Persis back from her third trip “abroad,” which in the age of parenthood means anything more than a half hour drive away. My turn is on Thursday, when I go to San Diego for a “Lavender Law” conference: it’s a GLBT law thing that I’m sort of attending to test the waters, and see if that environment is as exciting to me as I think it might be. I hope it is, but I’m half afraid that I’ll be turned off by the pompous intellectualizing. I don’t know if the tone is going to be really legal or legal-academic or what; I’m sure there will be people from all walks of queer activism attending. I’m kind of getting into this idea of pursuing a JD/PhD; I love the vaguely horrified look that people get when they think of the time and intensity involved. That’s why I want to take it…or to pursue it, rather, because I think it will be intense and long and hopefully transforming; I want to have that happen to me after this time spent languishing intellectually in the entertainment industry. Of course, I don’t want it to happen to me yet, but…and now I’m setting myself up to be disappointed if the writing actually does work out. I figure that, based on my experience, the course of my life, that’s the only way anything is ever going to happen to me: if it’s contrary to what I want to happen.

Burt is great. It’s so wonderful to have him curl into me to be held. Yesterday, we took a little nap together and afterward, after we got out of bed and were starting to get going again, we ended up just sitting in the hallway, him curled up on my lap. That feels so amazing.

I’m liking Ruth Reinhardt. As I said, she’s much different from you, and I’ll get to that some more, but the bottom line is that seeing her is helpful. She talks more than you do, as I mentioned last week. And that makes her feel somehow less special or valuable to me. Somehow, I associate a person’s worth – a therapist’s certainly, anyway – as having an inverse relationship to the amount they talk. So you felt special and mysterious and good as a therapist partially because you were of relatively few words. It kind of fed into my desiring distant men (more about that I hope, because this weekend my father came to visit and I learned/relearned/reexperienced some interesting things about him). But now here’s this relatively accessible woman I’m seeing, and as a result, I feel like the help she’s giving me could come from anybody, like it has nothing to do with her, and I feel that because she talks as much as she does. I don’t really understand that. Except insofar as I have always felt more powerful and more, I think, myself when I’ve been withdrawn and more silent, when I only speak when it is necessary. Why do I value silence and distance so much?

The things I learned about my dad:

1) The compulsive strain in me, the one that made me a good assistant editor, the one that makes me very detail oriented, I clearly get from him; and the way he expresses it these days is by doing dishes.
2) My dad seems to have not really thought about how kids learn, about what they are ready to learn; he approaches grandfathering (and I concluded, perhaps erroneously, that this is also how he approached being a father, though my feelings about him as a kid (insofar as I recall them) had no element of consciousness of inadequacy)… So it’s kind of like I experience him as having forgotten how to be a parental figure (to Burt) [in the time] since he was raising me. It feels like he’s gotten worse at it.
3) My dad is so suited to Babs because he needs more distance in a relationship, and he kind of acknowledged – or more accurate would be that he, unbidden, entertained the possibility without shunning it – that there was something broken inside of him that made him unable to love someone the way my mom needed/wanted someone to love her.

This is all so interesting, and I realize I’m not being terribly specific about it, but it conjures up an image in my head of a much different person than the one I’ve had in my head for so long. So perhaps – and this sounds a little trite, because isn’t this what becoming an adult is all about? – the person that I thought my dad was, the person I’ve really continued to see him as, is a fiction wrought by my child’s eyes’ inability to perceive and identify certain characterological traits; whereas those same traits, brought again to bear in his (or any parent’s) interactions with a grandchild, are now readily identifiable to me. The frustration is that…I want to know who my father is and always has been. There is no room in me to hold the idea that he has changed, that he was exactly the warm, present, and expert father that I remember him to be (until he unexplainedly left us); and that he is now this changed person, removed, loving but limited, holding the rough edges of the world at a distance. I desperately want him to have been the same always because then, I guess, I sidestep the question of, “What made him change?” Was it me? Was it Babs? Was it my mom? And how do I undo that? How do I make him go back to the father that I used to have? I’ve felt this almost crushing disappointment with my parents, both of them, as I’ve seen them interact with Burt. This sense that both of them are more plastic, flatter, more human than I remember them being with me. And I know, of course, as I write this that it really is far more likely that they have always been the way they are now (or a reasonable semblance thereof) than that they somehow, in the last fifteen, twenty years (or in my dad’s case, last thirty), forgot how to parent and have become the awkward…as I said, plastic, flat… This is a perception that bears some discussion. The quality, the activity of them being more human…The perception of them as more human [in the sense of being prone to imperfection], is an intellection, an excuse, really, for the perception that I have of them as simple, more predictable. More stereotypical. [I’m trying to say here that calling them human has the function of normalizing, and thus allowing to go unexamined, the anxiety-producing difference between how I perceive them now and how I perceived them as a child.] I’m having trouble with this. I see them parent and I want to slap them, to shake them, and say, “What the hell do you think you’re doing?!!! Why can’t you be with him the way you were with me? Not this stupid, posing, stiff and artificial way that you’re being. Not this way that makes you seem like you‘re doing those things that you imagine, from reading in books, that you should do as a parent. Why don’t you respond to him, as an individual, the way you responded to me as one, the way you took my needs as mine individually, which required special attention and ad hoc responses, rather than this calculated way in which you’re interacting with him?” I want to punish them, to say, “No! This is how you do it you stupid old man/woman!” And to show them how to interact with him individually, subtly. Persis is constantly wanting to tell people how to speak and to interact with Burt, and while I agree with this to a point, I really feel that to a large extent, people are who they are, and telling them constantly how to behave around someone is simply going to make them feel gun-shy (this has in fact happened in my mom’s relationship with Burt due to Persis’s haranguing) and reserved and afraid that they’re constantly going to do something that is perceived as “the wrong way.” Instead, as I told Persis this morning, you should limit your comment to the important things (like my asking my mom not to fake cry in order to induce Burt to do something – something that I mentioned a while back, and is actually an example of something that I remembered about the way my mom parented that I wanted her to not do around Burt, rather than what I‘m talking about, wanting them to be more the way they used to be [with me] around him) and then just let them be themselves, knowing that no one is going to be you to Burt, no one is going to behave exactly like you, a parent, and that these people love him and will treat him well, and that even my grandmother I remember with a different sense than I do my mom. Nana didn’t behave exactly like my mom did; I don’t have the sense about my grandparents that they were what Persis would like Burt’s grandparents to be: exact proxies for us. But now what I’m trying to say is that even though I believe this, I recognize and share that desire to pound them into line, to make them act the right way… I just have, I think, a healthier perspective on how to handle that desire than Persis does, a more realistic one.

Anyway, back to the main point, this idea that I’m learning who my parents really are. And I don’t want them to ever have changed, and I want much more to be able to put their current behavior in the context of a continuum, that it was basically this way, only I loved them more, more unconditionally. The latter actually makes more intuitive sense, but my desire to be able to see them as more or less constant (whether I end up liking the way they’ve parented or not) is still an important, basically irrational desire.

What am I afraid of? What if they were these idealized parents who then morphed through inactivity into these cardboard cutouts? Again, I return to the desperate desire to identify what made them change, but it’s more than that. It’s…


Thinking…




It has to do with wanting to understand history, almost; and somehow, I’m very anxious when I think of not being able to understand them, to think of them as these stable sets of parental qualities. If they have changed I will never understand anything. If they have changed then I will never know them. If they have changed then they are gone forever and I can never get my parents back. If they have changed, then I am alienated forever from a childhood that I feel good about, or at least that makes me happy and I think of happy things when I think of it, the period before my dad left. I really feel like that was this edenic time; and I don’t know whether I’m more afraid of entertaining the idea that it really wasn’t – which I know intellectually – or of actually accepting that that edenic time is gone forever and that I will never get back or see the parents that I knew then during that period.

My parents have been replaced by aliens. They have been killed, and the ones who are in the world now are of another species that only knows how to act human, not to be human.

And this makes me think of my parents dying, which I am more and more conscious of. They each are showing signs of age, are having old-people problems: arthritis, osteoporosis, joint pain. My dad is going to need to have a hip replaced at some point. And these are not the parents that I knew, the energetic, healthy, faster than I am…I’m faster than they are now. I move around more…Although, realistically, Burt pretty much moves around more than I do, too.

And it makes me think about what happens when they really go. I want to get them back, my edenic parents, before they die; and I am afraid that I will either not get them back, or that they have already died… I think that’s what the opposing fears represent to me: if they have changed since I was a kid, they can change again, and I am afraid that I will not be able to make them change before they die; and if they have been the same since I was a kid, then those ideal parents never really existed, and the picture that I have in my head is a lie. And the sad, sad thing is, of course, that both of those things that I am afraid of are true: to the extent that they have changed, I will likely not make them change back; and to the extent that they haven’t changed, my image of them is a lie.

But I feel like this image I have of my childhood is like this last vestige of happiness that I have to aspire to. Without it, I have no hope of ever achieving anything like it, which I have been implicitly trying to do my whole life. To give that image up would require a major, major reorganization of my views on relationships and families, and basically make me feel that there is no such thing as real, lasting happiness in the world.