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

as deeply emotionally attuned and my mother as more distant and intellectual. Perhaps because I was more focused on what I felt they had done to me than on how they may have inadvertently harmed each other, I looked at their interactions solely in terms of roles. I saw them as having separate if mutually interdependent spheres of activity. When my mother returned to work in order to sup-plement my father’s income, I was completely blind to the fact that, like most other women, she was doing double shifts—one in the domestic world and another in the public. Even though they employed a housekeeper, if anything went wrong it was inevitably my mother’s fault. I did not grasp the domestic dynamics that might have been equally well described in the more politically charged terms of op-pressor and oppressed. I failed to understand the ways in which their relationship replicated traditional distributions of power and emotion in society.

After my mother’s first serious illness, there is a shift in this dynamic. Returning from the six-week hospital stay deeply depressed and withdrawn, my mother is now clearly unable to care for their apartment, to do the daily cooking and cleaning that has defined her life since retirement. In addition, my father’s severe spinal stenosis has affected his balance and he requires close, moment-to-moment monitoring. Our fiercest battles in those months are waged in the arena of domestic sovereignty since my mother refuses to acknowledge the extent of her own needs. Eventually she concedes that my father’s inability to walk unaided warrants more extensive help. For his part, my father begins to bond with the health aides as he recognizes that my mother cannot fulfill his personal needs. Unable to take on her traditional caregiving roles, my mother becomes something of a displaced person. Increasingly, my self-obsessed father treats her dismissively as a secondary character in the drama of his own survival.

And yet, slowly and painfully over a two-year period, my mother’s depression lifts. Making a connection with a particularly sympathetic m y fat h e r ’ s k e e p e r n 65

health aide, she is able to find a new role for herself—making doctors’

appointments and keeping the all-important weekly calendar, answering the phone, and maintaining contacts with the outside world.

As she begins to reposition herself in the domestic sphere, she comes back to life and into touch with her feelings. For the first time in decades, my mother is able to express genuine sadness, to enjoy a bit of humor, and to speak more realistically about her situation. She even learns to make some small claims for herself—telling my father, when I am present, that she does not like to be yelled at for unimportant reasons, that she wants to go out to a restaurant with a visiting relative, and that she will attend a family function that he refuses to go to.

My father continues to act out his patriarchal role with a vengeance. He is constantly critical, and my mother is always trying to please him. Now I understand their interactions as anything but atypical. It is as if all the illness and vulnerability has finally laid bare the gendered skeleton of their relationship. With my father’s emotions writ so large, what place can there have been for my mother’s desires? With her endless self-denial, how can he learn to curb his demanding ways? Finally, I am left to wonder what I gained and what I lost by not seeing the extent of his bullying and the depths of her self-abnegation. What do these changed perceptions tell me about myself, about the function of memory, and the childhood I thought I understood so well?

A year and a half after my father’s hospitalization for severe dehydration and the insertion of the gastronomy tube, much to everyone’s surprise, he comes back to life. Slowly I watch as he sheds the flat-tened and sanitized language with which he left the hospital. Increasingly his talk is punctuated by favorite Yiddish expressions, terms of childhood endearment, and the sounds of genuine laughter. And although both my parents have never lived in the past, as it is reported of some elderly, my father is now more willing to tell anecdotes about his family and to recall the impact on his life of historical events such 66 n jonathan g. silin

as the Great Depression. Feeling less vulnerable and more robust, he is able to look back, and this, ironically enough, allows me to stay anchored in the present.

Despite the definitive prognosis of his own doctors, my father continues to seek out the one medical expert who can explain with certainty the nature of his swallowing difficulty, know how to treat it, and assure him that he will eat again. Meanwhile, he sits at the dinner table while my mother and I have our food. He encourages us to eat more—my mother, because she has always been anemic and is now dangerously underweight, and me, because over the years that’s just become an immutable part of the family script. He is genuinely pleased to hear that the curried chicken is tasty and disappointed when I reject a second helping of mashed potatoes. We reminisce about the way that my mother used another orangey yellow ingre-dient, saffron, to flavor special dishes and even agree to disagree on whether he ever enjoyed spicy foods himself.

At times my father complains about the discomfort caused by his feeding tube. It irritates the skin, makes odd noises, and occasionally causes minor bleeding. As in so many other areas of his life, my father adjusts to discomforts that once would have been considered intolerable and sets his sights on increasingly modest accomplishments. He does not speak of missing my mother’s famous pot roast or of longing for the taste of her potato pancakes. More simply, he hopes one day to sip a glass of water or to drink a cup of tea without choking. I try to steer