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

present, she also knew deeper psychological truths like the importance of self-confidence and the difficulty of trying new activities. There was always certainty in what my parents did and what they thought.

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Entering adolescence, I began to understand that despite their different realms of knowing, they shared a deep belief in the natural superiority of their children. This superiority, when realized through academic distinction and participation in the full panoply of extra-curricular activities, would lead to later successes. Acceptance at the right college assures admission to an elite professional school, which in turn lays the groundwork for a life of economic security, perhaps even public recognition. Because the world is a threatening place, we must either enter armed with sufficient credentials to protect ourselves or face the irreversible outcomes of our early mistakes.

I grew up in bondage to the future. And, inevitably, I rebelled

—dropping out of college, actualizing my homosexual desires, and rejecting a safe career. I found support for my moment-to-moment orientation among the existentialist writers popular with disaffected youth in the 1950s. They taught me about choice and possibility, resistance and rebellion, contingency and the value of keeping death in front of us at all times. Later, I carried these interests with me into the classroom. As a new teacher, undaunted by Piaget’s pronouncements about limited intellectual abilities and warnings from psychoanalysts about potential emotional upsets, I explored the children’s here-and-now understandings of death. I decried the absence of books that would help other teachers do the same. Still further on, when AIDS

became an overwhelming presence in my personal and professional life, I championed discussions of HIV and other difficult social issues with young children. In this way I continued to resist assumptions about what children can and can’t understand, about the differences between the young and the old.

On the rare occasions that my parents become nostalgic about the past, I remind them of their persistent attempts to control my future.

My parents acted as if their constant surveillance would assure the outcomes they desired. With this belief, they validated their personal sacrifices and tried to negate the gratuitous nature of life.

My parents were models of self-sacrificing, child-centered caregivers who appeared to have few interests beyond the welfare of their 52 n jonathan g. silin

family. Seldom did they display physical or emotional affection toward each other. I sometimes wonder what my childhood would have been like if I had experienced a few healthy doses of benign neglect.

What if my overly zealous middle-class parents had spent less time reading about the ages and stages of child development and more time tending to their own needs as adults? As the oldest in his working-class family, my partner, Bob, was privy to some of the pleasurable rituals that his parents indulged in. His mother, who worked as a housekeeper for much of her life, participated in weekly card nights around the kitchen table with her sisters and friends. Highballs were plentiful, off-color jokes abounded, and children were momentarily forgotten. Bob’s father, who worked in a factory during the day, played the drums at night. When he was younger there were even engage-ments at local clubs for his trio.

It’s not that my parents lacked for friends, but the tenor of their interactions were different. There were nightly phone calls to my father requesting advice about the stock market, business opportunities, or healthcare decisions. My mother fielded calls and occasional crisis visits from women friends seeking a sympathetic ear about a nasty divorce or an unmanageable depression. For myself, I was fascinated by a bevy of visiting aunts and uncles who would inevitably arrive in New York City with restaurant reservations in place, theatre tickets in hands, and a full calendar of social events planned. Closer to home I was intrigued and intimidated by my mother’s sister and her husband who, unlike my own parents, openly displayed their mutual attraction as well as their fierce disagreements, something my parents considered unacceptable. I grew up understanding little about how people live through passionate attachments to each other or the world, let alone how they let off steam and played together.

Revengefully, now as I try to help my parents manage, I want to tell them that all of their conscientious care—their attempts to shield me from discomforting emotions and to provide me with armor against a threatening world—was of no avail. But I don’t. All my diplomas didn’t protect me from illness or knowledge of death. Nor m y fat h e r ’ s k e e p e r n 53

has my respectable income made me a stranger to personal unhappiness. Above all I want to tell them that I was right about the future and they were wrong. But I don’t. I know that to say this would be to say the obvious, to cruelly underline the lessons that their final years are teaching them only too well.

Instead I focus on taking charge of my own memories, and the possibilities of editing them in fresh ways. Perhaps this interest is simply an artifact of time. For, until the recent hospital dramas, I have consciously sought to reassure myself that childhood is securely anchored in the early years, a fixed and knowable entity whose difficult emotions would not intrude upon the present. Through countless hours of therapy as a young adult living on my own, I had gained sufficient distance to cautiously look back at the homeland I had just left and to construct a story that would contain my feelings and explain who I had become. I seldom saw my parents during this period, and, when I did, the meetings were strained and uncomfortable. The psychological journey that I was engaged in seemed to require complete physical separation. I declared a moratorium on direct contact as I struggled to unpack the baggage that I had brought with me from childhood into