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

I have not always been willing to recognize these multiple, sometimes contradictory roles. For the longest time I simply wanted to believe it was over—childhood, that is. I stubbornly persisted in this belief, ignoring all indications to the contrary, until the day shortly before my mother’s first illness in 1996 when I was called to 34 n jonathan g. silin

sort through the boxes containing the long-forgotten remnants of the past.

In a hurry, I was annoyed with my parents as I began to open the cartons and empty the dusty closet shelves. The memories started slowly but soon picked up momentum, becoming an unstoppable tide.

Here was the heavy metal erector set stored in its own red box, replete with pictures of bridges, machines, and vehicles that my brother and I tried to duplicate without success during those long, house-bound days of winter. There was the stamp collection carefully packed away along with our hopes of finding rare misprints that would make us rich, the glassine envelopes still filled with garish triangular stamps depicting exotic flowers and majestic animals from faraway places—

Tanganyika, Costa Rica, the Republic of Cameroon. And the old cigar boxes, lined with cotton batting, containing the hand-painted lead soldiers purchased by a beloved aunt and uncle on their first trip abroad after the War, essential props in elaborately staged conflicts of our own devising.

A single afternoon was all that was needed to decide what would be saved for my niece and what would be consigned to the display cases of the local thrift shop. That was the easy part. It was much harder to sort through the emotions that the objects elicited. I was drawn to savoring the pleasures of recollection at the same time as I was fearful of sinking into the swamp of nostalgia. Childhood memories can bring to the fore ambivalent emotions and unresolved relationships that threaten the achievement of adulthood. Middle-aged, I wanted to fix my understandings of the past so as to better focus on the future, to see myself as making history rather than determined by it.

Recent events had broken through the pretense that childhood belongs only to the past, another country which we may visit or ignore at will. For as my parents and I struggled to meet the demands of illness and aging, the complexity and vitality of our relationship became clear. Regardless of age, we continued to be parent and child.

We brought our shared history and ways of relating to every interac-m y fat h e r ’ s k e e p e r n 35

tion. At the same time, I saw new qualities in their personalities—

my mother’s anxiety and depression, my father’s determination, dare I say ambition, to make the most of his life. Were these new character traits, the result of their changed situation? Or were they part of my growing up that I just hadn’t seen?

With time, however, memories fade, facts are confused, history intervenes. Because memory is never pure but always colored by successive layers of experience, it does not offer a direct route to the past. I found it difficult to sort out what I actually remembered, what had been described by my parents, and what I was learning about my family through looking at old photographs, report cards, and first attempts at writing that had been carefully packed away in boxes and stored deep in the back of closet shelves. I realized that what is important to me is not the literal accuracy of the stories but the emotional truths that they are the vehicles for. I saw that it is these truths that both connect me to the past and that I would need to reconfigure in order to do what was necessary in the present.

I began to doubt my once-secure memories of parents, childhood, and the larger narrative into which I wove them. That narrative, which remained unedited from my midtwenties to midfifties, was now open to, indeed demanded, reinterpretation. I realized that the life narratives we construct are more about coming to terms with the present than any truth about our history. Perhaps childhood itself is not a fixed part of the past that can be known with any certainty. At first blush, the idea that childhood is constituted by an elusive, fragmented collection of memories and that our lived experiences are open to multiple interpretations challenges the commonsense understanding of our early years as a foundational period when the building blocks of later successes and failures are put into place. Yet my recent experience suggested the fragility of memory and an ever-evolving understanding of what it means to be young, and to have lived in this particular family at that time in history.

Despite recent research on the abilities of children to overcome early learning difficulties, on childhood resiliency in the face of social 36 n jonathan g. silin

adversity, on the potential of lifelong learning, and even on the continuous regeneration of brain cells, educators and parents are often reluctant to give up their belief in the critical importance of the first years. Anyone who doubts this need only review the guidelines for Developmentally Appropriate Practice published by the National Association for the Education of Young Children, with its specific, detailed recommendations for how to run the best possible program for young children. The aisles of the local bookstore, stacked high with self-help manuals telling parents how to foster their children’s confidence and competence, convey the same message: do it right in early life or risk the consequences for later development.

The popular media are quick to reinforce this message about the critical role of the early years when they erroneously imply that the results of neuroscientific research on early brain stimulation can be directly translated into the design of educational environments. More toys and activities, more specialists and highly fragmented days, do not necessarily make