Trying to get from Ecksville to Rimpleton to visit my fucking dad and step-mother. [Trying in the sense of trying to make future arrangements to do so. (These bracketed notes are all after-the-fact, for clarity.)] She’s a dried up old bitch who I wish I had the guts to call on her shit. We were sitting in a restaurant this past week (they had come up to visit) and we were talking about Persis and Burt and I coming down to visit them some time in July, and my Dad offered (at our prompting) to watch Burt for us while we went to see a play (Rimpleton is, as you may know, home to the State Theater Convocation), and Babs clamped down on that idea like a steel trap, and even when my dad insisted that he would be okay (he wasn’t insisting with any backbone; it was like he was a whimpering child and she was his mom telling him know (I meant to write no, but for whatever reason, that homophone came out, and under the terms of my editing standards, I must leave it)), she kept saying, “Not this first time, Teddy,” and it was damn fucking clear that she meant it, even though she was (and he was cooperating) keeping up appearances of being civil. They say they never fight, but looking at that interchange it’s impossible for me to imagine how that’s possible. What, does he just give up everything he wants because she says no?

That’s what I’m afraid of with Persis…but I can’t let go of the Dad and Babs thing yet, because I’ve just come off of Amtrak’s and Greyhound’s website, trying to find ways of getting down there that don’t involve driving with Burt in the car for two and a half hours, which is a major undertaking at this point.

I hate that fucking bitch. You know, sometimes, she surprises me -- I have said in the past that she never ceases to surprise me, but know…I meant to write now…I see that that surprise is the same kind of surprise I experienced when I went to the abstinence conference last Fall (did I tell you about that? [(Sexual) Abstinence Education Conference for script research.]) where I was blindsided by the humanity and goodnaturedness of these people whose point of view I despise on paper. In fact, of course she surprises me in that sense; why should I be insensitive to the human side of her? But the fact is that she runs this life, this tight ship, she runs my dad, and I oscillate between thinking that the reason he lets her is because at heart, he really doesn’t want the things that I imagine she is preventing him from having [e.g., time with his kids, grandkids, etc.] badly enough to protest and thinking that he’s just spineless. Why don’t I write them an honest email that blows apart the fiction that I’m maintaining by not telling them what I think of them? Being civil is such a constraint on honesty. I guess that’s what it’s supposed to be.

So on the other hand, they come up, supposedly to spend time with Burt, whom they haven’t seen in six months since they went off to their pied-a-terre in Paraiso (and screw you for ever having lived there) and we meet them for lunch and they come back to our house and Burt starts doing his thing, crawling around and exploring the house, and they just sit out on the fucking patio playing with the cat. I mean, what do they expect, that Burt is going to put on his Sunday best and come outside and sit and chat with them? My dad gradually relaxed and became more expressive over the course of the twenty-four hours, at the end of which he finally had the initiative to come out and offer to watch Burt [That is, during this proposed future occasion of our visit to Rimpleton.], when Babs clamps down on him. Why does it take so fucking long for my blood to come to a boil about this? Why don’t I jump in and say, “Shut up you desiccated old hag (you know, (I think I’ve told you) my dad once shared with me that he and Babs don’t have sex very much; again, the Persis comparison comes up), why don’t you let him do what he wants?”

I should dictate terms. I should stop letting them tell us the terms under which we are going to see them and say that I can’t afford to be that flexible anymore; that it’s time they start molding their schedule around us.

What really makes me burn is that, at dinner on Tuesday night (they were here Tues. lunch through Wed. breakfast) Babs lets out that (and my dad wasn’t listening at the time; I don’t know what he would have done if he had heard this, probably nothing) my dad doesn’t think he’s going to live very much longer. (!!!) This doesn’t surprise me. I have wondered the same thing for the same reasons: his genetics. His mom died when he was sixteen, and his dad died when he (my dad) was in his thirties so that must have made my granddad mid to late sixties probably, which my dad is dawning on. So he’s trying to take care of himself, exercising every day. Meanwhile, every time he goes on a cruise (which he does one to two times a year) he goes on this…he sends me all this information about how to get ahold of him and where his will is and all that. My grandfather died while on a cruise through the Panama Canal…which incidentally is where my dad’s last cruise was, when I noted that his anxiety was especially high. Grandpa Bobo died at the Coco Solo hospital. I remember that factoid; the rest – or most of it – is a blur.

My dad, if confronted with any of the evidence of his subconscious working [i.e. anxiety around cruises, and esp. ones through the Panama Canal.], seems neither fazed by it nor acknowledging of it; as if he acknowledges the school of thought that says there is any such thing [That is, such thing as a subconscious.] but privately believes that he is not possessed of one and feels no conflict about this. He denies any of it so coolly that I almost believe him; it is one of the things that routinely shakes my private assessment of his inner workings: how reliably and ably he seems unimpressed or –affected by those ideas.

So here’s Babs saying that my dad thinks he is going to die soon. And of course you will want to know how I reacted. Desperation: this sense that I want to take advantage of the time that I have, this fear that something will be left unsaid. And…hard to own up to…relief. The money that I’ll get. Not billions, but at least half a mil, I think, based on the insurance policy that my sister and I will share the proceeds of upon his death. And not having to deal with this meshugas about Babs. I have this fantasy of honoring my dad’s memory by treating her well after he is gone, but I wonder whether I really will. I like to think that I will, but I probably will succumb to the human pettiness that I would rather pretend I am not subject to…like my dad and his nonexistent subconscious. (I’ve been going back and adding, subtracting words here of there for clarity or emphasis. Like ‘nonexistent’ in the last sentence. Added after the period. Sorry. I’m bad.)

And I’ve been thinking a lot about my dad’s choices in the light of my feelings about Persis. I really am afraid that I will never feel sexy again. I will never feel naked and unadulterated sexual desire for anyone, and I will never have the good fortune to feel that someone feels that about me. And I will never be blessed to have a wife whom I respect and value like some of the women that I have known, whom I value like I value my closest friends. Granted, there are ways that Persis serves me which, to acknowledge them fully (which I do on occasion to her) would be to acknowledge my own deep flawedness; whereas, my best friends make me feel like I’m perfect even in my imperfections. Persis completes me in certain meaningful ways. But the problem is that I don’t think she duplicates me in other important…or any important ways. What I mean is that…like the sex thing. I feel like, given a partner who is in touch with themselves and at ease about expressing sexual desire, I’m a really good lover (my mother, believe it or not, once said that about me, that I’d be an excellent lover – an out of the ordinary thing to admit perhaps, but when she said it, it was in the context of acknowledging, I don’t know, an attunedness to sensual stimuli that is an important quality in a lover. Don’t know if this is clear. What I’m trying to…no, shouldn’t veer off of that so quickly. But these qualities that my mom was, I think, identifying in me, in the same way she would say that I’d make, perhaps, a good lawyer, with an appreciative and admiring and definitely parental (I’m trying to say that I don’t remember feeling like she was saying anything inappropriate when she said this; it struck me as something that a parent might say to a child, and that, most importantly, that I agreed with, for the same reasons as she had for saying it in the first place), and that these qualities are what Persis herself lacks and what makes our sexual relationship so old-open-fizzy-water…flat. So she doesn’t duplicate those things. Or my sense of humor. We don’t really laugh about the same things in the way that I do with my close friends. We laugh about things. But not in the way that I do with my…here’s that word again…mother. Persis jokes acidly that maybe I should have married her. And the truth is I wish I had, though not her specifically, but someone exactly like my mother, who just wasn’t my mother. Who was my age and attractive…not that my mother isn’t. I recently looked at pictures of her when she first married my dad and when I was first born. And I swear to God…I never realized that my mom was as hot as she was when she was my age until I got to that age. Strange how that works.

So I’m afraid that my relationship with Persis is like my dad’s relationship with Babs. That I’m in it simply because I’m too spineless to get out of it, and that maybe I deserve it because I’m so spineless. That anyone who, seeing frankly all the warning signs and limitations of such a relationship, would go ahead into it, deserves what he gets. And then I try and justify it by saying that I can’t imagine not having had Burt, but certainly that’s as self-fulfilling as an argument gets. So… I wonder if my dad is in this stricture of a relationship because he feels like he deserves it for leaving his family.

What’s so weird about that is that I can’t match the boldness of that move [i.e., my dad leaving his family.] (and I mean bold in a morally neutral sense; I can think of it both as positively bold (leaving a relationship in which one has the insight to see he is never going to be happy although it may be very painful to do so and may cause pain to others, but what example is he setting for his children if he doesn’t?) and close-mindedly stupid (someone as seemingly unaware of his own subconscious as my dad is, and as I suspect he has always been, though I fantasize about him not being so in the moment he left his family, cannot have decided on divorce and leaving his family from a particularly thoughtful position, especially when the reason that I’ve been told was that he was critically wounded by the fact that my mom had had an affair.))

I can’t decide who my dad is, who I want him to be. If he’s the bold guy who acts with insight to achieve a greater happiness though it leave destruction in its wake, why can’t I do the same? And if he’s the same guy he is today I can only conclude that he left us and my mom because he was too numbskulled psychologically to explore a more complex and certainly reflexively painful (that line about Persis and my own imperfections? Apparently, the affair was instantiated by a lot that my dad was and wasn’t doing that he would not own up to or explore…though of course that’s my mom talking, so she has her bias, no doubt) truth that might yet keep his family together.

Then I look at all this Christian nonsense out in the world today and wonder if a family is really worth saving. Sometimes I want to destroy mine if only to deal a blow to this idea of the blissful Biblical family. I hate being a member of this demographic. I never intended to be a part of it, nor wanted to; the young suburban straight-laced family, I mean, not the Christian part.
So who is my dad? Can I discover by asking him? I’m afraid of what he’d say. I’m afraid that this frustratingly complex, gemini man I’m imagining him to maybe be will be dissolved by the simplicity of his denial of any subconscious motives and that I will be left with what he says as the truth. I don’t know if I like who he is. Maybe that is what I am saying. I love him, and I enjoy him a lot a lot of the time. But when the truth comes out about who he is… I would much rather imagine him as this dark complex figure…much the way I would like to imagine myself…as opposed to the simple nuclear father that I am becoming. Thank you, that’s it…can I have a different life, please?

Happy Father’s Day. I’m in my house in Ecksville, amid a slew of opened but not emptied boxes, in a corner of my office, trying not to focus on all the work I have to do to feel settled, which work will not even come close to being completed before I will feel pressured to start being productive with my writing, which means that…I don’t know. It feels like a long time before I’ll feel settled, and that really eats at me.

I don’t have anything to do.

I am not a productive member of society.

I feel worthless.

I feel awful for feeling that way because of course raising my son is both valuable work and…well, it’s valuable work, and why doesn’t the time I spend doing that satisfy me? Yesterday I started to feel so intensely unstimulated. I was trailing Burt around while Persis did the unpacking…that’s the other thing. I am colossally bad at the whole moving thing: packing, unpacking, arranging rooms. I just want it all to disappear from one house, appear in the other house, and do so in an aesthetically pleasing fashion. Instead, I am constantly disappointed and frustrated that it actually requires input from me. Persis and I have started getting in this circular conversation where she will want my input on…say, how the bedroom is arranged, and I will only be able to tell her what I think is wrong with it. And it’s not that I can’t, don’t see that I’m not being constructive; it’s just that I don’t know what is going to make the room look better, I only am able to identify what’s wrong with it. So she tries to get me to engage constructively and that makes me feel more incompetent because my head just doesn’t work that way. And I’m creative enough in other ways to know when certain connections are just not being made in my head, and to know when there’s something that other people are much better at envisioning than I am. Persis’s not an expert at it, but she doesn’t throw in the towel the way I do. Anyway, so that’s a source of tension. And then Persis feels like she’s doing all the unpacking... which is true, but I’m watching Burt while she’s doing that. Blah blah blah. A bad situation. I just want it to be over.

And at the same time, I’m anxious about it being over because I know that there are some rough days ahead of me on the screenplay. I’m at a point where…I went back and watched Dog Day Afternoon again recently. Don’t know if I already told you this, but… The bulk…or a significant portion of my script is sort of a siege, with a small group of people trapped, essentially, in one place. And this siege is the forum for the exchange of perspectives that is really what interests me about this subject, the confrontation between a porn star and an abstinence…I don’t really have a good name for this woman, generically speaking. “Porn star” sums up a profession, but…what?…abstinence worker? Religious right woman. Church lady. Abstinence bitch, perhaps. Anyway, so what’s so great about Dog Day Afternoon (and movies of its kind, of course; it’s just one of the best movies of its kind) is that most of the movie is a siege where characters are frozen in place, and yet it’s incredibly taut, and great at revealing character. And so I want to have these characters reveal each other, but I have no idea what happens in order to have that happen. And I don’t even know everything that these characters will end up revealing about each other. But I really like my idea, and I just have to remind myself that there’s always a point in working with even the best ideas that there are lots of holes. If there weren’t, then writing would just be typing. Envisioning what happens in those holes, I fear, is not a great skill of mine, either.

Or is it.

See, this is maybe one reason why the move and rearranging my stuff in this other world is traumatizing to me, because it’s like the world is teasing me about how bad a writer I am. The world is reminding me that when I come up against those holes in my writing, I also panic and don’t know what to do. The difference, though, is that I do have a set of things I do in order to find good things to fill up those holes, whereas with interior design, those holes don’t go away. They just sit there, gaping, and I try to imagine where I could move the bed in order to make the space in my bedroom flow better, and it comes up, like, empty set. Nada. And I’m afraid that’s that what will happen when I sit down to write; that I will not be able to rearrange the elements of the story to make it flow.

I’ve been working, sort of, with a writer – he was Persis’s assistant – a big, fat, arch, affable mid-40s guy who is clearly as desperate as I am to achieve success at writing. One difference is that he is also naïve in ways that I hope I am not anymore. He gets a little too excited each time I tell him that someone might be interested in seeing his manuscript (brief summary: he’s writing a novel that he’s trying to get published and at the same time get to any Hollywood people he can; it’s not a great novel, but it’s kind of a cool world with sharply defined characters, and I could see it being successful as, like, an HBO movie, so I’ve been trying to show it to a couple of agents I know). And I look at him, and I look at me, and I realize that there’s probably very little different between us. He’s really desperate to make it as a writer, and honestly, I don’t think he will any time soon. His novel doesn’t have a great story, and though his writing has some really good moments, there just aren’t enough of them. He’s not, like, hopeless; I could see him getting it together with a really good editor. But…I’m afraid that I’m him. I mean, sure, I like my idea. But who doesn’t like their own ideas? A lot of time I feel condemned, given the path that I’m on, to be this failed writer, whose greatest achievement in life is raising his son. And I love my son, I want to mold him into a positive addition to the human race, but I don’t want him to be the thing I’m most proud of in my life. I want to do something. Something I can point to and say, “I did that, and if I hadn’t it wouldn’t have gotten done.” And I don’t want to get bogged down in the stupid argument that no one else is going to raise my son for me. That’s not what I mean, I want to make something, change something. And I’m worried that I’m going to keep beating my head against this writing wall and it’s just not going to fall down. Granted, I’ve framed this script as being my last big push. I feel like if I churn this thing out, make it what I want it to be, and it still doesn’t get me anywhere, I will have no real reason to keep going along the entertainment road…unless I like the script so much that I try to make the film myself. But then I think of all of the films out there that get made because some poor sod like Persis’s former assistant Lukas likes his script so much that he decides to make the film himself. And what’s frightening, is that the success stories all sound like the failure stories…the only difference is that they are successes. “I believed in myself. I felt like the market just had to be out there.” Blah Blah Blah. I mean, I see where this train is heading, and I really don’t want to go there…but hope springs eternal.

The triumph of hope over experience.

That was someone’s quip about what second marriages were, but it applies equally well to me.

I’m not so sure I’m that excited about my marriage either. I don’t know. I keep seeing these people whom I imagine are living much more interesting lives than I am… Forget that. I just can’t believe that I am what people talk about when people speak of being “happily married.” I really don’t like being married that much. I don’t like Persis a lot of the time. We’ve had sex…I mean intercourse…I think once successfully since Burt was conceived. I don’t really think she likes sex all that much, and I don’t really desire her all that much. She’s a ball of neuroses, and I wish deeply she would go into therapy, but I don’t think she ever will. I’m amazed that Burt is as happy-seeming a kid as he is, because we squabble in front of him all the time. Of course, we’re always around him, and we’re always loving toward him. But I worry about what he will experience living with us. I’ve gotten myself convinced that I don’t deserve any better. I’m just a passive, depressed chicken-shit who relies upon mood stabilizers to get through his day and get along with his wife. I start revising my messiah complex and vesting Burt with it. My destiny is to beget, not to be, the messiah; and as such, it’s no surprise – or no cause for concern – that my life feels so uninteresting and relatively…dare I say unhappy?…as it does. Unhappy. It’s mostly happy when I’m around Burt. It’s occasionally happy when I’m with Persis. But she’s not someone I trust with my deepest self. She’s someone I keep from seeing it. And I think she would say the same about me. The idea that she is supposed to be my best friend is, like, a tragedy. I have abandoned my best friends in order to be with her, and to start this institution called a family that, while I have moments in which I understand why some other people would die defending it, I basically could take or leave. I would much rather continue to be a part of my mom and stepfather’s family. I wish Burt and I could go and live with them. That would be lovely. I have thoughts about what would happen if Persis died, if Burt died. If Burt died, would Persis be able to comfort me or I her? I don’t think so. Sometimes I hope that the acid that causes her gastroesophageal reflux and which I imagine causes the drab appearance of her teeth, and which I fantasize causes the acidity of her personality, is causing a tumor, eating her away from the inside. That reflux is one of many ailments. Reflux, dust allergies, a sore shoulder that keeps her from lifting Burt, tooth problems. And an inextinguishable sense of guilt.

Time to go. I’m gonna try to make this a Sunday thing.

I’ve been thinking all day about what I would start with, what I would write, once I finally managed to snag the time to sit down and start writing. To you? To me? I don’t know. I’ve been half tempted to call this whole experiment off, since I think it’s really me that I’m writing for. I guess I said that the other day. This feels very artificial.

I’m in a bar, a cigar bar, at the J-- resort in Las Vegas. Not my usual place (assuming this ever becomes a “usual” thing); but the best I could find under the circumstances. Burt upstairs asleep. Persis doing her thing in the room. Ordinarily, I would hope to be able to do this at a set time in my own place. My room, office, whatever. But here I am, amid cigar smoke, having ordered a Bushmills and a pack of Marlboro lights. Should I correct my typos? I don’t know. Spell check? Is that, like, authentic? Should I backspace to correct for my imperfect typing? Will my finger slips on this too cramped keyboard betray some subconscious motive? I reserve the right to correct myself. To spare you the time of trying to figure out what I was trying to say. But isn’t that beside the point? I don’t know.

I feel this compulsion to keep typing. To not take the time that I might ordinarily take to say what I want to say, whatever that ends up concealing. Why should I be confined by the limits of the qwerty system, and my own “speech impediments”?

Whatever.

A deep breath.










A long pause as I try to forget my circumstances. Surely people feel all the time how artificial the convention of the couch is, in terms of getting at anything real. Why should this be any different? I can get used to it, I suppose. But can you?


A sip of my Bushmills.

But I don’t think I’ll smoke. Didn’t…I don’t know…did Freud smoke while he was seeing patients? Did he allow them to? That was a different time. Maybe he did.







I’ve been thinking a lot today, these days about my relationship with Burt, and my relationship to my relationship with him. Tonight, as I was getting ready to put him in the bath, he crawled down the hall to me with a ziplock bag of Cheerios in his hand, and when he saw me, he held them up to me and said, “Meh,” or “Deh,” or “Ba.” Whatever he says these days to indicate that he wants something from me, or from the world. And it was clear that he was holding it up because he wanted me to open it so that he could have some. It was breathtaking. It was, I think, the most dramatic example of sequential thinking I had seen him display. Cheerios. Bag. Cannot open bag. Must get dad to open bag so I can get Cheerios. It filled me with that watery weepy sense of diaphanous awe that I get when he does something unexpected, or new. And I felt that feeling that I was trying to describe to you the other day, that thing that wants to be called pride but is not pride. It wants to be called pride because that is how that feeling (I think) has always been conveyed to me. It’s like calling someone by name, even though they do not look like their name. A chihuahua named bubba. That’s what this feeling is. And it gets so that you simply accept that that particular dog is named Bubba. You no longer question it. But all these things happening for the first time. It becomes important for me to evaluate them anew because they themselves are new, at least in my experience (I am hoping that writing about Burt will make you say again that what I am writing is meaningful to you. This is the subtext, the thought lurking behind what I am saying, though I am not saying it because of that. But perhaps it directs my choice of subject.) So I sat down with Burt as he tossed a petite handful of Cheerios about the marble floor and I tried to tell him, fruitlessly what it was that I was feeling. It is joy. Definitely. But it is not joy at his having done something new. It really does cross into a kind of awe. I decided earlier (because I was thinking about whether I would write about it as I was experiencing it) that it was like seeing the face of God. It made me think of the song from Les Miserables that has the line, “To love another person is to see the face of God.” Pooh. Musicals. What place do they have here? But it’s this feeling of wanting to take him and wrap him in my arms and tell him what a miracle what he just did is. It’s a surge of love for him. Of thanks for being blessed to be present for that moment. A finally ineffable – the feeling feels very watery – wash of pure…something.

It’s like when he says the word, “Hot.” This is in the last couple of weeks. He understands what “hot” is, and when we give him a piece of food on his tray and we say, “Hot.” He knows what it means. And then sometimes he will say, when he touches it, or when he puts his hand on a piece of sunbaked pavement, he will say, “Ah.” It is a very short, exceedingly simple utterance, said in a monotone. It is a single sound. And I have tried to imitate it but I cannot, because it contains this pure innocence. It is not even a sound of recognition. It is said by him almost as simply as the sensation itself must be, “Ah.” And I don’t mean Ah as in Ooh-ah, or like the ah of aha. He is trying to say hot. But it is as if he is not even trying to relate that word to anything we have said; it’s not like he’s saying “Yes, I recall that this is the thing that you have in the past called ‘hot’” or “Yes, I see what you mean when you say hot and I am therefore repeating that word that you have said.” It is pure innocent observation. And he does it with this certainty. He’s not asking “Is this hot?” He’s observing in this pure lovely high baby voice a very short but not staccato syllable that is intended to correspond exactly to what he has experienced. It has no gravity, no pain, no sense of threat were he to touch the thing again. And when he does that I want to smother him with kisses and love and without exaggerating the import of what he has just done to tell him how wonderful and delightful and inspiring of joy he is, and to make him understand that. I don’t want to make him proud of having said something. I simply want to communicate to him how much I love him and how wonderful he is.

But when I go to kiss him, or hold him, he turns away. I wish he would just let me love him as unrestrainedly as I want to, and lie with me and take in my kisses and snuggles and hugs and words and experience in those gestures the very joy and delight that I experience in him. But he would prefer to go on to the next thing.

This is one of the things that makes watching him, I mean like babysitting him, so hard. It’s really boring. And I feel guilty because I love him so much that I just want to be doing something else, or give his care over to someone else. If only I could just read a book. Or watch a movie. But since I love him as much as I do, and since there are these moments of such delight, how can I be so cold as to think caring for him is boring and anything less than the most valuable act in the world? And then...and this is where I get back to what I just said…I think that if only he would let me lie with him and give him my love and take in my love, then it wouldn’t be boring. That’s all I want to do with him: to alternate between these moments of watching him do things for the first time and giving him love snuggles.

You think that I am using euphemisms for being sexual with him. That must occur to you, though obviously that is not relevant. What is is that that thought, the preoccupation occurs to me. What if I am loving him in a way that will hurt him? I don’t think that I am. But, like, in the bath, when I wash his penis and his anus. My fingers are attuned in a way that they are not when I am washing his ears. I make a special effort not to linger any longer than necessary, and I treat them the way I would treat any other part of his body. I name them on occasion. I call them his penis and his anus so he will know what they are called and so that he will (I hope) not feel shame in speaking about them. And I confess that one of the things that I think about is that I want him to know their names so that he will be able to talk about what has been done to him if anyone should ever touch him inappropriately. Obviously this is on my mind. And it’s not even that I’m afraid of him feeling some specific trauma as a result of such an experience. I worry about a nameless vague trauma that I might inflict on him as a result of doing and expressing to him that which I feel is right and honest. And so as a result I am always fighting between my sense of wanting to do what I feel is right and honest, my sense of what the world would think if it knew what I was doing, and my fear of breaching the love and trust that I want to obtain between me and him. I want to stress that I am not doing anything that I feel is harmful; just that I’m afraid that it will be harmful even though I don’t think it is.

I l…this is hard to write…I have always taken baths with him, less often recently since he seems to be a little less patient. And I wash him and then I bathe myself while he plays. So we are together in the bath naked, which I think is a good thing. I think it’s important that he see naked bodies and not be brought up to think they are things that “should” be concealed. And sometimes he becomes very interested in my penis and he will touch it or grab it. And I will say, “That’s my penis. Please be gentle.” And I emphasize that he should be gentle, because I want him to know how he should touch people. And yet I know that if I were to tell…say…George Bush this, he would disapprove. Do you disapprove? I don’t think that it’s wrong, what I’m doing. I think I am raising him to have a healthy sense of bodies and his body in particular, and how to touch, and how not to feel ashamed.

I never touch his penis or anus with the goal of producing any kind of sexual response in him, and I never allow him to touch me…or try to get him to touch me in order to arouse myself. Although I have told you about his playing with my nipples as he goes to sleep. It’s obviously a comfort to him. He not infrequently will fall asleep holding my one of my nipples (I always put him to bed, laying down with him until he goes to sleep). And it’s occasionally arousing. But I never do it or allow him to do it so that I will become aroused. I never interrupt him when he plays with his penis when I change his diaper, and Persis now does the same thing. If he’s playing with his penis, we’ll wait until he takes his hand away to fasten the last strap of the diaper. And sometimes we have to distract him. But I don’t want his relationship to touching himself to be affected by our physically taking his hand away so that we can close his diaper.

It’s very interesting, this last thing. Though we’re almost out of time. You can see how a child might start to see that masturbating is something he must hide from his parents because whenever he does it they stop him. This might arise from a very innocuous situation…like trying to change a diaper and a parent being more concerned about his own convenience instead of the child’s experience.

See you next week.