My Father's Keeper: The Story of a Gay Son and His Aging Parents (21 page)

In the end, however, Dr. M proves too much a part of that world.

Although my father’s analysis concluded before I was an adolescent, his work with Dr. M did not enable him to treat me with equanimity.

The heat of our relationship reflects the intensity of our mutual attachment. My father acts as an emotional lightning rod, attracting the electricity that breaks through the storm clouds almost always 134 n jonathan g. silin

hanging in the air. The resulting sparks set off countless brushfires that require all my mother’s mediating skills to keep them from spreading out of control.

Not shy about my gayness, at least in the therapeutic setting, I am soon telling Dr. M about my feelings for other men and the pleasures I find in their arms. He listens carefully and thoughtfully. At first he seems to be the patient, nonjudgmental father I long for. Unfortunately, he soon reveals himself to be the father I know so well, the father with confused boundaries and overwrought identifications. He tells me that my father loved to hold me as a baby, that I was a particularly warm and responsive infant, a source of physical and emotional sustenance for him. How am I, a young gay man who has experienced short crushes on peers but already fallen deeply in love with two older men, one a father of a young child himself, to make sense of Dr. M’s confidence? Is he telling me that he knows from my early life that I have the makings of a responsive partner, someone capable of providing great satisfactions to another man? Is he telling me that my father is the source of my erotic longings and the later desire to reexperience early pleasures?

In part, I know Dr. M speaks the truth about my relationship with my father. After all, I have my own deep reservoir of bodily memories

—riding atop my father’s shoulders to watch soldiers coming home from World War II, sitting on his lap as he ate dinner long after we children had finished, lying in bed with him at night when I couldn’t sleep. Nonetheless, I am unready to hear Dr. M’s report from the past.

News of my father’s sensuality contaminates my blossoming sexuality.

Filled with my own complex and ambivalent emotions, I do not want to hear about my father’s desires and my role in their fulfillment. I certainly do not want to think of my father’s connection to me as erotically charged, nor am I experienced enough to understand that the sensual enjoyment he received in holding me might be distinct from a specifically sexual one.

Now I imagine that my father, against the male stereotype of the 1940s, may have permitted himself some of the same pleasures that m y fat h e r ’ s k e e p e r n 135

women report who breastfeed their children and are otherwise physically bonded with them. Indeed, it is hard to imagine otherwise. I recall the discomfort of my undergraduate students, especially the males, when I suggest the sensuous pleasures, tinged with incestuous and potentially homoerotically charged desires, that might be enjoyed by parent and young child. Were my own feelings of discomfort any different from those of my students? It is easier for them, I imagine, to deny these possibilities or to entertain them as theoretically interesting ideas in a classroom than it was for me, trapped as I was in a therapist’s office with someone who could validate the specificity of my father’s feelings. Experiencing great difficulty breaking away from my parents, I did not need to be reminded of the ties that bound me to them. Dr. M insisted on speaking the language of attachment and connection while I tried to speak the language of separation and divorce. How could I ever trust him to keep my own confidences when he willingly revealed my father’s?

Dr. M made what I still consider to be a daring therapeutic move by revealing my father’s sensuous attachment to me. It is also one that failed, if judged only by my immediate decision not to return for further help. In the succeeding years, however, I managed to transform the discomfort caused by Dr. M’s maneuver into a guiding set of questions that I continue to explore in my work as an early childhood educator: What kind of knowledge can children tolerate about their teachers, teachers about their students, children about their parents?

How does this tolerance change over time? I am drawn to teach what is most personally difficult for me. In the end, I believe that good teachers, like effective researchers, use the classroom to explore that which confounds and troubles them. How boring it would be to do otherwise.

Through most of my adult life, I maintain a carefully modulated distance from my parents. This seems the best way to protect myself from their emotional intrusiveness and the porous boundaries that make separation so difficult. Like many gay people, this means that I live in a glass closet for a very long time. My parents and I simply 136 n jonathan g. silin

agree not to acknowledge that I am gay. Then in the mid-1970s, with my increasing political activity, I decide to shatter this closet with an official announcement about my sexual orientation.

The dining room—in which our later conversations about their care and my father’s tirades about his loss of control will take place

—is thick with emotion. There are no raised voices, however, or obvious shock expressed by my parents. This interview is about transforming unarticulated into articulated knowing. My parents are far from stupid. They know their children well. Besides, I am too old, and too much the black sheep, for them to think that being gay is a temporary stage in my life. For my parents, the moment seems to be about sadness and loss. My father expresses fears for my safety, for the potential prejudice that I may experience. Perhaps he is remembering the anti-Semitism he endured in his own childhood.

My mother’s most potent protest is to decry the fact that I will not have children. Although I am not sure if they feel bereft for me or for themselves, this disappointment is understandable. After all, they have built their own lives around their children. At that moment, my parents cannot seem to separate what they know about me as an individual from the way that gay people are so often characterized—as selfish and self-absorbed because of the absence of children in their lives. I remind my parents of my work as a nursery school teacher. At best, they see this vocation as an inadequate substitute for raising children of one’s own. They counter with embarrassing comments about the genes that will be lost if I decide not to reproduce. I am left speechless by their hubris, and the conversation ends.

In retrospect what strikes me about this conversation is the combination of fear and sorrow that drives my parents’ response. These are not new themes, and perhaps it is only the baldness with which they are stated that takes me aback. After all, protectiveness, the worry that I am somehow vulnerable and will be the target of physical or emotional harm, preoccupied my parents throughout my childhood. The grief that I will not reproduce is an iteration of the elitism that has characterized their approach to my upbringing from the be-m y fat h e r ’ s k e e p e r n 137

ginning. However my parents understand their family’s special tal-ents, they are now endangered because there may be no grandchil-dren, at least from this son. They are caught up in a set of narrow, dare I say narcissistic, ideas about how one generation lives through and influences another. In the end, there are no questions about intimacy, love, and the gay world in which I live: No curiosity about what being gay means to me, only statements about what it means to them.

It is at about this time, 1978, that I go to see Dr. M for the last time.

In 1963 he had opened a door just wide enough for me to peer into a space where my father and my infant self could be seen in mutual rap-ture. Back then actually entering such a room felt intolerably threatening. Only fourteen years later do I feel secure enough to visit Dr. M, now ostensibly for professional advice.

We meet at Dr. M’s office in the highly respected therapeutic nursery school that he helped to found. Having spent ten years teaching young children, I want to refocus my career, and Dr. M, a colleague of Anna Freud, seems an appropriate person with whom to discuss possible study at her clinic in London. In retrospect, the answer to my specific question—how will my application as an openly gay man be received?—is obvious. Even then, nearly ten years after Stonewall, my professional pride is loath to accept exclusion from what my educator colleagues judge to be the seat of therapeutic knowledge. My very presence in Dr. M’s office is paradoxical. I am eager to proclaim my mental health and seek approval from someone whose earlier remarks, at best, were a clinical error in judgment and, at worst, left me deeply disturbed.

My question makes the usually confident Dr. M uncomfortable.

Perhaps it is that I have forced him to articulate the popular clichés and biases that have dominated the psychoanalytic world until recently and announce a professional judgment on my life that causes him difficulty. I would like to think that Dr. M had not succumbed to the worst excesses of analytic thought and had approved of the 1973

American Psychological Association decision to excise homosexuality from its official list of psychiatric disorders.

138 n jonathan g. silin

I cannot know where Dr. M himself stands on the subject of homosexuality. He doesn’t say, and the silence following my question is long and palpable. When he does respond, his words are smooth and skillfully crafted: “I think you might be more comfortable elsewhere.

There are many places to train that would be more receptive to your application”—but the emotions are less polished and more jagged.

Now it is I who have opened the door and Dr. M who has firmly closed it. I have the answer to my question as well as his pronouncement on my suitability to serve among the analytic elite. I leave feeling strangely content.

Ironically, when I turn to one of the few openly gay psychiatrists of that era to continue the conversation cut short in Dr. M’s office, I once again encounter my father. In our very first session, this psychiatrist confides the he grew up in the same small city in western Pennsylvania as my father and remembers him well. He proceeds to ask after my father’s five siblings by name, cannily characterizing each one with the briefest comments. I find no comfort in this familiarity, with this blurred, dare I say contaminated, fault line. Much to the doctor’s consternation, I terminate the relationship immediately after solving my professional quandaries.

During these and succeeding years Bob and I attend the requisite family functions at the same time as I manage to sustain a necessary emotional space between my parents and myself. Then, with their first hospitalizations in the mid-1990s, it is no longer possible to do this. Perhaps the vulnerable body is what puts the emotional issues in perspective. Shockingly at first, all modesty falls by the wayside as well. Detailed reports about food consumed and left untouched on the tray, body fluids collected and resisting collection, weight gained and lost, preoccupy us all. I know more than I want to know about their bodily functions, just as I am forced to learn my way around their Byzantine financial arrangements. I struggle to master the multiple bank accounts, insurance polices, and safety deposit boxes that make it all but impossible to grasp the real limits of their resources. Attempting to keep track of the household expenses, I discover the daily m y fat h e r ’ s k e e p e r n 139

economies my mother makes to secret away small amounts of money

—the refusal to buy in quantity for fear they will not live to use the products, the stacks of outdated newspaper coupons promising fifty cents off three cans of soup, the down-to-the-penny reports she extracts from whoever does the shopping. All this laying bare of the practical arrangements by which they stitch together their lives is poignant and painful. I do what is required, knowing that, in the interest of preserving a modicum of my parents’ dignity, some mysteries are better preserved than unearthed. Whether it is simply the passage of time, the years of therapy, or learning to write through my experience, none of my newly acquired insights is as threatening as the revelation offered by Dr. M so long ago.

Knowing much about the dailyness of my parents’ lives leads me to make new comparisons. I want to replicate their best qualities and rewrite their less endearing traits. Bob teases me when I worry about the future at the expense of enjoying the present, “You’re getting more like your father every day.” He wants to continue with our plan to rent a house in the south of France from a writer friend even though I have suddenly lost all my consulting contracts and will come back to no work. He is used to living on the financial edge; the house is a bargain, a dream fulfilled. “How can we not go?” he asks. When I am reluctant to see other people, to give up a weekend of work and privacy to enjoy time at the beach with friends, Bob chides, “Be careful, or otherwise you will end up a recluse like your mother.” I give in to his more social nature and am happy for the decision. Bob sees my parents in me and he is mostly right. I am more readily fooled by the huge dis-crepancies in our outward life circumstances and it isn’t easy for me or for them to see the underlying patterns of behavior that connect us.

Connecting patterns. Oddly enough, my most recent therapist, Dr. C, an openly gay man, inherited the office at the therapeutic nursery school where Dr. M and I talked in 1978. This link between Dr. C

and Dr. M is reinforced when Dr. C shares with me a recent dream he has had about the office. Here Dr. C displays some of his own therapeutic daring, a willingness to use himself to provoke my own reflec-140 n jonathan g. silin

tion. I don’t know if Dr. C actually met or worked with Dr. M. It is sufficiently complicated for me to know that Dr. C has sat where Dr. M once sat, the same place that decades earlier Dr. M may have thought about my father, his infant son, and even my grandfather. For just as Dr. C has listened to my family saga, and helped me to edit and reimagine my stories, so must Dr. M have heard my father out. Dr. M

was undoubtedly the recipient of emotions intended for, and shaped by, my father’s relationship with his father, Nathan Silin, for whom I was named. Queer genealogies.