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

hand and challenge adult ways of organizing the world. Assisted by all manner of new technologies, classrooms, afterschool programs, and summer camps are set up to keep children physically in view at all times while increasingly sophisticated psychological assessments and academic tests bring to light qualities once hidden from sight.

And perhaps, for Anne and myself, it is no different with the elderly. We are frightened by what we see. My father forces me to confront mortality, to feel old before my time. I try to keep some distance in word and deed. If I describe him as needy, failing, and deeply depressed, then surely I am self-sufficient, thriving, and optimistic. If I declare him irrational and out of control, then surely I am reasonable and in charge. How can I possibly know what it would be like to live with all my senses askew and basic biologic functions mediated by mechanical devices or the assistance of others? How can I know what it means to have little regard for past accomplishments and future projects? Like children, the elderly force us to reorder our priorities, to step back from our concerns for tomorrow, and attend more closely to this day.

I was in graduate school when I first began to develop my criticisms of child development theory. Skeptical of the way it functions to distance teachers from their students, I wanted to explore the common ground adults share with children, the existential themes and ways of knowing that bind us together in one world. Other early childhood specialists were curious when I asked them to consider what is gained and what is lost when adults define children as “undeveloped,” in need of just the right amount and kind of protective nurture to mature properly. Ultimately, however, my peers in the field were unable to give up the security of the child development canon. When I comm y fat h e r ’ s k e e p e r n 45

pleted my doctoral work, I was often a finalist, but did not receive the job offer I sought—a tenure-track professorship.

Then my words were couched in philosophical and political language. Now there is a much larger body of empirical evidence to substantiate my criticisms of developmentalism and educational practices that continually direct us toward the child’s future. Now too I have a heightened sensitivity to time gone by and of the options no longer available to my parents or to me. At first, I did not realize how threatened I felt by their despair, their lack of hope. But over time, I have come to understand the central place of hope in our arsenal of survival strategies. In hope we defend against the past; the future will be better. In hope we implicitly acknowledge our disappointments; something wasn’t right back then. Hope allows us to imagine a state of affairs in which the past is ameliorated and our deepest losses are compensated.

Theories and practices focusing exclusively on what children will become rather than what they are, however, reflect a kind of blind hope. Blind, that is, because it defends against remembering the ravages of personal and social histories. I think of myself as an advocate for a more modulated form of hope built on a willingness to look at the present and back at the past without allowing ourselves to be overcome by what we see.

Adults are hopeful because of the children. Children in turn contain this precious investment made by their elders. When time and illness destroyed my parents’ defenses and left them quite naked, they took little interest in my potential or my accomplishments. It was not my desire for their approval, although there is always that, but the withdrawal of their investment that signaled our changed relationship and triggered my deepest anxieties. Despite their many weaknesses, my parents were still powerful in ways that I am sure they didn’t imagine. I was angry about their ability to deprive me of the status they conferred at my birth, emblem of hope. At the same time I accepted their new self-absorption; after all, they were finally leaving the future to me.

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Psychic Reality

[A] life as led is inseparable from a life as told—

or more bluntly, a life is not “how it was” but how it is interpreted and reinterpreted, told and retold: Freud’s psychic reality. . . . So perhaps a metaphysical change is required to alter the narratives that we have settled upon as “being” our lives.

j e r o m e b ru n e r , “Life as Narrative”

Growing up, each of us builds an understanding of who our parents are and how our family functions. We construct an overarching narrative of our life and tell particular stories that capture the complex interpersonal dynamics that thread their way through our days. We tell these stories over and over again because they enable us to make sense of our experience and lend credence to the larger narrative. We come to believe in their reality. Over time these stories, our memories of the past, become fixed, and reinterpretation less likely.

Although my work is bound up with children and the role of autobiography in teacher education, my own childhood stories remained as immutable as anyone else’s. For me, however, when the overarching narrative finally became unsettled, it was not by a “meta-47

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physical” change but by my parents’ all too physical decline and the frequent bedside scenes that followed.

The first time my mother lies in the critical care unit of a local hospital, in the spring of 1996, with her long hair unpinned, released from the tight French roll in which it is usually bound, I am stunned to see glimmers of youthful openness in her face. The medical crisis has caught her off guard, and she reveals an emotional accessibility that had disappeared many years ago. It is as if the surgeon’s knife has not only cut out the bleeding ulcer but