My Father's Keeper: The Story of a Gay Son and His Aging Parents, Jonathan Silin [uplifting novels .TXT] 📗

to start on the cold winter morning and a sleepy child who is reluctant to get out of bed for school. The children are impervious to the charm of this explanation that only seems to add to their confusion.

As I watch this group of young children try to make sense of the morning’s events, I am reminded of the conversation with my father on the previous Saturday afternoon about his life insurance. Like my father, the children need everything spelled out. The story must be specific, concrete, and without sidebars. It must be repeated over and over. I am envious of the way Catherine attends both to the quality of her practical explanations and to the underlying fears that are preventing the children from hearing them. It’s not the specific issue of Ms. Lewis’s car that is important. After all, they could be discussing Chantal’s move to a new apartment, the birth of Ba-shey’s new baby brother, or the death of Fluffy, the classroom guinea pig. Rather, it is the threats to our survival, posed by dangers both internal and external, that drive their unquenchable anxieties. The children are exquisitely attuned to the potential separations, losses, or displacements in the stories they hear and the events they experience themselves.

Catherine listens to the children with intensity, her insistence that everyone who desires may speak signaling her respect for their concerns. It is the same way I want to hear my father’s questions, without succumbing to the anxieties that fuel his interactions with me.

Like Catherine, I want to respond to specific concerns as well as to the emotional undercurrents that flow beneath the surface. A literary theorist might say that we need to attend to both the fabula, or timeless plight—human jealousy, thwarted ambition—and to the sjuzet, or particular plot in which it is embedded. A kind of double consciousness is required at all times.

Catherine also knows when she has hit a wall and new strategies m y fat h e r ’ s k e e p e r n 23

are needed. After a final round of speakers and with signs of lingering uncertainty among them, she announces the end of the conversation.

At the same time, she promises to invite Ms. Lewis to join the group in the afternoon to tell the story in her own words and reassure the children that she is unharmed. The kindergartners are then asked to refocus their attention on a short reading lesson before going off to work on their own. There are plenty of blocks, a large dramatic play area, and art materials should they want to rehearse the car difficulties during the course of the morning.

It feels more challenging to absorb and then redirect my parents’

anxieties. I wish that they too had access to vehicles other than language to express their feelings and to represent their ideas. Catherine, nevertheless, models a willingness to listen, a firmness when the conversation has reached an end, and an invitation to continue it at another time that I will not forget.

Stephanie is another teacher whose calm skill impresses me. I reach her classroom of twenty-eight second graders just after morning work time, when the children assemble to share their accomplishments. Everyone is seated on the rug except for Devon, who appears to be looking for something in the writing area. Stephanie’s requests for him to join the group are pointedly ignored. Without raising her voice, she finally says, “I’ll count to three and then I want you with everyone else.” I worry that this strategy will backfire and lead to a direct confrontation. I remember many such failures from my own teaching career, such as the time I discovered Ezra and Kenny hiding behind the large hollow building blocks in the school lobby. Resistant to authority, they adamantly refused to come out just as a tour group of prospective parents led by the director of admissions stopped to talk about the benefits of progressive education. Or the time in the crowded cubby room, where children were putting on their outdoor clothing, when I was so enraged by Michael’s ceaseless teasing of others that I held him tightly and shook him far too vigorously. Scared by my rage, he immediately threatened to tell his mother. It was only Roger, the streetwise six-year-old, who could deflate Michael’s threat 24 n jonathan g. silin

and bring me to my senses when he observed, “That man don’t listen to nobody’s mamma.”

So when Devon fails to join the group after the count of three, I am relieved to see that Stephanie can simply walk over to the writing area, take him by the hand, and bring him to the rug. Throughout this encounter the rest of the children wait quietly and without undo concern for Devon’s difficulties. They do not take advantage of the moment to cause other problems and Stephanie herself never loses control of the situation.

After my visits to Stephanie and Catherine’s classrooms, I stop to chat with them. The broad range of emotions they display surprises me. Stephanie laughs long and hard over the pseudoadolescent essay that one of the eight-year-old girls has written about the history of friendships in her peer group. Catherine is in a fury about the latest administrative directive that will prevent her from taking informal class trips. Although they are very different teachers, Stephanie and Catherine share a deep appreciation of their young students’ difficult lives at the same time as they do not get drawn into emotional entanglements with them. Their lessons about clear boundaries, which ultimately help their students to become effective learners, are what I will take with me at the end of the day. These boundaries, often hard to enforce, enable the children to feel safe in the classroom. I know that I will need to be as steadfast if my parents are to trust me when their own emotions run amok.

When I enter Diane’s classroom just after lunch, she is reading aloud