Now, as I make my weekly trips between Manhattan and my research site, it is teaching me further lessons about attachment and separation, loss and recuperation, the young and the very old.
3
The Future in Question
People don’t have to stop being children, they just have to be able to be adults as well. If we cultivate unbearable choices, we create impossible lives.
a da m p h i l l i p s , On Flirtation
Early childhood educators pride themselves on knowing about transitions. We are experts at convincing anxious parents to leave the classroom in the morning and at cajoling others to spend a few more minutes with a distressed child in need of their attention. Despite the chaos engendered by young children anxiously stuffing half-eaten lunches into backpacks, grasping library books and PTA notes while trailing extra sweaters behind them, at the end of the afternoon we try for one final moment in which our students review the day’s successes and failures. Endings are important to us. In between these events we have managed to get twenty-six rowdy first graders up to the art room and down to the gym, into math lessons and out of reading groups, onto the playground and back to the classroom just in time for music.
As a teacher educator I continue to help people make transitions—from other fields to education, from roles as parents to roles as teachers, from childhoods spent in traditional schools to more pro-31
32 n jonathan g. silin
gressive settings, and the reverse. All of these changes have in turn been negotiated to help young children make the monumental shift from intimate, domestic worlds to disciplined, public spaces.
Despite my skills at assisting others, I am always unprepared for my own transition back to school each fall. In mid-August, as the days become cooler and shorter, I inevitably find myself scrambling to revive the writing projects, course outlines, and research proposals that have wilted in the heat of the summer sun. There still seems to be time even as I begin to relive that mixture of excitement and anxiety which as a child I anticipated the new school year with. And no matter what the outcome of my efforts, I always feel unready when September finally arrives.
In the late summer of 1998 the practical and emotional preparations for my return to work were interrupted by my mother’s increasingly anxious reports about my father’s extreme weakness and recurring moments of disorientation. Monitoring my parents care from a distance and taking into account their multiple health problems, I have tried not to act precipitously and to listen carefully for signs of critical changes. I fear that my own life may all too easily be subsumed by their many needs. I guard my energies as well so as not to squander them on false crises and to exhaust myself before the more serious, terminal events have begun.
On Sunday my mother asks when I will come to the city. Reminding her that I will be there on Tuesday, she says, “Good, because I need you.” For someone not given to direct demands on others, her words are startling. They signal that indeed something is seriously wrong.
On Monday morning, however, I conveniently “forget” the urgency of my mother’s words until the health aide who tends my father calls. Calm and competent, Marlene summarizes the situation, saying,
“He can’t go on this way.” Ten minutes later, when I tell my father that I have arranged a doctor’s appointment for later that morning, he tells me that he won’t go. He works hard to prove that he is not disoriented, knows the day of the week, and can recite details of a fa-m y fat h e r ’ s k e e p e r n 33
vorite nephew’s weekend visit and the list of medical specialists whom he is to see in the coming days; he insists that he has no time for another appointment.
My father and I are now plunged into a familiar game in which I am the judge of record, assessing the truth of his situation in a court of last resort. My father is determined, uncanny, and persuasive as he pleads his case by demonstrating his physical and psychological competency. The very skills that my father summons to his defense indicate the depth of his fear and desperation. They also indicate the continually shifting nature of power in our relationship. Although I have legal authority to make difficult decisions, he has the ability to inflict the anguish and pain of a helpless father pleading with his son.
Power is never unidirectional, but circulates between us. As our conversation ends, I ask my father to reconsider at the same moment as I make mental preparations to leave for New York.
Two hours later the call from the doctor tells me that my father has consented to be seen and is suffering from an infection and severe dehydration that require immediate hospitalization. My father accepts the antibiotics, ten dollars per pill (my parents’ antiquated health insurance does not include any drug coverage), promises to drink plenty of liquids, a physical impossibility due to prior throat radiation and surgery, and returns home. Steadfastly refusing the hospital, my father poses a direct challenge to medical authority and to me. I face moments like this with equanimity and with dread, confused by our changed relationship. He is the headstrong father I have always known, determined to assert his will at every turn, as well as the extremely vulnerable octogenarian who longs to be taken care of. I am the adult responsible for his care and the child who continues to want his approval.
I have not always been willing to recognize these multiple, sometimes contradictory roles. For the longest time I simply wanted to believe it was over—childhood, that is. I stubbornly persisted in this belief, ignoring all indications to the contrary, until the day shortly before my mother’s first illness in 1996 when I was called to 34 n jonathan g. silin
sort through the boxes containing the long-forgotten remnants of the past.
In a hurry, I was annoyed with my parents as I began to open the cartons and empty the dusty closet shelves. The memories started slowly but soon picked up momentum, becoming an unstoppable tide.
Here was the heavy metal erector set stored in its own red box, replete with pictures of bridges, machines, and vehicles that my brother and I tried to duplicate without success during those long, house-bound days of winter. There was the stamp collection carefully packed away along with our hopes of finding rare misprints that would make us rich, the glassine envelopes still filled with garish triangular stamps depicting exotic flowers and majestic animals from faraway places—
Tanganyika, Costa Rica, the Republic of Cameroon. And the old cigar boxes, lined with cotton batting, containing the hand-painted lead soldiers purchased by a beloved aunt and uncle on their first trip abroad after the War, essential props in elaborately staged conflicts of our own devising.
A single afternoon was all that was needed to decide what would be saved for my niece and what would be consigned to the display cases of the local thrift shop. That was the easy part. It was much harder to sort through the emotions that the objects elicited. I was drawn to savoring the pleasures of recollection at the same time as I was fearful of sinking into the swamp of nostalgia. Childhood memories can bring to the fore ambivalent emotions and unresolved relationships that threaten the achievement of adulthood. Middle-aged, I wanted to fix my understandings of the past so as to better focus on the future, to see myself as making history rather than determined by it.
Recent events had broken through the pretense that childhood belongs only to the past, another country which we may visit or ignore at will. For as my parents and I struggled to meet the demands of illness and aging, the complexity and vitality of our relationship became clear. Regardless of age, we continued to be parent and child.
We brought our shared history and ways of relating to every interac-m y fat h e r ’ s k e e p e r n 35
tion. At the same time, I saw new qualities in their personalities—
my mother’s anxiety and depression, my father’s determination, dare I say ambition, to make the most of his life. Were these new character traits, the result of their changed situation? Or were they part of my growing up that I just hadn’t seen?
With time, however, memories fade, facts are co
nfused, history intervenes. Because memory is never pure but always colored by successive layers of experience, it does not offer a direct route to the past. I found it difficult to sort out what I actually remembered, what had been described by my parents, and what I was learning about my family through looking at old photographs, report cards, and first attempts at writing that had been carefully packed away in boxes and stored deep in the back of closet shelves. I realized that what is important to me is not the literal accuracy of the stories but the emotional truths that they are the vehicles for. I saw that it is these truths that both connect me to the past and that I would need to reconfigure in order to do what was necessary in the present.
I began to doubt my once-secure memories of parents, childhood, and the larger narrative into which I wove them. That narrative, which remained unedited from my midtwenties to midfifties, was now open to, indeed demanded, reinterpretation. I realized that the life narratives we construct are more about coming to terms with the present than any truth about our history. Perhaps childhood itself is not a fixed part of the past that can be known with any certainty. At first blush, the idea that childhood is constituted by an elusive, fragmented collection of memories and that our lived experiences are open to multiple interpretations challenges the commonsense understanding of our early years as a foundational period when the building blocks of later successes and failures are put into place. Yet my recent experience suggested the fragility of memory and an ever-evolving understanding of what it means to be young, and to have lived in this particular family at that time in history.
Despite recent research on the abilities of children to overcome early learning difficulties, on childhood resiliency in the face of social 36 n jonathan g. silin
adversity, on the potential of lifelong learning, and even on the continuous regeneration of brain cells, educators and parents are often reluctant to give up their belief in the critical importance of the first years. Anyone who doubts this need only review the guidelines for Developmentally Appropriate Practice published by the National Association for the Education of Young Children, with its specific, detailed recommendations for how to run the best possible program for young children. The aisles of the local bookstore, stacked high with self-help manuals telling parents how to foster their children’s confidence and competence, convey the same message: do it right in early life or risk the consequences for later development.
The popular media are quick to reinforce this message about the critical role of the early years when they erroneously imply that the results of neuroscientific research on early brain stimulation can be directly translated into the design of educational environments. More toys and activities, more specialists and highly fragmented days, do not necessarily make for smarter, happier, or more engaged learners.
It’s just not that simple.
The demand for simplicity, however, goes to the heart of the problem. Adults want to believe that they inhabit a logical cause-and-effect world. After all, it’s easier to live with certainty and determin-ism than with contingency and possibility. We are reluctant to acknowledge that our connections to the past and to the children before us are messy, multidimensional, and continuously shifting.
In 1968, when I entered the early childhood classroom, I vividly recall telling people who questioned my career choice that educators can have a critical impact on children when they are very young. My best friend had taught with great enthusiasm in the initial summer of Head Start, and like him, I understood social change as a grassroots process and those roots as best nurtured in the early years.
Today, my graduate students continue to believe in the foundational nature of the early years that will set the pattern for later development. They tell me that they want to teach because they have always loved children and have never had a vocational doubt. Or, like m y fat h e r ’ s k e e p e r n 37
myself at their age, they want to change the world through education, often a more recently acquired desire. Perhaps because of the need to create a distance between past and present, and to experience themselves as responsible adults, capable of being caregivers, they emphasize the differences between children and adults. Despite the subtleties of some developmental theory and the messiness of their lived experience, students portray the road from childhood to adulthood as orderly and well marked. They have read the seminal thinkers—Erikson, Freud, Piaget—and come away with a simplified template.
While each of these theorists writes about different if overlapping domains of development—emotional, cognitive, psychosocial—they all document universal stages of development through which everyone passes, albeit at varying speeds. Change is linear, sequential, and progressive. On the way to graduate school, for example, many of my students have come to believe that the basic struggle between parent and child over attachment and separation is concluded by age three.
Caring for my parents, however, I am realizing something quite to the contrary. After all, we are still striving to understand how we are alike and how we are different. We grapple with the changing responsibilities and gifts that result from our close connection. And most importantly, I continue to learn and to know through the body, not just through words. A renewed intimacy occurs as I help my father to navigate from bed to bathroom, shamelessly discuss the daily difficulties of a bladder and bowel gone awry, or simply run my hand across the brittleness of his malnourished shoulders.
Most developmentalists would have us believe that adulthood is a time of new and therefore better powers. Theirs is a story of progress and enlightenment. But perhaps adulthood is a time in which we have expanded but not necessarily improved our tools for making sense of our experience, and when we all benefit by staying in touch with childhood ways of being in the world. It is the context that elicits and shapes our current responses, and in the context of parental care, I am almost always both child and adult.
38 n jonathan g. silin
•
•
•
When I arrive at my parents’ house late that August night, my father is still refusing to go to the hospital. He is waiting up for me along with my mother, the aide, Marlene, and Anne, my twenty-three-year-old niece. He is seated in a wheelchair, barely able to hold his head up, eyes closing midsentence as his words trail off. Called to attention, he asks for yet another glass of cold water, and has sufficient strength to complain that it is neither cold enough nor full enough. In truth, he is unable to swallow at all; the smallest sip of water precipitates a coughing crisis in which everything is returned.
My father claims to follow me as I lay out the two possible scenarios—voluntary and immediate hospitalization or imminent collapse that will force us to take him to the emergency room against his will.
At this moment I cannot imagine leaving him to die at home, nor do I think he is in a condition to make such a decision.
As he nods off yet again, I remember prior conversations, not so far distant in time, that contrast dramatically with our present failed attempt at communication.
We were standing at the bathroom sink in the spring of 1997 as my father indulged in an hour-long bedtime ritual. I was leaving for an extended speaking tour in Australia in a few weeks and worried that he might have a potentially life-threatening fall by getting out of bed unassisted in the middle of the night. Neither my concerns nor his reluctance to accept help were new. But now I summoned a fresh determination to get to the heart of the matter before my trip. I asked if the debilitation caused by so many illnesses had made him want to end his life. I told him that, if he had had enough suffering, we would find a way for him to die quickly and peacefully. I didn’t know where these cool, confident words were coming from. Despite having seen recent newspaper articles, TV documentaries, and films on the subject, I had no idea how such a carefully planned death would be accomplished.
But I needn’t have worried. His slow and thoughtful reply reassured me that “No, it’s not that bad yet.” Reluctantly submitting to my
logic, he agreed to call for help in the future.
m y fat h e r ’ s k e e p e r n 39
Now I long for the brevity and directness of this earlier conversation and feel the frustration of my protracted attempts to gain and hold my father’s attention. Neither of us is able to say the right thing.
I decide to put off further efforts till the morning.
Anne, who has waited in the living room with my mother during this private bedroom interview, wants to know what will happen if my father won’t go to the hospital in the morning. Hers is a youthful question that assumes an inevitable drama of opposing wills that can only be resolved by a unilateral decision or the use of force. I feel boxed in by the “what if” nature of her question, which poses life as a matter of stark blacks and whites rather than muted grays and partial compromises. I have no answer for her. She asks questions that I am unready for. I am only prepared to stay rooted in the present.
Despite Anne’s prodding questions that push me forward in time, her presence is welcome in an unexpected way. As I slip and slide between my roles as loving child and responsible adult, she reminds me that sometimes my years of accumulated experience can make a difference. Caring for people with HIV/AIDS has helped me to curb my natural impatience and to tolerate uncertainty and indecision. In moments of crisis, I try to stay in the present and to move cautiously; de-ferral holds open possibilities that we cannot yet calculate. Anxious talk of tomorrow draws us away from the pain of today. It functions as a distraction from suffering we cannot alleviate, wrongs we cannot right.
My Father's Keeper: The Story of a Gay Son and His Aging Parents Page 5