Parenting
<<2003-03-31 - 10:40 p.m.>>

Zibby (either spontaneously and with prescient brilliance or in response to some prior request which I have forgotten) gave me the name of a therapist whom she thinks could be good for Emma. Which gave me the incentive I needed to call home tonight . The family is home from Italy. I talked to my father last night, but my mother and my sister had been asleep, and my mother wanted to talk to me. So I called.

Talked to my mother for fifteen minutes. She inexplicably called me a good student, which is ridiculous, because she spent all of high school impressing upon me the point that I was a terrible student—though of course it was all very If you'd just apply yourself and You're not living up to your potential, which is certainly contrastive to my father's periodic Conferences on the Subject of Yale and How You Won't Get In with Those Grades but is nevertheless hardly academically me-positive. Revisionist historians, both of them. My father has decided that Reed is the best undergraduate education in the country.

I digress. Discussed also the Italy trip with my mother. About halfway through, my parents had a knock-down, drag-out fight. My father was playing the fun game in which he doesn't order dessert himself but instead eats substantial portions of other people's desserts, and in a family in which dessert is this coveted indulgence, this greedy guilty pleasure, this practice of his can get kind of charged. My mother commented that he was taking too big a bite. The shit, of course, hit the fan. How dare she talk to him like that, how can she insult him that way, blah blah blah vitriolic fury blah. My father, like John, often seems to subscribe to the "It's Just Rude" school of social interaction.

The point is, my father freaked the fuck out. And yeah, he was feeling denied, he was feeling uncared-for, and I know food represents all these things to him, trust me, I get it, but you know what? Don't care. I don't care. He scared holy Hell out of Emma, and that is so not okay with me. My mother gets all wrapped up in Dealing With Alan and forgets about taking care of Emma, and Emma retreats and doesn't talk about it and I know, I just know that it is all gnawing at her ribcage and pretending to be All Her Fault.

When I talked to my mother about it, she said she thought I was right—she said she's concerned for Emma, she's concerned that Emma doesn't cope as well as has always been believed. She's concerned that Emma displayed absolutely no visible reaction to the familial chaos in Italy. She believes it indicates a reluctance to confront. This is something of a "duh" moment, but I am grateful for small mercies. I am counting my blessings. I offered my mother the name Zibby had given me, but she said she'd suggested therapy to Emma and it hadn't gone over that well. She said she thought Emma would listen to me.

Which she actually kind of seemed to. I passed along Zibby's referral to Emma, seguing rather gracelessly from her intention to discuss this fight in family therapy. I said she needs someone on her side. I said she needs someone to look out for her—just her, no one else. I said no one is looking out for her in these situations. She said it's okay. I said no, it's not okay. And it's not okay.

So I sent Emma an email when I got back from physics lab. It said "This is who you call, and this is what you say if you get an answering machine, which you probably will, and this is how you begin if you actually speak to this woman on the phone, and if you are too nervous to call, send me your schedule in detail and I will call for you, and this is what you do at the appointment, and I really wish you'd give all this a try."

I really, really, really do.

And I'm concerned that maybe I'm being parental, but even that is better than making her feel like she needs to parent me. Someone needs to take care of her, and God knows our actual parents seem to have abdicated that role. I'm not ideal, but I'm better than nothing, and nothing's pretty much what she's been getting.

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