My Father's Keeper: The Story of a Gay Son and His Aging Parents (6 page)

Then, he counseled me to take up a sport and to attend Saturday afternoon football games as a way to lift my spirits and participate in the larger social world. Now, I exercise regularly, moving over the years from distance running and tennis, far too hard on middle-aged knees, to swimming and biking. I try to humor my father by reminding him of the wisdom of his own advice and the irony that it is I who has become the sports enthusiast. He refuses to accompany me on my trip back to a time when I could see no future and felt constantly betrayed by my own body and its desires for other men. I think that he should gain satisfaction from knowing that I have learned a lesson from him, but he doesn’t. I think that I should understand how so many illnesses have lead to a total self-absorption that excludes reminiscences, but I don’t.

Both the past and the future are territories that my father no longer travels to. He judges me, and other caregivers, by what we can do for him today, not by what we may have meant to him yesterday or the promise that we embody for tomorrow. It’s no longer possible to appeal to a shared history, to trust that has been built over time. Betrayal is as recent as the last telephone conversation, a refusal of consent to an ill-conceived financial scheme or to call the doctor about a minor discomfort. As my father’s body crumbles, so does the architec-ture of time that once supported it.

At night the scene in Diane’s classroom haunts me. I dream that I am a student teacher who has been asked to settle the children before a group meeting. I am unable to get their attention. They ignore me just as they ignored Diane. I wonder at the continuing impact of my days in hard-pressed urban schools. After all, I have seen it before—

children out of control, some needing therapy or psychotropic drugs, some needing only a more meaningful curriculum; teachers in tears, unable to maintain order, let alone live up to their ideals. But in the m y fat h e r ’ s k e e p e r n 29

past my parents did not follow me into the classroom with quite the same persistence.

As a young teacher, I learned to recognize the subtle ways in which my personal history influenced my work with children. I tried hard not to project onto them my own childish needs or to demand from them satisfactions more appropriately found in my adult life. Now that the claims of my parents have become so great and my self-doubts about how to manage them so large, my emotions have become more tangled again. The dreams of unruly children and my inability to control them tell the story of my unruly parents and my failed attempts to bring order to their lives.

Diane and I live in different worlds and have very different relationships to our charges. Like Diane, however, I must find a way to contain the anxiety that makes my father unmanageable and worry about the impact of his behavior on those around him. I know what it is to be paralyzed, afraid of someone who is both more vulnerable and more out of control than I am. I beg the experts and rail against the doctors who withhold the more powerful drugs needed to subdue my father’s fears. I can only begin to imagine Diane’s frustration at the social-service bureaucracies that prevent Jamal from receiving his medications.

Our circumstances are not the same, but the underlying themes ruling Diane’s work with children and the care of my parents are similar. I want to be close enough to understand them but distanced enough so as not to absorb their anger and despair. I see this kind of commitment in the detached but mindful ways that Catherine and Stephanie respond to their students. I remember that, like them, I too can be tough in the morning, setting limits and accepting the hostile accusations that follow in their wake, and filled with appreciative laughter at night. The early childhood classroom is the first place where I became responsible for others and independent of my parents.

Now, as I make my weekly trips between Manhattan and my research site, it is teaching me further lessons about attachment and separation, loss and recuperation, the young and the very old.

3

The Future in Question

People don’t have to stop being children, they just have to be able to be adults as well. If we cultivate unbearable choices, we create impossible lives.

a da m p h i l l i p s ,
On Flirtation

Early childhood educators pride themselves on knowing about transitions. We are experts at convincing anxious parents to leave the classroom in the morning and at cajoling others to spend a few more minutes with a distressed child in need of their attention. Despite the chaos engendered by young children anxiously stuffing half-eaten lunches into backpacks, grasping library books and PTA notes while trailing extra sweaters behind them, at the end of the afternoon we try for one final moment in which our students review the day’s successes and failures. Endings are important to us. In between these events we have managed to get twenty-six rowdy first graders up to the art room and down to the gym, into math lessons and out of reading groups, onto the playground and back to the classroom just in time for music.

As a teacher educator I continue to help people make transitions—from other fields to education, from roles as parents to roles as teachers, from childhoods spent in traditional schools to more pro-31

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gressive settings, and the reverse. All of these changes have in turn been negotiated to help young children make the monumental shift from intimate, domestic worlds to disciplined, public spaces.

Despite my skills at assisting others, I am always unprepared for my own transition back to school each fall. In mid-August, as the days become cooler and shorter, I inevitably find myself scrambling to revive the writing projects, course outlines, and research proposals that have wilted in the heat of the summer sun. There still seems to be time even as I begin to relive that mixture of excitement and anxiety which as a child I anticipated the new school year with. And no matter what the outcome of my efforts, I always feel unready when September finally arrives.

In the late summer of 1998 the practical and emotional preparations for my return to work were interrupted by my mother’s increasingly anxious reports about my father’s extreme weakness and recurring moments of disorientation. Monitoring my parents care from a distance and taking into account their multiple health problems, I have tried not to act precipitously and to listen carefully for signs of critical changes. I fear that my own life may all too easily be subsumed by their many needs. I guard my energies as well so as not to squander them on false crises and to exhaust myself before the more serious, terminal events have begun.

On Sunday my mother asks when I will come to the city. Reminding her that I will be there on Tuesday, she says, “Good, because I need you.” For someone not given to direct demands on others, her words are startling. They signal that indeed something is seriously wrong.

On Monday morning, however, I conveniently “forget” the urgency of my mother’s words until the health aide who tends my father calls. Calm and competent, Marlene summarizes the situation, saying,

“He can’t go on this way.” Ten minutes later, when I tell my father that I have arranged a doctor’s appointment for later that morning, he tells me that he won’t go. He works hard to prove that he is not disoriented, knows the day of the week, and can recite details of a fa-m y fat h e r ’ s k e e p e r n 33

vorite nephew’s weekend visit and the list of medical specialists whom he is to see in the coming days; he insists that he has no time for another appointment.

My father and I are now plunged into a familiar game in which I am the judge of record, assessing the truth of his situation in a court of last resort. My father is determined, uncanny, and persuasive as he pleads his case by demonstrating his physical and psychological competency. The very skills that my father summons to his defense indicate the depth of his fear and desperation. They also indicate the continually shifting nature of power in our relationship. Although I have legal authority to make difficult decisions, he has the ability to inflict the anguish and pain of a helpless father pleading with his son.

Power is never unidirectional, but circulates between us. As our conversation ends, I ask my father to reconsider at the same moment as I make mental preparations to leave for New York.

Two hours later the call from the doctor tells me that my father has consented to be seen and is suffering from an infection and severe dehydration that require immediate hospitalization. My father accepts the antibiotics, ten dollars per pill (my parents’ antiquated health insurance does not include any drug coverage), promises to drink plenty of liquids, a physical impossibility due to prior throat radiation and surgery, and returns home. Steadfastly refusing the hospital, my father poses a direct challenge to medical authority and to me. I face moments like this with equanimity and with dread, confused by our changed relationship. He is the headstrong father I have always known, determined to assert his will at every turn, as well as the extremely vulnerable octogenarian who longs to be taken care of. I am the adult responsible for his care and the child who continues to want his approval.

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.