"My mother appeared none too pleased that my father no longer thought of a diplomatic career for me. I fancy that, anxious above all else that a definite rule of life should discipline the vagaries of my nervous system, what she regretted was not so much seeing me abandon diplomacy as the prospect of my devoting myself to literature. 'Don't worry,' my father told her, 'the main thing is that a man should find pleasure in his work. He's no longer a child. he knows pretty well now what he likes, it's very unlikely that he will change, and he's quite capable of deciding for himself what will make him happy in life.'"
Marcel Proust, Within a Budding Grove, p. 519
Here Proust is reflecting on his father's acceptance of his desire not to pursue a career in diplomacy, a response so unexpected that it caused him "great uneasiness." Proust continues, "His unexpected kindnesses, when they occurred, had always made me long to kiss his glowing cheeks above his beard . . ." I talked before about how my own father had surprised me when I told him, midway through my junior year in college, that I didn't really want to go to medical school. Far from being disappointed, at least on the surface, he was supportive of me doing what I wanted to do, and how that was one of the turning points in our relationship (not that we had a bad relationship, but I think after this we had a more direct and honest relationship as I began to grow into my own person). Lost in all that drama was my mother's response, which was always more of a mystery, mainly because we weren't as close, or maybe we just didn't talk about personal matters as much. And when we did talk about personal matters it seemed to catch us both off-guard. When I asked Brenda to marry me I told my mom, naturally a few weeks later, and she asked about my father's response, and seemed quite stunned when I told her that I hadn't talked to him yet. Similarly, when my first really serious adult relationship was floundering, and I actually talked to my mom about it, she pointed out that in the end the woman and I could, in reality, just be friends and not lovers. I can still remember her saying the word "lovers." Why that stunned me I suppose is representative of the evolving nature of every relationship that every person has with their parents, but in other ways I think it speaks to the flawed nature of our relationship. And to be honest, I really need to take ownership of a lot of that. Like my father, I have traditionally kept close counsel and not shared my personal feelings, especially if it meant that I had to show a weakness or to ask for aid (which, in my mind, were much the same thing).
Having said all that, and taken responsibility for some a goodly portion of the emotional distance that seems to dominate my relationship with my parents, there is always another side to the story. Truthfully, I've always felt that they didn't take a lot of interest in my career, especially when it veered away from their preconceived notion of what I should do with my life. My father used to jokingly tell my son that he, meaning my father, was the "serious" doctor, as compared to me. It was a joke, but I always felt there was a little bit more percolating beneath the surface. For years my mother seemed mainly mystified by what I was doing with my time. As I was finishing my dissertation and planning the move south to Atlanta to start at DeKalb (eventually to become Georgia Perimeter) College she, for the first time, asked me to explain to her the process of what I was doing. At that moment I was thirty years old and was finishing my Ph.D. and she suddenly wanted to know what I was doing. A couple years later she asked my son if I was teaching full-time at DeKalb, although, to be fair, to outsiders that extreme flexibility of the life of a university professor is a bit hard to reconcile with the temporal tyranny of the real world. In the end this led me - or, maybe more accurately, reinforced by natural inclination, to exclude them from my career. I blew off my Masters and Ph.D. ceremonies and part of it is my almost innate antipathy to meetings and/or ceremonies, but it also, truthfully, expressed my sincere belief that if you weren't going to be there everyday for the long messy trek then you don't get to stand up there for the picture taking part of the celebration. Similarly, on two different occasions when I won national teaching awards there were ceremonies, once in New York at the UN and once in Washington, DC, and my parents wanted to attend, and I told them that it was for recipients only. I'm sure I could have arranged something, but I didn't, for the reasons I've explained above. It certainly doesn't say something good about my relationship with my parents, and, probably more accurately, about me, but I promised to be as honest as possible during this year of Proustian self-examination.
All of this brings me back to a conversation that my father and I recently had where we, truthfully and quite sincerely, told each other how much we loved each other, but, oddly, maybe more importantly, expressed how proud we were of each other. Queue the dinner scene from It's a Wonderful Life. And, yes, it was "about time one of you lunkheads said it."
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