Living Out Loud (19 page)

I suppose this is true of many parents. For some it is simply that they think homosexuality is against God, against nature, condemns their sons to hell. For others it is something else, more difficult to put into words. It makes their children too different from them. We do not want our children to be too different—so different that they face social disapprobation and ostracism, so different that they die before we do. His parents did not know any homosexuals, or at least they did not believe they did. His parents did not know what homosexuals were like.

They are like us. They are us. Isn’t that true? And yet, there is a difference. Perhaps mothers sometimes have an easier time accepting this. After all, they must accept early on that there are profound sexual differences between them and their sons. Fathers think their boys will be basically like them. Sometimes they are. And sometimes, in a way that comes to mean so much, they are not.

I have thought of this a fair amount because I am the mother of sons. I have managed to convince myself that I love my
children so much that nothing they could do would turn me against them, or away from them, that nothing would make me take their pictures off the bureau and hide them in a drawer. A friend says I am fooling myself, that I would at least be disappointed and perhaps distressed if, like his, my sons’ sexual orientation was not hetero. Maybe he’s right. There are some obvious reasons to feel that way. If the incidence of AIDS remains higher among homosexuals than among heterosexuals, it would be one less thing they could die of. If societal prejudices remain constant, it would be one less thing they could be ostracized for.

But this I think I know: I think I could live with having a son who was homosexual. But it would break my heart if he was homosexual and felt that he could not tell me so, felt that I was not the kind of mother who could hear that particular truth. That is a kind of death, too, and it kills both your life with your child and all you have left after the funeral: the relationship that can live on inside you, if you have nurtured it.

In the days following his death, the mother of my friend’s friend mourned the fact that she had known little of his life, had not wanted to know. “I spent too much time worrying about what he was,” she said. Not who. What. And it turned out that there was not enough time, not with almost daily obituaries of people barely three decades old, dead of a disease she had never heard of when she first wondered about the kind of friends her boy had and why he didn’t date more.

It reminded me that often we take our sweet time dealing with the things that we do not like about our children: the marriage we could not accept, the profession we disapproved of, the sexual orientation we may hate and fear. Sometimes we vow that we will never, never accept those things. The stories my friend told me about the illness, the death, the funeral and, especially, about the parents reminded me that sometimes
we do not have all the time we think to make our peace with who our children are. It reminded me that “never” can last a long, long time, perhaps much longer than we intended, deep in our hearts, when we first invoked its terrible endless power.

A
t two o’clock in the morning I am awakened by the appearance of a person no taller than a fire hydrant, only his black eyes visible over the horizon of the mattress. “What do you want?” I whisper. “Nothing,” he whispers back.

What can have woken my younger son and brought him down from the third floor to stand here in his blue pile Dr. Dentons? It usually boils down to some small thing: a glass of water, a night light, a token rearrangement of the blanket. I always suspect that, if he could put it into words, the explanation would be something else entirely: reassurance that he is not alone in a black world, that nothing horrible is going to happen before daybreak, that someday he will sleep the sure, steady, deep sleep that his elder brother sleeps in the twin bed next to his own. His search for reassurance leads him to our bed, where two terribly fallible people toss and turn, the closest thing he knows to God.

This is what no one warns you about, when you decide to have children. There is so much written about the cost and the changes in your way of life, but no one ever tells you that what they are going to hand you in the hospital is power, whether you want it or not.

I suppose they think you know this, having been on the receiving end all your life, but somehow it slipped to the back of my mind. I was the eldest in a large family; I was prepared for much of what having a baby required. I knew how overwhelming were the walks, the feeding, the changing, the constancy of the care. I should have known, but somehow overlooked for a time, that parents become, effortlessly, just by showing up, the most influential totems in the lives of their children.

We have only to study ourselves, our friends, and the world of amateur and professional psychologizing in which we all live to know that parents someday will be cited as the cause of their children’s (choose as many as you like): inability to open up, affinity for people who belittle and hurt them, vulnerability, inferiority. Occasionally—very occasionally—their accomplishment and their strength. We need to find our weaknesses outside ourselves, our strength within. I knew that. I read
Portnoy’s Complaint
, D. H. Lawrence, and Eugene O’Neill. And yet I had managed to depersonalize the message until nights like this one, when I wake up with the moon shining through the window and stare back at a person who, staring at me, seems to be saying, “You are, therefore I am.”

I am not comfortable with this, which is a little like saying I don’t like having green eyes. “Remember that you are the world to your child,” one pamphlet I was given says. Oh, great. After a lifetime of yearning for egalitarian relationships, of trying to eschew power plays with other human beings, I find myself in a relationship which, by its very nature, can never really be equal nor free from a skewed balance of power.

We dwell so often on the harm that can be done by exercising that power malevolently, by those people who hit their children, or have sex with them, or tell them day after day that they are worthless and bad. Free of those things, I am more troubled by the subtleties. Raising children is a spur-of-the-moment, seat-of-the-pants sort of deal, as any parent knows, particularly after an adult child says that his most searing memory consists of an offhand comment in the car on the way to second grade that the parent cannot even dimly recall. Despite what the books suggest, you usually do not have several weeks to puzzle out how to separate battling siblings or what to say about death. So it is inevitable that, after a hard day, I occasionally sit back and think about whether I made any crucial mistakes between the chocolate pudding and the hide-and-go-seek. The answer is probably no. But still I consider the question—of passive power, of the power of suggestion, imitation, reaction.

Perhaps I have been preoccupied with all this lately because, despite the difference in their ages, my sons have dovetailed in a developmental stage and have both fallen in love with me. I can see it in their eyes. For the elder one, this is the grand passion before he lets go, flies off into the male world, switches his identification to his father. For the younger, this is the cleaving to me absolutely which anticipates that process. It is all in the books. Spock says it’s fine as long as the child does not become “too close” to the parent of the opposite sex. “In that case, it’s wise to get the help of a child guidance clinic,” he adds.

There’s not much to cure what ails me. I am aghast to find myself in such a position of power over two other people. Their father and I have them in thrall simply by having produced them. We have the power to make them feel good or bad about themselves, which is the greatest power in the world. Ours will not be the only influence, but it is the earliest, the most ubiquitous, and potentially the most pernicious. Lovers and friends
will make them blossom and bleed, but they may move on to other lovers and friends. We are the only parents they will have. Sometimes one of them will put silky arms around my neck and stare deep into my eyes like an elfin Svengali and say with full force of the heart, “I love you.” The vowel in that middle word dips and lengthens, like a phrase in a Brenda Lee song. My first reaction is to be drowned in happiness. My second is to think: don’t mean it so much. Don’t feel it so deeply. Don’t let me have so much influence over you. Of course, I have no choice. And neither do they.

FOOLING
AROUND