mother asks when I will come to the city. Reminding her that I will be there on Tuesday, she says, “Good, because I need you.” For someone not given to direct demands on others, her words are startling. They signal that indeed something is seriously wrong.

On Monday morning, however, I conveniently “forget” the urgency of my mother’s words until the health aide who tends my father calls. Calm and competent, Marlene summarizes the situation, saying,

“He can’t go on this way.” Ten minutes later, when I tell my father that I have arranged a doctor’s appointment for later that morning, he tells me that he won’t go. He works hard to prove that he is not disoriented, knows the day of the week, and can recite details of a fa-m y fat h e r ’ s k e e p e r n 33

vorite nephew’s weekend visit and the list of medical specialists whom he is to see in the coming days; he insists that he has no time for another appointment.

My father and I are now plunged into a familiar game in which I am the judge of record, assessing the truth of his situation in a court of last resort. My father is determined, uncanny, and persuasive as he pleads his case by demonstrating his physical and psychological competency. The very skills that my father summons to his defense indicate the depth of his fear and desperation. They also indicate the continually shifting nature of power in our relationship. Although I have legal authority to make difficult decisions, he has the ability to inflict the anguish and pain of a helpless father pleading with his son.

Power is never unidirectional, but circulates between us. As our conversation ends, I ask my father to reconsider at the same moment as I make mental preparations to leave for New York.

Two hours later the call from the doctor tells me that my father has consented to be seen and is suffering from an infection and severe dehydration that require immediate hospitalization. My father accepts the antibiotics, ten dollars per pill (my parents’ antiquated health insurance does not include any drug coverage), promises to drink plenty of liquids, a physical impossibility due to prior throat radiation and surgery, and returns home. Steadfastly refusing the hospital, my father poses a direct challenge to medical authority and to me. I face moments like this with equanimity and with dread, confused by our changed relationship. He is the headstrong father I have always known, determined to assert his will at every turn, as well as the extremely vulnerable octogenarian who longs