My Father's Keeper: The Story of a Gay Son and His Aging Parents (5 page)

Catherine is one of these remarkable teachers. When I reach her classroom at 10:15 am, she is sitting on the floor in a large circle with her group of twenty-seven anxious five-year-olds. Upon arrival at school, the children have learned that a teacher in the next room will be late because of car problems. Subsequently, Catherine has overheard them theorizing about an explosion in the car and life-threatening injuries to Ms. Lewis. Six months pregnant, Catherine awkwardly shifts her body weight in an attempt to find a comfortable position, as she patiently walks through the steps of Ms. Lewis’s morning, from leaving her house and trying to start the car, to calling the 22 n jonathan g. silin

repair service and notifying the school that she will be late. No matter how many times Catherine reassures them, many children persist in their belief that a major catastrophe has occurred. Frustrated by the worried looks on the children’s faces, she calls on her assistant for help. The assistant draws an analogy between the sluggish car unable to start on the cold winter morning and a sleepy child who is reluctant to get out of bed for school. The children are impervious to the charm of this explanation that only seems to add to their confusion.

As I watch this group of young children try to make sense of the morning’s events, I am reminded of the conversation with my father on the previous Saturday afternoon about his life insurance. Like my father, the children need everything spelled out. The story must be specific, concrete, and without sidebars. It must be repeated over and over. I am envious of the way Catherine attends both to the quality of her practical explanations and to the underlying fears that are preventing the children from hearing them. It’s not the specific issue of Ms. Lewis’s car that is important. After all, they could be discussing Chantal’s move to a new apartment, the birth of Ba-shey’s new baby brother, or the death of Fluffy, the classroom guinea pig. Rather, it is the threats to our survival, posed by dangers both internal and external, that drive their unquenchable anxieties. The children are exquisitely attuned to the potential separations, losses, or displacements in the stories they hear and the events they experience themselves.

Catherine listens to the children with intensity, her insistence that everyone who desires may speak signaling her respect for their concerns. It is the same way I want to hear my father’s questions, without succumbing to the anxieties that fuel his interactions with me.

Like Catherine, I want to respond to specific concerns as well as to the emotional undercurrents that flow beneath the surface. A literary theorist might say that we need to attend to both the
fabula,
or timeless plight—human jealousy, thwarted ambition—and to the
sjuzet,
or particular plot in which it is embedded. A kind of double consciousness is required at all times.

Catherine also knows when she has hit a wall and new strategies m y fat h e r ’ s k e e p e r n 23

are needed. After a final round of speakers and with signs of lingering uncertainty among them, she announces the end of the conversation.

At the same time, she promises to invite Ms. Lewis to join the group in the afternoon to tell the story in her own words and reassure the children that she is unharmed. The kindergartners are then asked to refocus their attention on a short reading lesson before going off to work on their own. There are plenty of blocks, a large dramatic play area, and art materials should they want to rehearse the car difficulties during the course of the morning.

It feels more challenging to absorb and then redirect my parents’

anxieties. I wish that they too had access to vehicles other than language to express their feelings and to represent their ideas. Catherine, nevertheless, models a willingness to listen, a firmness when the conversation has reached an end, and an invitation to continue it at another time that I will not forget.

Stephanie is another teacher whose calm skill impresses me. I reach her classroom of twenty-eight second graders just after morning work time, when the children assemble to share their accomplishments. Everyone is seated on the rug except for Devon, who appears to be looking for something in the writing area. Stephanie’s requests for him to join the group are pointedly ignored. Without raising her voice, she finally says, “I’ll count to three and then I want you with everyone else.” I worry that this strategy will backfire and lead to a direct confrontation. I remember many such failures from my own teaching career, such as the time I discovered Ezra and Kenny hiding behind the large hollow building blocks in the school lobby. Resistant to authority, they adamantly refused to come out just as a tour group of prospective parents led by the director of admissions stopped to talk about the benefits of progressive education. Or the time in the crowded cubby room, where children were putting on their outdoor clothing, when I was so enraged by Michael’s ceaseless teasing of others that I held him tightly and shook him far too vigorously. Scared by my rage, he immediately threatened to tell his mother. It was only Roger, the streetwise six-year-old, who could deflate Michael’s threat 24 n jonathan g. silin

and bring me to my senses when he observed, “That man don’t listen to nobody’s mamma.”

So when Devon fails to join the group after the count of three, I am relieved to see that Stephanie can simply walk over to the writing area, take him by the hand, and bring him to the rug. Throughout this encounter the rest of the children wait quietly and without undo concern for Devon’s difficulties. They do not take advantage of the moment to cause other problems and Stephanie herself never loses control of the situation.

After my visits to Stephanie and Catherine’s classrooms, I stop to chat with them. The broad range of emotions they display surprises me. Stephanie laughs long and hard over the pseudoadolescent essay that one of the eight-year-old girls has written about the history of friendships in her peer group. Catherine is in a fury about the latest administrative directive that will prevent her from taking informal class trips. Although they are very different teachers, Stephanie and Catherine share a deep appreciation of their young students’ difficult lives at the same time as they do not get drawn into emotional entanglements with them. Their lessons about clear boundaries, which ultimately help their students to become effective learners, are what I will take with me at the end of the day. These boundaries, often hard to enforce, enable the children to feel safe in the classroom. I know that I will need to be as steadfast if my parents are to trust me when their own emotions run amok.

When I enter Diane’s classroom just after lunch, she is reading aloud to her twenty-two first graders from a book about Michael Jordan, part of a celebration of Black History Month. As I scan the room for a seat, I cannot help but notice the physical disorder. Books are strewn around the carpeted library area, plastic foods have been dumped on the floor in the dress-up corner, and a game of lotto sits partially open on a table. Not finding an extra chair, I lean against the radiator at the back of the room. Within a few minutes I see the reason for the housekeeping difficulties. While most of the class is listening to Diane, Ja-m y fat h e r ’ s k e e p e r n 25

mal, a short, compact boy, is wandering from area to area, pulling educational materials off the shelves and leaving them where they fall.

Diane pointedly ignores this disturbing behavior. When Jamal draws near to me and begins to flip through a stack of photographs from a recent class trip, I naively take this as an invitation to social contact.

But my conversational overture is immediately rejected. Leaving the photographs scattered atop the adjacent radiator, Jamal races across the room, opens the door to the hallway, and yells at some passing children. Now sitting on the doorjamb, half in and half out of the classroom, he physically declares his marginal status.

Fifteen minutes into my observation, Diane has finished reading the story of Michael Jordan and is desperately trying to launch a math lesson that requires the class to work in small groups. Several of the children have begun to fight with each other and to openly resist her instruction. Meanwhile, she has pulled Jamal from the doorway back into the classroom. Finally, as he continues to circle around the room, Diane uses the loudspeaker connecting the classroom with the office to request that “security” come to get him. The secretary replies that no one is available to help her at the moment and that Mrs. William-son, the social worker, is also at lunch. Jamal, hearing this conversation, along with the rest of the class, starts yelling, “I don’t want security. I don’t want security. I won’t go.” Faced with this threat and fearful of being sent home, Jamal eventually takes a seat at one of the tables and begins to play distractedly with the math materials.

Jamal’s behavior, the active resistance of the other children, and Diane’s inability to control the class make me want to flee. I am overwhelmed by the evident distress of this sixty-something woman who is being scapegoated by a group of angry six-year-olds. We stand off to the side and I see the tears in her eyes. Although it goes against my better judgment to become involved in an extended conversation before the children, I cannot help but listen. Diane tells me that along with Jamal there are three others in her class whose doctors have pre-scribed Ritalin to calm their behavior. Because of difficulties in filing the Medicaid claims, only one of the four is actually receiving his 26 n jonathan g. silin

medication regularly. Diane is in an impossible situation and woefully unprepared to manage it. She begs me for suggestions. An intruder in the room, I feel it presumptuous to offer advice. At the same time, remaining silent feels equally inauthentic, an act of supreme bad faith.

Diane’s story and Jamal’s life are narratives born out of social injustice. They speak to a history in which material resources and cultural capital are inequitably distributed, most frequently along racial lines. Oddly, however, the emotions that Diane and Jamal elicit in me resonate with experiences from a very different world. It seems im-probable to write on the same page about Jamal, an African American boy of six growing up in poverty, and my father, a white, Jewish man of eighty-seven living on the Upper East Side of Manhattan.

Even as I read that Jamal’s neighborhood was once the seat of a thriving Jewish community, I know that my parents are themselves several generations removed from the immigrant experience, let alone the experience of black families who have emigrated from the American south. Even as I know that racism and anti-Semitism may stem from similar roots, and that both have lethal consequences for their victims, I know that the histories of Jews and African Americans are very different.

It is impossible to equate the lives of families living in deep poverty with the lives of my parents. Yet it does seem possible that the demands Jamal places on Diane and those my father places on me give rise to similar feelings of frustration, anger, and helplessness. It is not happenstance that Jamal and my father share some of the same medications. Jamal races about the classroom pulling supplies from the shelves, poking at children, and ignoring his teacher. At times my father sends a sea of faxes, accuses me of stealing his money, threatens lawsuits, and exhausts everyone with whom he comes in contact. Like Jamal, when my father’s dementia is active, nothing enters his brain.

Rational arguments carry no weight. It is impossible to get through to him. At these times, however, unlike Jamal, my father does not seem to fear the authority of the security guard or the wrath of an angry parent. This has unfortunate consequences for me, since I have un-m y fat h e r ’ s k e e p e r n 27

doubtedly assumed the role of security guard in his life, keeping both external and internal threats at bay. It is I who do battle with the psychiatrist when he fails to understand the depths of my father’s dementia and its toll on those responsible for his care. It is more desperation than courage that leads me to fight for what both he and I ultimately need—a modicum of control over his overarching anxiety.

I too am the court of last resort with the terrible power to remove him from the familiar world and place him in an institution.

Jamal, on the other hand, does not appear to have strong and effective advocates to secure the Ritalin that he needs, nor is anyone available to help him regain control at school. Growing up in a world in which politicians are pushing for more and more testing and standardized, skill-driven curricula, Jamal’s present life is being sacrificed for a future that may or may not come to pass. Perhaps I am unduly sensitive to the problem of time, but I worry that concerns about employment in the years ahead distract immediate attention from the Medicaid system that fails to fill Jamal’s prescription and the social world that makes such a prescription necessary. I want the same thing for the children in Jamal’s neighborhood as I want for my parents in Manhattan, a present that contains the richness of their history and the sense of a meaningful future. Caring for my parents, I see what it is like to be locked in the moment, devoid of all connections backward or forward. They can only think from day to day, their calendar marked by visits to various doctors and visits from other healthcare personnel—therapists, nurses, and caseworkers. Given the narrowing of their physical powers and the heightening of their medical vulnerability, they no longer act as if they can shape the future. They don’t look forward. Events that once might have been a source of pleasure, plans for a Thanksgiving dinner or the purchase of an apartment by my niece, are assessed only for the potential risks they hold. The future is filled with anxiety rather than with potential moments to define the self and to leave one’s mark on the world.

What has surprised me most is that my parents’ inability to look forward is balanced by an equally daunting resistance to looking back.

28 n jonathan g. silin

I remind my father, the former high school football player and college basketball star, of the benefits of regular exercise and encourage him to go outside more often. As I deliver my lecture I recall the way he would deliver the same lecture to me when I first went away to school.