N.B. I have given in a little to my editorial impulse and added clarifying details where I felt appropriate. They are all [bracketed and italicized], and occur after the fact. I have also changed, without notation, punctuation for clarity and emphasis.

Can’t get comfortable. I feel like I have a nickel stuck somewhere inside my back, [to the] right of my spine and just above my pelvis. Can’t get it unstuck, no matter how much I twist and crack and stretch. It’s been there forever, I think. Like my fifty-year-old neck. Did I tell you about the time I went to an orthopedist and he told me that? Since I fell on my head when I was in high school? Off the rings in gym class. Thankfully on[to] a padded surface. (I think of saying, “Thankfully, depending on your perspective,” but I refrain from doing so.) I am uncomfortable a lot. I have a rash on my left forearm. It will not go away. It is not overly offensive. It is red and a little raised, as if I were a little allergic to some pepper that someone shook onto me. Last month, before I came to see you, it was acid stomach, heartburn, reflux. It was specific to the time, an hysterical phobia of sorts. It has bothered me before, but never like it did last month. It was clearly a response to stress. My gut was percolating up acid into my esophagus and streaming out these noxious, almost liquid farts that really smelled up the house. I don’t mind them. Burt doesn’t. Persis does. Not that I’m ever fart-free. But last month it was really bad, and when I came to Platte and I recounted my symptoms to my mom and Bill we all concluded that it was psychosomatic. Then those symptoms disappeared largely, not entirely, but now I have this rash. It itches occasionally. One day perhaps I will get it checked out. Not today.

Today I am free from Burt for a few hours. Persis is on her second of three weekend trips, having left me last weekend as I told you with him alone for four days, and this weekend for two. Next for three. Then I get to go to San Diego to a conference on gay and lesbian etc., law issues. There is a Fedex truck outside my window that I am ignoring. I hope you are satisfied. Poor Burt. He has to be without one parent for four weekends in a row. I worry about him. Sometimes…not recently…I have thought that it was okay that he was stuck with Persis as a mother because he had me as a father, and I doted on him and made up for whatever congenital lack of loving ability Persis had. And that perhaps I would teach her little by little how to love gushily and unrestrainedly, if not me…and I’m certainly not talking about me, that would be too much to hope for…then Burt. She loves him. Yes, I know that. Now I am wondering about how unfortunate he is to have me as a dad. (The Fedex guy left the package, so I am not feeling so bad. It is undoubtedly my waterproof shoes that I ordered from L.L. Bean. Using Persis’s money, I guess. Everything these days is with Persis’s money.) He tried this morning to brush my teeth as I am always brushing his [this is Burt, of course; not the Fedex guy]. When I do so [when I brush his teeth], he kicks and struggles, bends, stretches his head out of the way, cries. But I put the brush in as gently and efficiently…yet efficiently as I can to get his four…eight teeth, both sides, and a once-over on his gums. So I wanted to oblige him when he tried to brush my teeth, so as I was taking a dump, I bent forward and allowed him to put the toothbrush in my mouth, for which I was rewarded…no matter how far away from the tip of the brush I tried to keep my mouth…with several sharp jabs to the soft tissue at the back of my throat. These did not feel good, so I cut that off (inside me feeling bad, since he does not have the strength to cut me off when I am doing the same, no matter how uncomfortable it is for him. And also because Penelope Leach’s book suggests mutual teethbrushing as a way to get your kid to maybe reconcile himself to it…I’ll do yours if…you can do mine if I can do yours.) Then Burt took the toothbrush and tried to stick it in between my legs toward my penis, which had recently ejected a stream of urine freed by the passing of the turd. And so (and I find myself being intentionally graphic here…that description of the freed urine, for example, was not actually necessary) instead of gently telling him no, as I would usually do, because of course I do not mind when he is playing around my penis, it wasn’t that, it was just that he had jabbed me in the throat twice and I was not happy about that, and perhaps even the fact that I was not proud of the fact that I was able to stop him from brushing my teeth while he could not do the same, perhaps that thought made me mad at myself, which increased my feelings of frustration at not being able to be perfect or perfectly fair in addition to having been stabbed with a toothbrush twice, and instead of saying gently ‘no,’ that-- No, that’s not how it happened, I remember now. He tried once to put it between my legs and I said, “No, don’t put it there (fearing that he would pick up some urine on the tip of the brush), because people put that in their mouths.” Then he tried to do it again, and although I know [I wrote ‘no,’ then changed it upon review; an interesting slip under the circumstances] it is practically the toddler’s job to do exactly the opposite of what the parent says, several times recently (including, as I now recall, this morning) Burt has done just that and although I know better than to hold it against him, I lose my cool and become basically like him if he were frustrated, six feet tall, and much stronger. Which is to say that when Burt tried, after my gentle warning and explanation, to reinsert the toothbrush between…in the space framed by my thighs, my pubis, and the front of the toilet, I lost all patience and instead of allowing the toddler his little game, I pursed my lips as if to strain or to restrain a bark and yanked – and I mean pulled with all my strength (all possible strength, in any case, as was necessary to accomplish the task, and I felt, to demonstrate to Burt that the taking was by force and out of irritation) – the toothbrush from his hand.

Now this is what I wanted that gesture to do (and I feel here like I am not so much relating to you as a therapist, but rather as someone who is reading what I write [this arising out of your encouragement of my writing], and so trying to convey to you an episode that this morning conveyed to me (and I feel the advance spores of tears rising in my eyes as I write this) the imperfection of me as a parent, my inability to actually be the parent I want to be and thus to provide Burt with the foundation of love and caring and tolerance and encouragement that I so want him to have. [What I am trying to say here is that I am presenting this to you – this experience, not the writing itself – more as a finished product, rather than something to be processed…though, of course, I am not opposed to further processing, and as I have always said, the writing itself is processing to a large degree.]) I wanted the gesture to: 1) communicate to Burt that his violation of my instruction deprived him of the right to be consulted in the removal of the toothbrush from his hand; and 2) to show him that I was not happy with him for his having violated my instruction thus. But the other purpose, unstated in those principal purposes, but which perhaps had more to do with the actual purpose behind [or better, the motivation for] the gesture, was to provide an outlet for my frustration: a brief, short sharp shock of violence, force, that would expiate the rising tension that I felt within me – tension created by the fact that we were late to daycare, that he had hurt me a little, that I was already present to my imperfection as a parent in not being able [or willing] to let him brush my teeth, and finally ignited by his directly disobeying a gentle request. So the gesture, really, had nothing to do with teaching him anything; it was my expressing openly and physically my frustration in a way that felt permitted. [This is really misleading. My assessment of this gesture as ‘permitted’ is not a calculation that occurred at the time. The gesture’s content arose as my need to express frustration collided instinctively with my awareness of a societal negative expectation of physical violence It was the result of aggression constrained by custom.]

This brings me to another thought I have been having. The wisdom of the times is that physical punishment, corporal punishment is verboten. The American Academy of Pediatrics book describes the time out that one gives, should give, in times when one might otherwise give a slap or a spank. And that timeout involves a picking up of the child, turned away from the parent, and placed [placing him] in an empty crib with nothing to do for a period of time. Now this is all very nice on its face. There is no nasty violence, no loss of control by the parent, no lesson that violence is acceptable as a method of punishment and correction. But look at the alternative. What the time out is, essentially, is psychological rather than physical torture, so to speak. It deprives the child of control (you pick him up), love (you have him turned away from you and leave him…), and stimulation (…in an empty crib). He is essentially being placed in solitary confinement and subjected in a minor way to psy-ops on the part of the parent. Now, when one talks about torture (much in vogue these days), one is not only speaking of beatings; one is also speaking of the psychological torture that…well, you know what I’m saying. Blah, blah, blah, the bottom line is that I am questioning whether the current vogue is actually more humane, since its intention is to momentarily deprive the child of actual needs, rather than just to hurt him a little, get his attention, and modify his behavior. Now, that said, I really do get, on a visceral level, the ickiness of corporal punishment. If I get squeamish grabbing a toothbrush away from Burt, imagine what I would be like if I decided I wanted to spank him. How could I ever look his judging eyes in the eyes and pretend that I respected myself? Whenever I do something like the toothbrush thing (and what I am saying to you is that it happens often enough that I feel very bad about my self as a parent) I feel like Burt looks at me and judges me and knows that I am imperfect and mourns the day he was born to me as a dad and longs for the day – envisions it – that he is finally able physically to free himself from the bonds of my infantile oppression. We switch places.

Interesting. Of course, as I’ve told you, I was spanked as child. And these thoughts that I have imputed to Burt are all thoughts that I have had at various times – presumably though not when I was just shy of 18 months old.

Anyway, so what should I do in moments like that? When I fall short of my parental ideals, know it, and know even as I apologize to Burt for having lost my cool, that I am certain to lose my cool again? I am certain to repeat the sin, much as I would like not to, and so how can I truly repent? The truth is…do I actually desire to stop? Because…and I’m not proud of this...I like that feeling that I get, that release as I grab that toothbrush and yank it away and assert my dominance over this little recalcitrant critter trying to poke my penis with his little tool. It feels good…momentarily, at least. So do I actually want to stop? “Burt, I want to talk to you about what just happened. I yanked the toothbrush away from you in a way that was not very nice. What I should have done was told you that I was taking it away, why I was, and then removed it from your hand as gently as I could…presuming of course that you would not have let me, and so by gently I actually mean peeling your fingers from it one by one with all due care. Then I should have said, ‘Thank you,’ as we were instructed to do in our Mommy & Me class. But here’s the thing, Burt: I am an imperfect person, an imperfect parent. And there are some times when I do things that I’m not proud of, and in the grand scheme of things I don’t actually intend, want to do them, but I get carried away by my emotions in the moment and things happen that I soon regret because they are not the kind of things I would like to teach you to do, nor the kind of things, as a said, that I think a good parent should do; so I apologize for those. But here’s the other thing, my boy. This is going to happen again. And again. And again. Because, let’s be real here: as much as I want to be the perfect parent, you know and I know that anger is one of my problems, and things happen when I get angry that I cannot control. Now, you needn’t fear excessively; I am not talking about actually hurting you, I hope (though, since we’re being honest with one another, let me say now that in these moments to which I am referring I do, for a split second, want to do something to you that will force my instruction into your thick little skull…like knocking [nudging, really] you backwards [into a pratfall], as I did yesterday when you stepped repeatedly on the box of cereal despite my having told you not to). But I am talking about these little bursts of childish, primitive rage that must instantly be expiated, and after which I essentially return to being nice daddy, regretful of the show of outofcontrolness that just transpired. So, yes, these things are likely to happen, sure to happen again, because that is one of my faults as a person, and even if God willing I am able to understand and master that side of me one day, that mastery will not occur in one day, and so I must beg your indulgence as I continue to inflict these indignities upon you. So why don’t we do this: instead if my spending all this time apologizing to you every time I do something childish and brutish, why don’t I just apologize now to you for all of those times that, despite my best efforts of course (without which, naturally, this whole apology would be mere words), I am unable to control the IncredibleHulkish rage that rises within me and I express it in some forceful way that I would not have you follow as an example? Okay? So I’m sorry for all those times, I wish I were perfect, but I’m not, even though I try; and I will at least give you the benefit of identifying for you those times, so you at least know exactly what not to do, okay?

“Now give me the fucking toothbrush, you little…”

Wow, I so wanted to talk about the fall colors here, my missing Platte, my being afraid today to take up the writing again. But I guess there’s no time left. I know I still have to figure out when I’m next in Platte, because I would at least like to get a chance to discuss with you what I want to do with these notes and that blog idea. It still lingers. Best wishes…