In Spite of Everything (10 page)

I could go on. But in essence, the results of my armchair field study: The single-mom-and-son dynamic breeds emotional incest. I know there are exceptions, and all blessings and admiration are most deservedly theirs. But in my experience and in a great many others’, these relationships with their sons generally end up codependent—particularly if money is tight, which, statistically, it almost always is for single mothers (a chief risk factor for women falling under the poverty line is divorce). Such circumstances are outrageously stressful on single mothers with little outside help. But unless these women are highly self-aware and can avail themselves of appropriate emotional support, they often lean on their sons. Which often leads to filial dysfunction with a distinctly incestuous undertone.

No mother but the truly sick wants to do this. But it’s pretty much a gimme that the son is essentially forced to be the husband: a tragic setup on the Greek order. No matter how hard he tries, the son is doomed to feel like an impotent loser. He knows he is powerless to alleviate the mother’s financial and emotional stress, and even if he is too young to know about the mechanics of sex, he has the sense that he isn’t man enough to be a useful partner. But the mother still exerts such emotional pressure, however obliquely, and the son feels every square millimeter of it. Often this powder keg is set off when the son
is dumped unceremoniously if a boyfriend or stepfather steps in. Now he feels betrayed
and
unmanned, his hurt made worse by the boyfriend’s unspoken but clear resentment and competition with the son. The question is, what was anyone expecting
other
than “protest masculinity”?

Obviously, this mother-son configuration is at least as old as Oedipus. But because more boys were raised by single mothers in the 1980s than ever before in U.S. history—because there were more divorces—such Oedipal meshugas came to define a respectable margin of X’s generational anthropology, not only of human relations, but also of the culture. While predecessors like Philip Roth, Charles Bukowski, and Henry Miller might have shared similar angry-young-man DNA, Xers were distinguished for their lacerating self-awareness and shame. Think Bret Easton Ellis, Marshall Mathers, Kurt Cobain, Rick Moody, Douglas Coupland, almost all the eighties punk-rock band leaders you can name, and one of my favorite personal cases in point, the poet and Sarah Lawrence College professor Jeffrey McDaniel.

I met Jeff in the wake of both our parents’ divorces. Because of late (or no) child-support payments circa 1984, my mother, younger brother, and I had moved to a Soviet bloc style, ill-maintained apartment building in suburban Philadelphia inhabited by elderly people and divorcées. Jeff moved in with his dad, who lived down the hall from us, apparently in the wake of some bad goings-down with his mother, who lived in the city. Jeff attended the prep school where my mother was head of the English department (probably one of the reasons Jeff and I, wisely, never really became friends). But I always half-tracked him throughout high school because whenever I walked past his apartment, he was listening to the same music I was. Plus, I liked his whole affect: sneery, punky, writerly, clearly exhibiting protest masculinity. I’d pass Jeff with one of his legion of girlfriends, moodily trudging the streets of Bryn Mawr with his earring and combat boots.

A lifetime later, when I was groping through the bleakest period of my divorce, I found a book of grown-up Jeff’s poetry next to Pablo Neruda’s at Barnes & Noble. And what do you know? His work nails the kind of narcissistic wound exacted from that whole Generation X son–single mom thing, in a wry, self-lacerating, and street-y way. Consider this poem, “The Jeffrey McDaniel Show”:

And as if to offer a close parenthesis, consider this pithy stanza from another of his poems, “The Jerk”:

And there you have it: the ipso facto Oedipal Gen-X man. I have, we all have, known so many of them that describing their basic gestalt is almost like writing a horoscope profile. They are furious and self-incriminating, charming and resourceful. They can seem like consummate rescuers until their scabs are ripped off by women who they feel are manipulating them or treating their efforts with indifference, mockery, or egregious clinginess. Then, look out. They can become Madonna-whore-complex-struggling, redemption-seeking humiliation junkies. Personal observation and experience suggest, however, that this kind of guy comes into his own in a relationship with someone who genuinely values his competence and helpfulness, as well as his masculine virtues in their various forms. My feeling is that guys like this
need
to feel needed and appreciated, which is why they often make especially doting fathers. This is a man I understand. Why? I had the same mom. I had the same dad, too: the absent one.

This meant, for me and people like me, that the mate selection process was, depending on how you looked at it, either so complicated as to be statistically impossible or really quite simple: Get sucked into someone’s orbit.

T
he first love of my life was a guy I’ll call Jai—the yoga name that his parents cursed him with, and they couldn’t have chosen a worse guy for it. Jai looked like a lusty cross between David Bowie and Jack Nicholson, and he could not have been less calm and centered. In fact, when I saw my first Eminem “Slim Shady” video years later,
I was full of delighted recognition: Jai! Jai was gorgeous and feral and funny and smart and angry. He raced bikes with sustained, intense fury and had the most Adonis-like body of any guy I have ever known before or since. Everyone wanted Jai: teachers, girls, guys, little brothers, mothers. But the best part about Jai was that he was devoted to one thing: me!

We met at boarding school, one of those third-tier sorts for kids who had been kicked out of someplace better. Students were housed in the upper floors of the school’s main building, divided into “Girls’ End” and “Boys’ End.” Jai and I didn’t so much know each other as eye each other, and since Jai was eyed by everyone, that didn’t mean much to me. I was known primarily as the punky girl whose off-campus boyfriend (Pete) was always sneaking her off to the city. Then, one early winter morning, on the students’ return from breakfast, each of the girls of Girls’ End discovered a note in her mailbox. Each communiqué was profoundly and explicitly insulting, a brutal inventory of that young woman’s flaws in the estimation of the authors. My note, however, was not. It was rapturous, worshipful, panting. And it was, as one shrill know-it-all pointed out loudly, written in Jai’s handwriting.

I don’t have to tell you that this was—and depending on the day, just about remains—the best fucking moment of my life. To be sure, it was great that he was hot and kooky and the main event. But that wasn’t what made this event so exquisitely transcendent to me. For a fifteen-year-old girl with an acute case of unrequited Elektra complex, it was that I was The One. He saw me, chose me, conspired with his fellows, bankrupted his reputation—risked school ousting—for me. For
me
. Reader, he could have had teeth growing out of his ears. I was his.

In the end, we got kicked out of that boarding school. Jai had to move back to D.C. with his dad; I returned to my mother’s place outside Philadelphia. Still, we stayed together for nearly three years, and we saw each other every weekend.
Every weekend
. By that time I was sixteen years old; Jai was eighteen. He dropped out of high
school, took the GED, and became a TV producer; I went to a local public high school, where I was an exotic boarding school expellee and angry writer-in-residence (a status that, to my ambivalence, isolated me from the main population). But though we lived hundreds of miles apart, there was never any question in our minds that we would stay together. Jai either rode his motorcycle up I-95 to me, or I dashed out of Friday’s last class and ran directly to Amtrak, where I would plunk down in the smoking car and produce essays, short stories, songs, poems, and sketches of Jai in various guises. My mother wouldn’t let us sleep in the same bed, but Jai’s father was deeply moved by our guileless devotion to each other (probably because he was Russian) and gave us our own room in his apartment.

It never fails to elicit jaw-dropping responses when I tell people that our parents did not quibble with this arrangement. I suppose it’s partially that, first of all, the divorced parents were just too taxed by this time to stand firm on anything. But they must also have had the sense that Jai and I did actually love and buoy each other in ways that they couldn’t or didn’t. Easier to countenance a radically unorthodox relationship between a pair of delinquent teenagers than to undertake the alternative: Deal with us.

But our epic teenage love story finally ended when the long-distance commute began to get to me. I promised Jai that we’d get back together once I graduated from high school. He snapped and launched an array of distressing tactics: phone calls from window ledges; middle-of-the-night high-speed trips from D.C. to my mom’s apartment, culminating in Jai’s bellowing beneath my window like Stanley Kowalski; anguished, angry letters. Ian was heartbroken; he adored Jai. What was I doing? I was wretched and torn. On the one hand, Jai was my psychic twin, My Guy. On the other hand, I was seventeen. I was going to a sis-boom-bah public high school, complete with freaks, geeks, jocks—the whole
Pretty in Pink
ecology. Everyone was dating, going to parties, being
kids
. I observed the scene as if it were unfolding in a different dimension. I inhabited Unknown Regions. Still, maybe I could try to be normal. Was I such a
ruined mutant that I couldn’t fit into a traditionally functioning solar system, too?

It would become clear that the answer was a resounding yes. For years, I regretted letting go of Jai. I would never understand someone else as well, or be as well understood, again—without risking more than I was willing to risk via any audition process. In other words, I could not date.

I
do not understand dating at all, and for that reason, I have never done it. Yet were you and I to meet, this would probably not be your impression. It’s not that I don’t like hanging out with guys. I have always loved hanging out with guys; I love the whole guy talk shtick. It’s not that I don’t think sex is good; I think it is quite good. Moreover, although I don’t really see it this way because it sounds bad and inappropriate to me, I am told that I am a catholic flirt: I flirt with young and old men and women, babies, dogs, birds, everybody (except cats). My point is that, to the world, I apparently present as someone who would date, and maybe date a lot.
No
. No freaking way. The mere idea that I would agree to go to dinner or drinks with someone, with the naked subtext of “Does either of us want to sleep with the other?” running like a prurient news crawl underneath the veneer of conversation, is so fantastically upsetting and alien to me that it actually makes me sick to my stomach. I know that this makes me nuts. Yet there it is. My feeling is: Why are we even watching this movie if we’re not getting married? (I would do very well in the Orthodox community, my Orthodox friends tell me. Then I show them my tattoos. Okay, maybe not so much, Susie.)

My version of dating was: Watch, sniff, wait, and then signal. There was nothing civilized about it. Indeed, my process unconsciously mimicked animal mating strategies because I was, after all, a wounded animal looking for protection. It wasn’t until after I had already been with my husband for well over a decade that I began to understand the ways in which my incipient sexual identity had been
hobbled by the circumstances of my father’s leaving and my conjoining with Pete—which had, unconsciously, compelled me to set up job candidates for the position of safeguarding my gnarled-up little psyche. And let me tell you, that position was a serious business. I now see that there was a pattern to the way my courtship strategy worked. I was never a note passer or a rank-and-file coquette, though I have always, as mentioned, been at ease with, and taken genuine pleasure in, guyish company. Again, I also seemed a lot older than I was, not surprising since I had been doing older things for a few years already. I had advanced tastes. I seemed, in short, like someone who knew a lot about a lot. But of course I didn’t. Just because you’ve had a lot of experiences doesn’t necessarily mean you’re wise. It makes me think of the fallacy of that hackneyed Nietzsche saw: “That which does not kill us makes us stronger.” This is something that people seem to say when they either have not yet been through an experience that actually did come close to killing them, or they can’t make sense of life’s horrors. I can definitely understand the impulse, but still, it has always struck me as utter horseshit.
^*

At any rate, my experiences hadn’t killed me, but from Jai on, whenever the vibe smacked of dating—in any given school, college, workplace, or regular social situation—I would hang back and disappear out the back door. To me, this was basic self-protection: entering into anything resembling an emotionally intimate scenario would render me utterly defenseless, vulnerable, childlike. I couldn’t do this with anyone casually, so I’d chat, joke caustically, have a giggle, and exit. But to others, I was later told, such behavior bespoke an attractive unavailability. Who knew? It never fails to amaze me
that one’s deep and abiding neuroses can, when masked, seem like something marvelous to the outside world.