My Father's Keeper: The Story of a Gay Son and His Aging Parents Jonathan Silin (pocket ebook reader .txt) 📖

difference to her parents. Like my own father twenty years ago, her father rails against the way she dishonors his name. Unlike my father’s complaints, his are specific. She has written that that he is ashamed of his own father, a poor peddler in Cuba. She has described how he vindictively destroyed the letters she wrote him while away at college.

She airs the family’s dirty linen in public as a way to get back at him, spiteful revenge. Her mother, whom Behar has taken the liberty of referring to as a typist rather than using her full title of Diploma Aide, comes to the point, “Mira, I’m going to tell you something, Ru-tie . . . ‘La mierda no se revuelve, porque apesta. Don’t stir up the shit, because it will stink.’ ” Unable to resolve the difficulties with her parents, relations remain strained. Behar decides not to share her writing or the nature of her professional life with them in the future.

Why do we write? Who do we imagine will read the text? How do we know that we have represented others responsibly? I worked in the school-reform project for three years before writing anything other than the official documents required of our formal evaluation. I fulfilled my professional responsibilities while remaining at a distance, my feelings kept closely under wraps. I told myself that many others had already described the urban decay, social dislocation, and racism I was witnessing. What could I say that hadn’t been said before? If Jean Anyon’s carefully documented history of school corruption, Jonathan Kozol’s biting description of the savage inequalities in American education, and Valerie Polakow’s heartrending ethnogra-phy of children growing up in the Other America hadn’t brought about change, why would my writing be any more effective?

Eventually I began to suspect, however, that the emotional detachment with which I went about my work, the much-vaunted stance of scientific objectivity that I assumed, and my reluctance to tell our project’s story were not so much a tribute to what others had already seen and written as a defensive maneuver against what I was feeling. I simply wasn’t strong enough to become a vulnerable observer in poor urban schools. Behar argues that such personal vulnerability is required to successfully enter another culture, to become m y fat h e r ’ s k e e p e r n 89

aware of how our own histories are reflected in what we see and what we don’t see, what we choose to report as “data” and what we choose to call irrelevant, “beyond the limits of this study.” By going beyond the limits of traditional studies, we seek to engage the adult reader in the way Proust reminds us that young people can be engaged in an absorbing work of fiction. But for social scientists the pleasures of the text alone will not suffice. So we risk the personal and the confes-sional to highlight the social and the political in the hope of moving others to action.

In contrast, from the first days of my mother’s hospitalization, I did not hesitate to record my thoughts and feelings. I scribbled notes on the late-night bus home from New York City and early in the morning before beginning work. Although, once these notes began to accumulate and my file folders to expand, I had paralyzing reservations about how to organize them into a larger narrative. I did not see my parents’ story as unique. Nightly conversations with friends were now filled with diatribes about the refusal of parents to accept help from adult children, the complexity of their care, and guilt about our inability to do enough. Despite the fact that I could not imagine an audience interested in such concerns, I continued to write.

Sometimes I felt myself drowning in the vast sea of my parents’

practical and emotional needs. Although I knew I would be a better caregiver with a stronger defense mechanism in place, I could not find a more distanced perspective from which to view their situation. At the same time, I wondered how my work as an educational researcher might change if my emotions were less tied up in the knot of my parents’ final years. I don’t believe we have some finite amount of emotional energy or that my experiences with poor, minority children and my white, middle-class family are equivalent. Their very real discomforts aside, my parents are receiving the best care possible in the setting of their choice, the apartment they have lived in for forty years.

The wrath of my father is the wrath of a man who remains ambitious for himself and for his children, not the wrath of a man who has directly suffered social injustice.

90 n jonathan g. silin

In the schools I visit there are too many children whose basic health and educational needs aren’t being met and too many teachers who have little or no control over their professional lives. The contexts that I move between and the potential remedies to ameliorate the problems I observe couldn’t be more different. In one I am the ultimate outsider—a white, Jewish, highly educated male, part of an effort to change poor/working-class elementary schools populated by African American and Latino children. In the other I am the ultimate insider, the son who bears responsibility for his aging parents. Nevertheless, I have become curious about the ways that these disparate experiences live within me.

Each is a story of loss, and as Ruth Behar suggests, we can only write them with “an awareness of how excruciating are the paradoxes of attachment and displacement.” I grieve for the lives that my parents have lived, for my own childhood, and for the belief in immor-tality that will ultimately be pierced by their death. At the same time, I grieve for the lives that many children in poor urban schools won’t live, for the missed opportunities to teach meaningful lessons about education, social change, and personal efficacy, and for the coherent