WHEN MY OLDEST SON ZACK was 16, he was arrested for buying beer. The city sentenced him to 24 hours of community service. His mother wisely sentenced him to at least as many hours of talk therapy. After several sessions with his therapist, Zack came home and asked if we could talk. I was expecting more revelations. I just wasn’t expecting the one I got. Zack said, “I don’t think I know you very well.”
I wanted to say, “What kind of crap is this? I worked part-time when you were little so I could care for you. I wrote a novel while I rocked you in your bouncy seat. I rode you 10,000 miles on the back of my bike. I learned the difference between an alligator and a crocodile and hundreds of other useless pieces of information because you wanted to know. When you wanted to join Cub Scouts, I became the least likely den leader in history. I’ve been there for you, pal. Don’t tell me you don’t know me.”
Instead I asked, “Do you mean I don’t know you very well?”
Zack made it clear that he had been keeping secrets. The drinking wasn’t a one-time event. He had also been cutting school. And there were several nights when he was somewhere other than where he told me he’d be. I figured I had him. The problem was he wasn’t letting me know him.
Then he said, “No, I mean I don’t really know you. I just know stuff about you.”
Zack had shared with his counselor his sense of loneliness. His counselor had prescribed intimacy and given him an assignment: Practice getting below the surface with people. Zack decided to start with me. And I will be forever grateful.
It took me a few days to get used to the idea that my son didn’t know much about my interior life. I had to recalibrate my self-image. Apparently, I was not Mr. Most-Open-Dad-on-the-Planet. I came to see that Zack was right. I was open about discussing things-ideas, events, values-but when the subject got personal, I backed off. It wasn’t a fear of intimacy, as some of you women readers might be suspecting about now. You’ll have to take my word for it, but I am not a man who has trouble talking about his feelings. This was something different.
I was trapped in my role as parent. I realized that every time I got close to revealing my feelings about important things in my life-about my divorce from his mother, about my trials as a writer, about my temper, about my dreams deferred-I stopped. There are no maps to the land of fatherhood, but there are boundaries. Clearly those boundaries had become fences. It was time to take some of them down.
The dismantling took place on our back deck. We stopped going to ballgames. We gave up our tennis matches and one-on-one games. We had done that. We would do that again. Now, it was time to sit still.
We talked about our saddest moments, our best days, the things that make us happy, our worst fears, our biggest embarrassments, our craziest dreams. I told him things the parent in me probably shouldn’t have. Having dismantled the fences, I wasn’t sure where I was. The markers between father and friend became difficult to discern.
I heard voices of caution in my head, but I made a decision to listen instead to the voice of my son, asking me to please tell him who I was. I told him about the novel I wrote when he was an infant, how it was inspired by my obsessive fear that he would die in his crib of Sudden Infant Death Syndrome. I told him how I checked his breathing a dozen times a night. How I wrote to face my fear.
We traded stories. We had no rules, but I followed one anyway: I suspended all judgment. The less I said, the more he told me. He described a night he drank so much he passed out. He spoke of bouts of depression and loneliness and anger. He told me about some of his sexual experiences. I told him about some of my own early experiences with love and lust. But instead of putting them through the PG-13 filter, as I usually did, I spoke candidly. We found common ground.
He told me about a time I had hurt him deeply, how betrayed he had felt and how long it had taken him to forgive me. I didn’t make excuses or defend myself. I just listened. For the first time, I saw Zack as he saw himself, not as a part of me, which was the way I had always seen him.
I told him about how passionately I had loved his mother and how hurt I was when we divorced. I told him my own stories of betrayal and heartbreak, the ones I carefully hid from him when he was 9, when his mother and I first separated.
One night I told him something I had never told anyone. That I hadn’t been accepted into the graduate creative writing program I had applied to after getting my B.A. How hurt and shamed I had been. At the time, I told everyone I had just decided to go elsewhere for graduate school.
Psychologists always talk about how we re-create our childhoods. Mostly, they’re referring to the negative experiences. If your parents were alcoholics with poor relationships, you might stay away from alcohol, but you find a way to re-create the tension and conflict. Zack unknowingly helped me re-create one of the things that was positive in my own childhood-my relationship with my father.
My father was the rare man of his generation who had the courage to make himself vulnerable to his sons, my brother and I. By the time I was Zack’s age, my father had shared a lot of his emotional history with us. I knew his darkest fear when he became a father was that he would be as distant a parent as his own father had been.
I knew about his first love, a woman he wanted to marry, and how she broke it off with him when her family forbade her to marry a Jew. He had told me stories that let me understand his values in a way abstractions never could. For example, I knew he had sued Bucknell University on behalf of one of his professors who had been discriminated against. I knew the story of what led him and his father not to talk for 15 years. He didn’t apologize for his flaws or chastise me for mine. He didn’t lecture. He listened. And we became best friends until his death in 1991, when I was 33.
Talking to Zack on the back porch that spring and summer made me remember my father. Zack taught me that love is different from intimacy. That love is often a product of proximity and chance, bound by roles and duty. But intimacy is never random. It requires care and feeding. And in many important ways, its bonds are so much more powerful than love.
