This is difficult, getting started again after two weeks of not writing. It was not intentional, but you have to understand that you are assuming an…a lesser importance in the scheme of things. This week it was getting ready for my choir performance last night, which performance was much less fun, I thought, than the rehearsals. It’s funny: when I told Persis that, she said it was so like me to not enjoy…to enjoy the rehearsals more than the performances, and I think she’s right, but it's also the first time that has happened. Usually, I really enjoy performing. But in this case it tells me that I’m doing the right thing with my time, if I enjoy the process of working on something, getting better at it, the analysis rather than the synthesis, as I have been differentiating the two states of my creative process in with Reinhardt…that was a jumbled sentence. I hope it all came out all right. The other thing I was doing this week was going to Dallas to see my friend Craig, from my singing group, which trip I was really glad to have made, even though my mom came through in spades by monopolizing the time with my friend whom I had gone across the country to see. She made up for it by taking Burt for all of Thursday, so I was able to get some good work done, good writing. I’m getting to the point in the script that I haven’t yet written, and every sign points to my having difficulties doing that as quickly as I have been [able to get through] the rest of it. I’m approaching fifty pages of what I have to consider a first draft, which is to say that it’s actual Stuff. This is good. But I dread the next fifty pages, which I will really have to dig deep for, both in terms of inspiration and perspiration.

My mom. I was talking a lot about my mom with Reinhardt this week, this short week, because I left town with Burt on Wed. to go to Dallas. So I only got in three meetings with her this week, but they focused exclusively on two dreams that I had two nights apart, each of which was textually distinct from the other but thematically identical as far as I could tell, of course with some little additions and subtractions here and there. And there were two things going on, one of which was…well, in the dream, I was…in each case, there was a woman[, different in each dream, whom] I was in love with (not Persis, [though] Persis was present in both) and whom I really wanted to be with, but in each case I was prevented from being with her; in one case because of Persis and in the other case because this [the] woman [featured in that dream], my friend Serena Case, with whom I have one of those nagging uncompleted (sexual) relationships that I think about all the time…because this woman had gotten together with…well the fact that it was Benjamin Yalom, whom you have heard of probably, father of my friend Joshua, whom I have talked about here a lot, long time friend of both my parents…suffice…oh, happily (one suspects) married to Esther forever…suffice it to say that this is not a person I would have expected Serena to ligate herself to…anyway, so there was the issue surface-wise of my wanting to be with a woman that I really desired, but then there…the other feature of the dream was that in both cases they took place in a house that was being torn down, remodeled[; and in each case the house was one that I used to live in or that I was about to move out of]. And Reinhardt chimed in at the end about how the house is a symbol for the self, and that certainly works, but I really related to it as a reference…or at least I associated it to the fact that I had left Platte, and literally…well, and Charlie will catch me on this…not ‘literally’ but in fact ‘figuratively,’ tearing my house down and building one, a different one…think of the house instead as The Home, tearing down one Home and building one up in another place. Well, this then led me to the idea that this woman whom I so strongly desired was my mother, the original object of desire, and about whom I have not really given voice to the sadness that has befallen me as a result of my having left, and of her strained relationship with Persis. For the first time this week, thanks to Reinhardt giving voice to it, I was really able to articulate how difficult, how unfair, really, it is that Persis and my mom should…that Persis (because I really do blame Persis for it; I think my mom, despite her eccentricities, would be able to make it work if she had as her doppelganger someone who had the merest iota of social skills) should create such an unbreachable divide between her and my mom and thus the rest of my family. It is hard for me to even…because there is no place for this feeling to go: this feeling that I am in so much pain as a result of the alienation from my family forged as a result of my union with Persis. On the one hand, I can’t just tear down the house, The Home, that I am in just so I can move back in with my parents – now I am speaking figuratively – but on the other hand, I feel so broken as a result of simply being with this woman who cannot bring herself to be a part of my family (Persis; that is, Persis cannot bring herself to be a part of my extended biological family). And that truth just sort of hangs in the air and makes me ache. I don’t know what to do with it. It is like that big eternal wish of getting some good nookie before I die, only this is stronger. Or be reunited with my family once more.

I really do feel…it’s interesting that I’m saying all this, because I do not at all mean to hold my mom up as this great ideal of mature,…what?…philanthropic?…no…what’s that word?…I don’t know…conduct. In fact, I started this thread so that I could talk about how incorrigibly intrusive she is, and to muse about the fact that there are certain patterns of behaviors that we get into that I now want to get out of, but I realize that what was once upon a time a symbiotic relationship has become a little bit more entrenched and difficult to dislodge, or impossible to dislodge simply because I would like to. But now I’ve gotten, come around to saying how I feel, like when I go visit my mom in Dallas with Burt, and let her have the day with her grandson, that I really am sneaking away from Persis and essentially having an affair with her [(my mom)], one that is done with her [(Persis's)] implicit consent. And for this I must give Persis credit; she at least is aware that the best way to deal with the situation is just to let me and Burt go visit my mom and to just stay out of it altogether. Which is clearly preferable to her (Persis) being involved in it at all, though that’s certainly sad. So at least Persis doesn’t try to prevent me unreasonably from going with Burt, so that both he and I can spend time with mom and Bill. But I really feel like my relationship with them is…it’s almost like I’m smuggling him away, smuggling Burt, and delivering him to them so that they can get their fill. I…There are situations that arise in my head associatively: getting drugs for the Noteworthies so that they can enjoy them [( I have never actually done this, but the group – this is my singing group in college – has a post whose title is ‘Trashbag,’ and it is the Trashbag’s responsibility to procure whatever substances might be required for the group’s pleasure. As I said, I never had this post, but I should add that it was a transformative moment in my relationship with my mother when I found her smoking pot in the back room of our house with some members of the group. It was over one spring break when the Worthies came to Platte for their annual tour; a number were staying at my house, and my mom had asked them to keep me from coming into the room where they were smoking. I don’t know why it was I had to go back there – maybe I was just looking for my mom – and the guys did their best to distract me, but there she was. I was not smoking pot at the time – it was before my 21st birthday at which point my dad had pledged to give me $1000 if I abstained until then – and I had an extremely strong reaction, both good and bad. I think I was kind of thrilled that I turned out to have a mom who smoked pot. But, as I’ll get to in more detail below, the knowledge that she had asked my friends to keep me away so that she could party with them has never left me.)], a German smuggling food or delicacies to, like, Anne Frank while she lies in hiding away from the hostile Nazis…that’s the kind of feeling I have about it. And that’s really, really sad. I’m glad that I am able to deliver Burt to them, but sad that it has to feel like it’s something that’s done by braving the odds, avoiding the authorities, being secretive. So it’s really put me and Persis in an oppositional relationship that is astonishingly wide reaching. I wouldn’t be surprised if it colors the entirety of our interactions. It certainly colors my relationship with her parents, which I endeavor to keep as superficial as possible. I do not want to talk to them. I do not really care what happens to them…but most important, I refrain from caring. I intentionally, as a show of tit-for-tat, avoid cultivating a relationship with them. That is sad, too; though at the same time, I guess I don’t really see how I could possibly fit into her family culture. The only difference between Persis’s situation with respect to my family is that I do not foam at the mouth every time they come around (in fact, it’s often Persis foaming at the mouth about her own family; that seems to be her default setting with respect to family), and I have not (other than a moment of our (Ted, Persis’s father) and I digging in our heels over wedding issues) had any overt conflict with them. (And I apologized about that, by the way.) So I feel very broken where my family is concerned, and - here it is again - isolated up here in the woods.

But being here is forcing me to pay attention to a situation that might have been papered over had…were we still in Platte. It is the distance from my mom right now that really makes me realize the dynamics with respect to her in my relationship with Persis, and it is also the distance which makes me realize how much friends mean to me, even if I do not see them.

So that, in a nutshell, is the issue about Persis and my mom that arose through these two dreams. But I need to go and tell you about how my mom and I have always worked together to learn information about my friends. My mom tells me that when I was little, I would invite friends over, then I would get tired of them and want to go play alone in my room. And at a certain point, she and I fell into this pattern (which may or may not be related to the previous observation) that we would be sitting at a table with my friend, and she would ask him or her all the questions and I would just listen, feeling too…what?...considerate to ask the questions that she was asking but still reaping the benefits of knowing. Because I was always interested in them. It’s just that many of the questions that she would ask, and that she would get away with, I would have felt…I couldn’t have asked them because they would have felt intrusive to me. And I feel this way about most questions of substance that I would ask anybody. It is rare, I think, for me to engage in personal conversation with someone with whom I do not already have an established relationship that could sustain such a conversation. So my mom would ask these questions, and there was almost this unspoken understanding (at least in my head; and I sort of presumed that it was somehow, maybe subconsciously, in hers) that she knew that I was too shy or whatever to ask these questions and so she was asking them for me. And I participated because the truth was that I was too shy to ask those questions and yet I was really interested in the answers. (This brings up the idea that knowledge about someone always takes on for me a highly sexualized overtone. That is the primary reason why I’m so ashamed of asking people personal questions: because I am afraid that the question itself will suggest or reveal hidden sexual motives and desire.) And I can think of this working much of the time, each of us getting what we both wanted, (I'm not suggesting, by the way, that my mom had intentionally chosen to do the inquisitive work for me; she was genuinely interested in these people, and she probably (I remember…well, she’s always asking me these very specific questions, often about people I’ve just recently met…


….uh… [Brain fuzzy; lost my train of thought.]

Anyway, she’s always asking these specific questions that I cannot answer because I haven’t dredged for that kind of information. And I’ve sensed a kind of…someone (probably not my mom, maybe Persis) once expressed disbelief that I didn’t know certain elemental facts about someone whom I was friends with…disdain, disapproval, scorn…mused scorn…for my not knowing these things when she asked them of me. And so getting…having her answer [solicit the answers to] the questions accomplishes this end and also allows her to satisfy her genuine curiosity and enjoyment of the people I’ve tended to be associated with. […and this last point is crucial, too, since her interest in and enjoyment of my friends made me proud of them, made me feel like she liked the people I liked, which all made me feel very right in the world.]

But now we’ve come to a point in my life where there are people that I genuinely want to spend time with and have conversations with, especially when I make trips away from Ecksville (generally to Platte), and yet I want to be able to invite them over to my parents’ house[...when I'm in Platte, after all, it is also my house, or at least my pad, and it's so much easier than having to meet people at some commercial establishment, or out in public]…but like last time I went down there, they ended up talking with Marco about their experience with surrogate parenting. And I know it was a conversation that they both really enjoyed…but I wasn’t enjoying it. I wanted to talk to my friend about how he was and tell him how I was, and their presence in the kitchen was…well, not their presence, but their monopolizing the conversation made me really frustrated. So I asked if he wanted to go for a walk. And then again, in Dallas, when the three of us went over to Craig’s house, amazingly, she practically monopolized him. I barely said one word to him the whole time I was there, and instead spend the time talking to his wife (who…I don’t know…I get a weird feeling about them…but their kids seem cool) and following Burt around their back yard. And I couldn’t believe the gall of her, sitting in the living room, engaging my friend animatedly in intense personal conversation, while I am outside, behind a closed glass door, with Burt and Karena, wishing I could come in and be the one sitting on the stool talking to Craig. She had the good grace to apologize for it the next morning, after she asked me if I got a chance to talk with him and I answered with a very pointed, "No, I barely said one word to him all night. What did he have to say?" But the other thing, the thing that is perhaps harder for me to let in than the idea that my mom tries to monopolize my friends, is the idea that my friends care more about talking to her than they do about talking to me. After all, Craig is a big boy; he can express preferences. He didn’t need to be sitting in there talking so excitedly to her. She was the first one he hugged when he came in our hotel room the night before… She just seems so totally unconscious of how in the way and intrusive she is. And yet Craig went along with her.

I need to stop. The bell has rung, and besides, I am exceedingly tired. Have lost the mentor [surely I meant 'meaning' here, but...have you ever been writing as you’re falling asleep, and your dream state dribbles out on the page? Kind of cool. Perhaps that was what happened here. In any case, it bears some reflection.] of certain sentences…in the middle of writing them. But this idea that my friends like talking to my mom better than they like talking to me is painful. It feels unfair that I am, have been, only trying to be considerate of them [that is, by inviting them to my “home,” where they can relax, and not heavyhandedly steering the conversation or interaction with my parents, blah blah blah…]; and yet they and my mom as a result form a bond whose mission (sorry for the mixed metaphor) is to throw me out of the circle, keep me on the edge, the outside looking in at my own relative inability to relate to my friends, and to show me that she (my mom) is so much better at making friends than I am that she can even take the friends that I currently have away from me.