Saunders--Memoir--Week of 10-26
10-26
Writing this memoir of my life around the time of my father's death is having a series of noticeable effects on me. I am finding, again and again, that I'm being called upon to act something like a father. An abandoned kitten shows up. A friend I met online in a sex chat room turns into a sort of surrogate son, asking for emotional support to help him deal with finding out he is HIV positive. A person I've known many years, only through groups like the one I'm doing now to write this memoir, calls on me to act as an ideal figure, a protector. I'm grateful for the chance to give him support. My mother and sister both have looked to me for emotional support lately, not because of any crisis, but because I'm the man in the family.
I'm acting the part of my own father, as well. I recently realized I was working out too much, that I was actually hurting myself through a gym addiction, and so I sat down, took stock of what I was doing, and started easing up on a few things. Now I'm noticing my body doesn't hurt all the time, and I'm actually getting stronger than I have in a while. So, my gym routine is making me feel good again, and that is something I value. I've also been fathering myself by taking myself out to do things I wouldn't have done a year ago: calling up a guy I know and asking him to go out; going to lunch with male friends; taking a long walk in a beautiful place I've never visited before. I've recently joined a group of men who do sporty things outdoors. The group is composed of gay men, most of us well over forty, and the feeling is mostly avuncular, brotherly, sweet, relaxed, open. We go camping, go on walks through the woods, ride bikes, and enjoy each others' company. I have lots of chances to meet with these men, and I'm finding over the past three months I've met with them at least once a month. I'm also fathering myself by keeping to my writing, encouraging myself to keep at it, but not beating myself up over what I don't do.
And I'm enjoying time with my dog, who is still a puppy, a foolish, boundlessly energetic scoundrel of a mutt who chews on everything I touch and who goes every place I go. I've had her for six months now, having gotten her to replace the dog I lost in February, Baby, the Rottweiler, the big goofy angel of a dog. The new dog is named Boo. She looks like the kind of dog you'd find tied to a rope outside a trailer with a dirt yard. She looks as though she'd always be pregnant and full of worms. But she isn't. She's healthy and full of beans and I'm raising her to be a sweet, fun friend. People readily ignore me but love her instantly. I'm finding that raising her is helping me to find out better how to be gentle and protective at the same time.
I would like a romance in my life now, but I'm not feeling the lack of it the way I did for many years. Most of my adult life has been spent as a solitary person, solitary except for the comfort of friendship. I've had sex with a huge number of people, so many I dare not begin to try to estimate the number. Every time I try I end up shaking my head and saying, That just can't be right. But at some level I know I have ploughed my way through yards and yards of ass, swallowed bathtubs full of cum, played and dallied with countless furlongs worth of dick, rolled and wallowed over vast tracts of flesh, and even so, I've spent most of my adult life alone. And even so, even realizing how much of all that play was spent on a fishing expedition to find the one I'd love as much as I loved Bill or Robert or Peter or Cary, loved as much as I loved them but wouldn't end up getting beaten up by this new, revised, corrected love, and even though through all that play I didn't find the one who would help me cancel out all the hurtful loves, even with all of this behind me I don't feel bitter or desperate or any of the things a young queen would suspect and fear a middle-aged queen would end up feeling. I'm glad to be thinking so much about men now, because what I'm getting more than anything else is that I really, really love men, love their beauty, their fragility, the thousand thousand gifts of their physicality and their nature. I love the heaviness of men, the heft of their architecture and their hard, hot charm. I do not believe I would know this so clearly now if I weren't writing the present memoir.
10-27
I was a terrible mess from the time I graduated in college throughout my twenties and well into my thirties. I struggled to find my way, and everything I tried, in the way of work as in relationships, just fell apart again and again. In college I had been in the Honors Program off and on. I was a lazy student, first doing a half-assed job of studying philosophy and gradually drifting to comparative literature, where I also did a lousy job of applying myself. I loved languages but could never get interested in my studies, and anyway, found I was much more interested in hanging out with my friends, doing drugs, and talking about art.
Most of my friends in college were art students. Unlike me, they actually worked at becoming artists. And they were very good at it. David Winter, Kelly Bugden, Bill Foy, and Teresa Bramlette were among these close friends. Kelly is now a professional photographer, living in New York. He has published several books of photography, and he lives his life as an artist, which he has done since he got out of school. Teresa is a famous painter, and now teaches at Georgia State. She's had numerous shows in Europe and the Americas, and she has been both a painter and a museum curator. David crawled into a bottle and never came out altogether. Bill started out as the most stunningly talented of all of us, and he crashed and burned under the weight of his own psychological baggage long ago. He no longer paints at all. My friends were brilliant, and in college they worked at developing their talents, while I hung on and watched from the sidelines. This was my real education. They taught me about modern art and about literature. I learned a little in class, but not much.
So what was I prepared for when I came out of college in '75? When I went into college, I had been told to expect that, no matter what I majored in, I'd come out at the end of it with my degree and an absolute guarantee that bunches of companies would want to hire me. This was the conventional wisdom of my parents' generation, and of my college advisors. What nobody knew at the time, though, was that the whole world was changing. Everything about all the rules was being blown up and reinvented under the influence of the end of the Vietnam War, Nixon's disgrace and resignation, and the energy crisis of the mid-seventies. I graduated in the middle of this, and I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life. I figured I would either figure it out or someone would come along and scarf me up and show me the way, but that's not what happened.
When I graduated from college in '75 jobs were scarce, and there were so many new college graduates that employers started being picky. I came out of a second-tier school with a liberal arts degree and no clear vision of my future. So I drifted. I tried different jobs, taking whatever I could find. First I was a sales clerk in a furniture store; then I was a food stamp caseworker. I was terrible at both jobs, and didn't last long in either. My parents looked on in horror as my life didn't fall into place. They urged me and cajoled me to figure out how to make my life work. I couldn't figure anything out. I had no idea why I wasn't getting anywhere.
So, after a year of this misery, I decided to go back to school and start getting another useless degree: a Master's in German from Georgia State. I loved lanugage studies, and I was good at German. I'd already learned French, and was passable in German. I resolved to become a translator. This meant that I was poor all the time. Graduate students aren't generally a moneyed lot; graduate students in foreign languages are among the poorest of the poor.
My poverty made my living circumstances very tenuous. I barely afforded my own apartment, and often moved from one dump to another to find a cheaper place to live. I slept on a bed of bank overdraft notices. By the time I was back in graduate school in 1976, one year before my father's death, I was so poor that I suffered the humiliation that is, for a young man, only a half-step above ending up as a circus geek, biting the heads off chickens. That is, I ended up moving back home.
Shortly after I graduated from college, my parents sold the house I grew up in, a simple, modest Cape Cod house in Decatur. They traded up to a new two-story tract house in a middle-middle-class development in east Dekalb County. The idea of the sale was, of course, to get away from the riffraff and congestion of inner-city Atlanta. I don't think my parents were focused on fleeing blacks, honestly. I think the quality of city life in general was becoming odious to them. There was too much crowding, the inner city was run-down, and the suburbs were clean and new, and everything looked pretty there. And anyway, everbody was leaving the old neighborhood, so they might as well, also.
The house I grew up in was, by no means, an architectural gem. It was a basic GI Joe house, a Southern version of Levittown. It wasn't trashy, but it wasn't much. Even so, I remember the first time I saw my parents' new house, out in the suburbs, and thinking, Oh my, isn't this awful? The house was, architecturally, the equivalent of a leisure suit. It had vinyl siding, no windows on two sides, hideous fake stone on the front, and a small, bald yard. The old house sat on a large lot, had two graceful, giant tulip poplars in the front yard, a forsythia and a quince bush, and a hedge of gardenias. The old house was tiny, insignificant, but it blew the new house out of the water in the charm department. I hated my parents' new house, and I couldn't imagine why they wanted it. I figured out eventually that, once they decided they needed a new house, they had umpteen arguments about what kind and where, and eventually settled the argument by buying a house they both hated in a place neither of them could stand. Typical committee work.
So it was into this house, this horrible shitbox out on what was then the eastern fringes of nowhere, that I penuriously crawled in 1976 to live while I was going to graduate school. And it was this house that, a year later, I came back to after my father died.
10-29
I don't remember much about what specific series of catastrophes brought me back to my parents' house in 1976. I suppose this lapse is owing to the fact taht my financial affairs were such a muddled disaster generally that no one particular part of the mess was likely to linger in my memory. I never have been particularly good at managing money, but then I don't know very many people who are any good at it. Most of us just lurch from one near-disaster to another, hoping for the best. At various times in my life I've worked multiple jobs to make sure I earned enough money to keep myself together and always ended up living in a state of near-constant anxiety about whether or not I'd end up living on the street; at other times I've worked at minimal jobs and felt pretty happy and carefee. I have yet to find a correspondence between difficulty of effort and scale of financial reward, nor do I see much of a correspondence in the lives of most of the people I know. To the extent that I've experienced any financial successes in my life, they've all come from windfalls. In fact, right now I'm living off of the proceeds of one, and hope to be able to ride this one out in conjunction with selling some of my writing to keep my little nest intact.
So it was that in 1976 I fell apart financially, and so moved in with my parents a short time. I don't remember how long I was there. I do remember I brought my cat with me, a gentle tabby I named Hirohito in honor of the cat's appearance in my life the week the Japanese Emperor, by then an ancient, shriveled, tottering old man, came to visit the United States. Hirohito the cat was a dollbaby of an animal. I eventually lost him when an evil roommate in one of my later living arrangements let the cat out. I suspect she drove him out of the house and then claimed an accident, but that's another story for another time.
So I lived with my parents in their awful house in the country, went to graduate school and lived a pretty monastic existence. I had a part-time job as a German tutor, and I tried to focus on my studies. I was determined not to make the same mistakes in graduate school that I'd made in undergraduate school, so I applied myself and focused very studiously on improving my German. I think it might have been the first time in my life that I really worked hard at developing an intellectual discipline. High school had never been much of a challenge, so I was able to breeze through it with high grades without ever breaking a sweat. Graduate school was different. I had to direct myself, for one thing, and the material I was being asked to command was much more complex than anything I'd ever dealt with, for another. So, I worked hard at it, and enjoyed the difficulty of it.
All of this was something my parents couldn't witness, of course. All they could see was that I was back at home, a man in his early twenties, still struggling with living the life of an adult; struggling and not doing well at it. I couldn't argue with their disappointment, of course. I could only think that, if I were doing the right thing getting more education to find a better route through life, I would eventually find a payoff. I didn't have any way of knowing it, but this was the last period of my life that I'd have a chance to figure out my relationship with my family, with the family I'd been born into.
From the time I was sixteen until well into my thirties, I was under the care of a series of psychotherapists. My introduction to therapy was, actually, an accident. By age sixteen I'd done so well in high school that I already had enough credits to graduate, so the question came up, between my guidance counselors and my parents, as to whether or not I should enroll in the new early college enrollment program that was being touted as the new frontier of handling smart kids. I was a smart kid, and it was thought I needed to be lifted out of the grubby environment of the common high school to promote my development. My mother was the champion of this cause in our family; my father met the idea with contempt. After a series of ugly fights at home, at length it was agreed that I would go through the screening program at Georgia State University for early college enrollment.
I did all the tests, and the battery of psychologists came back with their verdict: I was intellectually advanced enough to be attending college, but I was so much of an emotional mess that I really needed to be given a year to just play and try to develop some good, healthy social relationships. As shocking as this news was to my parents, they were bowled over by the next part of the verdict: my family was so awfully messed up that we all needed to be in family therapy and I needed to be seeing a shrink. Ka-BOOM!
My mother was a believer in psychology. She was and is an exceptionally brilliant woman who has always had an extraordinary faculty of intellectual curiosity. She led me to read psychology and philosophy as a teen-ager, and I owe a great deal to her, especially for the intellectual influence she exercised over me during my teenage years. I mention this now because I think it helps explain why she immediately embraced the idea of my going into therapy, and I'm sure she welcomed the suggestion that the family receive therapy, as well. She knew my father was crazy, but she couldn't help love him, and she didn't believe in divorce. What else could she do but hunker down and try to make things work? When someone came along and said, You folks need help, she jumped at the chance to get it. So I started seeing a therapist at Georgia State's Counseling Center, my mother and father started a series of couple sessions, and my parents started meeting occasionally in sessions with me.
This didn't last long, because my father couldn't tolerate it. My own sessions, with a kindly older man who was getting his counseling degree--I think his name was Jim Brautigam--were crucial to my survival. Jim, I'll call him, was the first adult I was ever able to talk with about being gay. We didn't get very far with the whole matter, as he didn't push things. He was great at being non-judgmental and kind. I think he helped me enormously by just being an adult man who listened to me and didn't berate me for everything I had to say. The sessions involving my parents and me together were led by a different therapist, a woman whose name I don't remember. She was plump, had dark hair, and dressed in what looked like expensive business clothes. She was also blunt. She couldn't stand my father, and she worked mightily to confront him during our sessions together. What I recall about these sessions is the therapist snarling at my father, trying to get him to blow up. He was very controlled in his responses to her, but made it clear that he regarded her and her profession as frauds. I remember my father pulling me aside at some point, and I think it must have been during this period, and telling me that I shouldn't believe anything a therapist told me, as they are nothing but liars intent on stirring up trouble.
Writing this memoir of my life around the time of my father's death is having a series of noticeable effects on me. I am finding, again and again, that I'm being called upon to act something like a father. An abandoned kitten shows up. A friend I met online in a sex chat room turns into a sort of surrogate son, asking for emotional support to help him deal with finding out he is HIV positive. A person I've known many years, only through groups like the one I'm doing now to write this memoir, calls on me to act as an ideal figure, a protector. I'm grateful for the chance to give him support. My mother and sister both have looked to me for emotional support lately, not because of any crisis, but because I'm the man in the family.
I'm acting the part of my own father, as well. I recently realized I was working out too much, that I was actually hurting myself through a gym addiction, and so I sat down, took stock of what I was doing, and started easing up on a few things. Now I'm noticing my body doesn't hurt all the time, and I'm actually getting stronger than I have in a while. So, my gym routine is making me feel good again, and that is something I value. I've also been fathering myself by taking myself out to do things I wouldn't have done a year ago: calling up a guy I know and asking him to go out; going to lunch with male friends; taking a long walk in a beautiful place I've never visited before. I've recently joined a group of men who do sporty things outdoors. The group is composed of gay men, most of us well over forty, and the feeling is mostly avuncular, brotherly, sweet, relaxed, open. We go camping, go on walks through the woods, ride bikes, and enjoy each others' company. I have lots of chances to meet with these men, and I'm finding over the past three months I've met with them at least once a month. I'm also fathering myself by keeping to my writing, encouraging myself to keep at it, but not beating myself up over what I don't do.
And I'm enjoying time with my dog, who is still a puppy, a foolish, boundlessly energetic scoundrel of a mutt who chews on everything I touch and who goes every place I go. I've had her for six months now, having gotten her to replace the dog I lost in February, Baby, the Rottweiler, the big goofy angel of a dog. The new dog is named Boo. She looks like the kind of dog you'd find tied to a rope outside a trailer with a dirt yard. She looks as though she'd always be pregnant and full of worms. But she isn't. She's healthy and full of beans and I'm raising her to be a sweet, fun friend. People readily ignore me but love her instantly. I'm finding that raising her is helping me to find out better how to be gentle and protective at the same time.
I would like a romance in my life now, but I'm not feeling the lack of it the way I did for many years. Most of my adult life has been spent as a solitary person, solitary except for the comfort of friendship. I've had sex with a huge number of people, so many I dare not begin to try to estimate the number. Every time I try I end up shaking my head and saying, That just can't be right. But at some level I know I have ploughed my way through yards and yards of ass, swallowed bathtubs full of cum, played and dallied with countless furlongs worth of dick, rolled and wallowed over vast tracts of flesh, and even so, I've spent most of my adult life alone. And even so, even realizing how much of all that play was spent on a fishing expedition to find the one I'd love as much as I loved Bill or Robert or Peter or Cary, loved as much as I loved them but wouldn't end up getting beaten up by this new, revised, corrected love, and even though through all that play I didn't find the one who would help me cancel out all the hurtful loves, even with all of this behind me I don't feel bitter or desperate or any of the things a young queen would suspect and fear a middle-aged queen would end up feeling. I'm glad to be thinking so much about men now, because what I'm getting more than anything else is that I really, really love men, love their beauty, their fragility, the thousand thousand gifts of their physicality and their nature. I love the heaviness of men, the heft of their architecture and their hard, hot charm. I do not believe I would know this so clearly now if I weren't writing the present memoir.
10-27
I was a terrible mess from the time I graduated in college throughout my twenties and well into my thirties. I struggled to find my way, and everything I tried, in the way of work as in relationships, just fell apart again and again. In college I had been in the Honors Program off and on. I was a lazy student, first doing a half-assed job of studying philosophy and gradually drifting to comparative literature, where I also did a lousy job of applying myself. I loved languages but could never get interested in my studies, and anyway, found I was much more interested in hanging out with my friends, doing drugs, and talking about art.
Most of my friends in college were art students. Unlike me, they actually worked at becoming artists. And they were very good at it. David Winter, Kelly Bugden, Bill Foy, and Teresa Bramlette were among these close friends. Kelly is now a professional photographer, living in New York. He has published several books of photography, and he lives his life as an artist, which he has done since he got out of school. Teresa is a famous painter, and now teaches at Georgia State. She's had numerous shows in Europe and the Americas, and she has been both a painter and a museum curator. David crawled into a bottle and never came out altogether. Bill started out as the most stunningly talented of all of us, and he crashed and burned under the weight of his own psychological baggage long ago. He no longer paints at all. My friends were brilliant, and in college they worked at developing their talents, while I hung on and watched from the sidelines. This was my real education. They taught me about modern art and about literature. I learned a little in class, but not much.
So what was I prepared for when I came out of college in '75? When I went into college, I had been told to expect that, no matter what I majored in, I'd come out at the end of it with my degree and an absolute guarantee that bunches of companies would want to hire me. This was the conventional wisdom of my parents' generation, and of my college advisors. What nobody knew at the time, though, was that the whole world was changing. Everything about all the rules was being blown up and reinvented under the influence of the end of the Vietnam War, Nixon's disgrace and resignation, and the energy crisis of the mid-seventies. I graduated in the middle of this, and I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life. I figured I would either figure it out or someone would come along and scarf me up and show me the way, but that's not what happened.
When I graduated from college in '75 jobs were scarce, and there were so many new college graduates that employers started being picky. I came out of a second-tier school with a liberal arts degree and no clear vision of my future. So I drifted. I tried different jobs, taking whatever I could find. First I was a sales clerk in a furniture store; then I was a food stamp caseworker. I was terrible at both jobs, and didn't last long in either. My parents looked on in horror as my life didn't fall into place. They urged me and cajoled me to figure out how to make my life work. I couldn't figure anything out. I had no idea why I wasn't getting anywhere.
So, after a year of this misery, I decided to go back to school and start getting another useless degree: a Master's in German from Georgia State. I loved lanugage studies, and I was good at German. I'd already learned French, and was passable in German. I resolved to become a translator. This meant that I was poor all the time. Graduate students aren't generally a moneyed lot; graduate students in foreign languages are among the poorest of the poor.
My poverty made my living circumstances very tenuous. I barely afforded my own apartment, and often moved from one dump to another to find a cheaper place to live. I slept on a bed of bank overdraft notices. By the time I was back in graduate school in 1976, one year before my father's death, I was so poor that I suffered the humiliation that is, for a young man, only a half-step above ending up as a circus geek, biting the heads off chickens. That is, I ended up moving back home.
Shortly after I graduated from college, my parents sold the house I grew up in, a simple, modest Cape Cod house in Decatur. They traded up to a new two-story tract house in a middle-middle-class development in east Dekalb County. The idea of the sale was, of course, to get away from the riffraff and congestion of inner-city Atlanta. I don't think my parents were focused on fleeing blacks, honestly. I think the quality of city life in general was becoming odious to them. There was too much crowding, the inner city was run-down, and the suburbs were clean and new, and everything looked pretty there. And anyway, everbody was leaving the old neighborhood, so they might as well, also.
The house I grew up in was, by no means, an architectural gem. It was a basic GI Joe house, a Southern version of Levittown. It wasn't trashy, but it wasn't much. Even so, I remember the first time I saw my parents' new house, out in the suburbs, and thinking, Oh my, isn't this awful? The house was, architecturally, the equivalent of a leisure suit. It had vinyl siding, no windows on two sides, hideous fake stone on the front, and a small, bald yard. The old house sat on a large lot, had two graceful, giant tulip poplars in the front yard, a forsythia and a quince bush, and a hedge of gardenias. The old house was tiny, insignificant, but it blew the new house out of the water in the charm department. I hated my parents' new house, and I couldn't imagine why they wanted it. I figured out eventually that, once they decided they needed a new house, they had umpteen arguments about what kind and where, and eventually settled the argument by buying a house they both hated in a place neither of them could stand. Typical committee work.
So it was into this house, this horrible shitbox out on what was then the eastern fringes of nowhere, that I penuriously crawled in 1976 to live while I was going to graduate school. And it was this house that, a year later, I came back to after my father died.
10-29
I don't remember much about what specific series of catastrophes brought me back to my parents' house in 1976. I suppose this lapse is owing to the fact taht my financial affairs were such a muddled disaster generally that no one particular part of the mess was likely to linger in my memory. I never have been particularly good at managing money, but then I don't know very many people who are any good at it. Most of us just lurch from one near-disaster to another, hoping for the best. At various times in my life I've worked multiple jobs to make sure I earned enough money to keep myself together and always ended up living in a state of near-constant anxiety about whether or not I'd end up living on the street; at other times I've worked at minimal jobs and felt pretty happy and carefee. I have yet to find a correspondence between difficulty of effort and scale of financial reward, nor do I see much of a correspondence in the lives of most of the people I know. To the extent that I've experienced any financial successes in my life, they've all come from windfalls. In fact, right now I'm living off of the proceeds of one, and hope to be able to ride this one out in conjunction with selling some of my writing to keep my little nest intact.
So it was that in 1976 I fell apart financially, and so moved in with my parents a short time. I don't remember how long I was there. I do remember I brought my cat with me, a gentle tabby I named Hirohito in honor of the cat's appearance in my life the week the Japanese Emperor, by then an ancient, shriveled, tottering old man, came to visit the United States. Hirohito the cat was a dollbaby of an animal. I eventually lost him when an evil roommate in one of my later living arrangements let the cat out. I suspect she drove him out of the house and then claimed an accident, but that's another story for another time.
So I lived with my parents in their awful house in the country, went to graduate school and lived a pretty monastic existence. I had a part-time job as a German tutor, and I tried to focus on my studies. I was determined not to make the same mistakes in graduate school that I'd made in undergraduate school, so I applied myself and focused very studiously on improving my German. I think it might have been the first time in my life that I really worked hard at developing an intellectual discipline. High school had never been much of a challenge, so I was able to breeze through it with high grades without ever breaking a sweat. Graduate school was different. I had to direct myself, for one thing, and the material I was being asked to command was much more complex than anything I'd ever dealt with, for another. So, I worked hard at it, and enjoyed the difficulty of it.
All of this was something my parents couldn't witness, of course. All they could see was that I was back at home, a man in his early twenties, still struggling with living the life of an adult; struggling and not doing well at it. I couldn't argue with their disappointment, of course. I could only think that, if I were doing the right thing getting more education to find a better route through life, I would eventually find a payoff. I didn't have any way of knowing it, but this was the last period of my life that I'd have a chance to figure out my relationship with my family, with the family I'd been born into.
From the time I was sixteen until well into my thirties, I was under the care of a series of psychotherapists. My introduction to therapy was, actually, an accident. By age sixteen I'd done so well in high school that I already had enough credits to graduate, so the question came up, between my guidance counselors and my parents, as to whether or not I should enroll in the new early college enrollment program that was being touted as the new frontier of handling smart kids. I was a smart kid, and it was thought I needed to be lifted out of the grubby environment of the common high school to promote my development. My mother was the champion of this cause in our family; my father met the idea with contempt. After a series of ugly fights at home, at length it was agreed that I would go through the screening program at Georgia State University for early college enrollment.
I did all the tests, and the battery of psychologists came back with their verdict: I was intellectually advanced enough to be attending college, but I was so much of an emotional mess that I really needed to be given a year to just play and try to develop some good, healthy social relationships. As shocking as this news was to my parents, they were bowled over by the next part of the verdict: my family was so awfully messed up that we all needed to be in family therapy and I needed to be seeing a shrink. Ka-BOOM!
My mother was a believer in psychology. She was and is an exceptionally brilliant woman who has always had an extraordinary faculty of intellectual curiosity. She led me to read psychology and philosophy as a teen-ager, and I owe a great deal to her, especially for the intellectual influence she exercised over me during my teenage years. I mention this now because I think it helps explain why she immediately embraced the idea of my going into therapy, and I'm sure she welcomed the suggestion that the family receive therapy, as well. She knew my father was crazy, but she couldn't help love him, and she didn't believe in divorce. What else could she do but hunker down and try to make things work? When someone came along and said, You folks need help, she jumped at the chance to get it. So I started seeing a therapist at Georgia State's Counseling Center, my mother and father started a series of couple sessions, and my parents started meeting occasionally in sessions with me.
This didn't last long, because my father couldn't tolerate it. My own sessions, with a kindly older man who was getting his counseling degree--I think his name was Jim Brautigam--were crucial to my survival. Jim, I'll call him, was the first adult I was ever able to talk with about being gay. We didn't get very far with the whole matter, as he didn't push things. He was great at being non-judgmental and kind. I think he helped me enormously by just being an adult man who listened to me and didn't berate me for everything I had to say. The sessions involving my parents and me together were led by a different therapist, a woman whose name I don't remember. She was plump, had dark hair, and dressed in what looked like expensive business clothes. She was also blunt. She couldn't stand my father, and she worked mightily to confront him during our sessions together. What I recall about these sessions is the therapist snarling at my father, trying to get him to blow up. He was very controlled in his responses to her, but made it clear that he regarded her and her profession as frauds. I remember my father pulling me aside at some point, and I think it must have been during this period, and telling me that I shouldn't believe anything a therapist told me, as they are nothing but liars intent on stirring up trouble.
posted by LifeWriter at 10:04 PM
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