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.