JFB: When you think of the best moments of being a dad, what comes to mind?
TE: Having a kid under each arm watching TV. You know, or even just waking up in the morning, in the bed, and having both of them crawl into the bed and snuggle. Having them under my arm.
I like feeling protective of them. It makes me feel like a red-tailed hawk, and there’s two baby hawks under my wing in the rain.
AUGUSTEN BURROUGHS
Courtesy of Augusten Burroughs
We break free, but just because we leave our parents doesn’t mean they leave us.
Augusten Burroughs is the author of, among other works, Running with Scissors, a memoir about his relationship with his mother, and A Wolf at the Table, about his father. On the twenty-seventh of July 2011, we sat on a rooftop at Eighty-first and Columbus in New York City, talking about parents and insanity. Just across the street, fifteen floors below us, was the sphere of the Hayden Planetarium, surrounded by moons and planets. As we talked, the temperature rose into the nineties. By the end of our conversation we felt like a pair of melted candles.
JENNIFER FINNEY BOYLAN: For those who came in late, could you describe a little bit what your experience was of your mother and of your father?
AUGUSTEN BURROUGHS: My parents met when they were young. They had an unhappy marriage. My father was an alcoholic whose disease progressed rapidly after their first child was born. My mother was—it’s sort of a long complicated story—
JFB: You can say that again.
AB: She’d always wanted to be an artist and was now married with a young son. Seven years after they had that young son, I was born. My mother was bipolar, but it was not diagnosed back then. My father was a very heavy drinker. It was a very verbally combative household. My mother had a degree in the arts, had an MFA. My father was a professor of philosophy at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. My brother was, for most of my childhood, out of the house.
They sought the help of a psychiatrist to save their marriage. He was a very untraditional psychiatrist, but it didn’t work and they divorced. My mother became closer and closer to this psychiatrist, whose practice was, again, absolutely out of the norm. He would eventually lose his license to practice medicine. My mother would have psychotic breaks every year, in the fall, usually. At a certain point, she just could not raise me. You know, I was like, thirteen. So she sent me to live with this psychiatrist and his family. He had a large family of biological children. Not all of them lived at home, but [he had] long-term psychiatric patients [living there too]. The house was always filled with people, and it was very busy. I grew up in that environment, and the doctor believed that when you were thirteen, you became an adult, free to make all your own choices. So it was a life with very little supervision, and it was a life with a lot of chaos.
JFB: In your memoir Running with Scissors, I feel a lot of readers responded to the unlikely combination of your tragic circumstances as well as a kind of comic response, a sense of the absurd, to that experience.
AB: At the time it seemed so hideous that it had to be funny. I mean, there were definitely lots of comical stuff that went on, but it was all sort of set within some pretty awful stuff. The thing about terrible circumstances, when you’re in them, is that they’re not survivable if you focus on just how bad they are, for one thing.… There was just so much of it that it was ridiculous.
JFB: So in Running with Scissors, it seems like you were able to make some measure of peace through humor. Whereas with A Wolf at the Table, the story you wrote about your father, it seemed much more raw and more angry, as if the emotions were still very volatile. Is that a fair observation?
AB: Oh, no, they were very different. A Wolf at the Table is a much angrier and more unresolved book. [When I was very young] I had not yet developed the defense mechanism of perspective, and being able to look at my circumstances with humor, which is like a life raft.
In that book, my father [comes off as] a monster, because [to me,] at that age he was a monster.
JFB: Do you think the job of fathers in raising sons is fundamentally harder than the job of the mother? I think that’s one of the things I was struggling with as I went from a father to a mother. Wondering, okay, well, is this a different job than I signed up for? Or is it the same job with a different accent? And I’m still struggling with the answer to that.
AB: I know a man who works with his hands for a living, very rugged guy. Single father of a daughter. And he’s the best mom you could ever want, because what’s a mom? A mom is the word we use to describe nurturing, and, you know, unconditional acceptance and love, so what’s a dad? My mother, when my parents divorced, used to say to me, “Don’t call me your mother, call me your parent.” I’ve been thinking about that since I was a kid—What is a mom? What is a mother?
JFB: Early in transition, I was very afraid for my boys not having a father, and that this was something I’d taken from them.
AB: They didn’t, and you did, and that’s fine. It’s not like you abandoned them on the street. You did take away the father, if a father is the man. It’s gone! Poof! You took it away, that role, that briefcase and that hat and that suit, as surely as if you stepped on it with your foot like a cockroach.
But what’s a father? What did you really take away from them? You took the ability for them to call you Dad, or Deedie to call you her husband.
JFB: Or to look at one of their parents and say, “I’m going to be like him.”
AB: Well, they still can say exactly the same thing, and I’m sure they do. Why wouldn’t they?
JFB: The things I was going to teach them, I think, are the things that I’m still teaching them—human kindness, generosity. As a result of having me as a father, I think my boys are forgiving of people who are different. I think they’re funny. I hope those are all the things they would have had anyway.
AB: I would hope it would be even more than forgiveness. I would hope they would feel proud to have a parent—I would feel safe. If I had a parent who went against the grain of society to protect themselves, to do what was right and sane, versus festering and writhing and becoming who knows how unstable. There’s a great deal of safety, from a kid’s point of view, to having a parent know exactly what they want. “This is going to be different here, guys, okay, but we’re doing it.” There’s something about that that is only honorable.
JFB: Is that what your father didn’t have? Did your father somehow not know what he wanted and who he was?
AB: My father was completely disconnected.
JFB: It seems like, in your writing at least, that your parents were almost perfectly matched for bringing out the worst in each other.
AB: They really were.
JFB: Each of them seems three-quarters of the way sane when they’re away from each other, but both of them seem all the way crazy when they’re together.
AB: They formed an unstable chemical when they were together. It was a relief when they were apart. My father was never sophisticated enough to grasp the notion of “I’m not your mother. I’m your parent.” That distinction he would never think to make.
JFB: What did your mother mean by that?
AB: She was saying to me, this is not about losing your father, but I do not want you to think of me as your mother. Don’t come to me asking me to make your lunches.
JFB: Why did she not want to be your mother?
AB: Because my mother did not want to participate in the tasks that are associated so heavily with the word mother. In the context of someone who’s twelve, thirteen, fourteen, my mother was not the kind of person to make lunch for you.
JFB: She wanted to be seen as an artist, not as someone who makes your peanut butter and Fluff.
AB: Exactly. She sort of felt she had better things to do. And she did, I’m sure, she did, that’s fine, that was never my … I admired that.
JFB: What about now? Do you feel free of them, your parents? Do people ever break free of them?
AB: We br
eak free, but just because we leave our parents doesn’t mean they leave us. The things that our parents taught us from the moment of our arrival in the bassinet, until whatever age it is that we leave, that is a part of our weave and weft.
JFB: Is there anything in you that has ever yearned to be a father? I know for gay men, that can be a more complicated question than to a straight couple. But is there?
AB: Oh yeah, definitely. I’ve always wanted kids; I’ve always wanted a large family.
JFB: What would their names be? Have you figured out their names?
AB: I’d have funny names for them. I don’t know … Gunther?
JFB: Sons or daughters?
AB: Both, all of them. Like a litter.
JFB: What do you think your father thought he was going to be when he set out on this [journey]?
AB: I don’t know. I never really knew my family very well.
JFB: When we’re kids, we think our parents have this plan. Like this guidebook somewhere.
AB: I never found that. I thought my parents were insane and I couldn’t wait to get out. Even when I was lonely, I thought they were completely fucking insane.
JFB: And you knew they were just winging it?
AB: Yeah, because it was just a chaotic mess.
JFB: I think that’s one of the things that makes your experience, in addition to the many other things, so different, because I think for a lot of people that I know who were raised in two-parent homes, there’s a certain point at which they realize their parents don’t know what they’re doing. It’s a great shock. In a way, for me, it wasn’t really until I had my own kids that I understood. It made me forgive my parents a little bit. Of course, my parents never did anything to me like your parents did to you, and on the whole it was a very stable family. It was years before they found out how unstable it was, because of what I was hiding from them.
I don’t know about you, but I’m really getting hot up here.
AB: It’s hot up here, man.
JFB: So—was there a shadow family that you imagined belonging to? What was that like? Who were they?
AB: It was derived from different images on TV, I think. I liked the idea of a large family because it seemed, I don’t know, part of the pack. Just to be able to relax and not [be] so tense. Worried. I was always worried, so I think I would always like …
I would have liked Willy Wonka.
I guess what would have made a difference is to have had happy parents, regardless of anything else. That they’d been happy people. Or happier. Not so angry. It would have nurtured and watered the light-heartedness that I have, that I feel inside but that I don’t really express enough, except in writing.
JFB: If you fell in love with some guy who had two sons, seven years apart—like your family—would that be appealing? Or would you run in the other direction?
AB: It would depend on how fucked up they were.
Like, this guy I bought my camera from, he came out and I met his teenagers, you know. And his daughter: She’s fifteen and smart as shit, and funny. And the son’s smart—I just was like, I wish you were mine! I totally wanted those kids. Oh, I would have loved it.
But then, you know, there are the kids who are, like, little judgmental, petty, dimwitted things. And if I had some—if this person I fell in love with had kids who felt very entitled and were not bright?
I’d feel like I would be compelled to ruin their lives.
“I’LL GIVE YOU SOMETHING TO CRY ABOUT,”
I SAID.
Zach, Jenny, and Sean Boylan, fall 2001. Wal-mart.
Courtesy of the author
We moved to Ireland in 1998. I had a job teaching American literature at University College Cork. The boys went to Montessori School, where they learned to sing in Irish. D’aois MacDonald bhí feirm, E-I-E-I-O! Getting them ready in the morning was a challenge, though, especially Sean, who at age three had become rather particular regarding his sartorial choices.
One morning, as I was trying to get him dressed, Seannie resisted the shorts that I had selected for him. They were plaid and had an elastic waistband. He pulled them off, threw them on the floor.
“Okay, you’re not doing that,” I said. I laid Sean on his back on the floor and held him down with one hand while yanking the shorts back over the child’s kicking feet. Then I pulled him into a standing position. “When I put your shorts on, you leave them on,” I said.
Sean yelled, “I don’t want pants! Oh, I hate pants!” And threw them onto the floor again.
“Goddamn it,” I said. “What did I just say?” I clenched my jaw, and the muscles in my temples pulsed.
I’d finally come out to my wife in the months before we left America, told her I had gender issues, that I wasn’t sure how deep they went, but that I hoped she could stand it if I cross-dressed once in a while. She’d been strangely sanguine. Sure, why not, she’d replied. Fantasy’s a good thing.
Among the other things I’d brought to Ireland was a small suitcase that contained a wig and a pair of heels, size twelve. Every once in a while, when the kids were asleep, I put this stuff on and read the Irish Times, did the crossword. Still, this wasn’t nearly as satisfying as it might sound.
I got Seannie down on the floor and pulled his shorts on. The child kicked and screamed as if being stabbed with knives. Still firmly holding my son down with my right hand, I pulled a pair of socks onto the boy’s feet, and after this stuffed each writhing, kicking foot into a tiny sneaker. “No!” screamed Sean. “I don’t want them! I don’t want them!”
“I don’t care what you want,” I explained, raising the child into the air and walking with him out into the hall.
“What’s going on?” asked Deedie.
“Just trying to go out the fucking door is all,” I replied.
“I hate you, Daddy,” said Sean. “I hate you!”
“Jim,” said Deedie. “Stop.”
“I’m just going out the door with my son wearing his actual goddamned pants,” I explained.
“I hate you, Daddy! I hate you!”
“Jim, please,” said Deedie. She reached for the child.
“I’ve got him,” I said, and walked out the front door still carrying the screaming boy. I opened the back door of the Opel and stuffed Sean into his car seat. Then I lowered the restraining straps over the child’s head and shoulders and clicked the buckle between Sean’s kicking legs. He writhed and wriggled like a condemned man in an electric chair. “I’m sorry it’s like this,” I said. “But you’re a bad boy.”
“I’m not a bad boy! You’re a bad daddy! I hate you!” The tears rolled down Sean’s face like rain.
I looked at my son with fury. “I’ll give you something to cry about,” I said. Then I slammed the car door.
I walked back inside. Zach looked up at me in fear. “What happened? Where is Baby Sean?”
“I locked him in his car seat,” I said.
“Why?” said Zach. “Why?”
“Because,” I said. “I’m teaching him a lesson.”
Maybe it’s no surprise that, in the wake of my decision to start sharing my secret with Deedie, I was a more terrible person rather than a more tranquil one. I had hoped that by cross-dressing openly once in a while, I’d be able to shed the burden of secrecy and to obtain a kind of equilibrium between my various selves. But instead, sitting there after-hours by the peat fire in our living room in Cork, wearing a Coldwater Creek skirt and a wig that still made me look like Joni Mitchell, I only felt stupid and embarrassed. I was mortified by the strangeness of it all, even as Deedie sat by my side. I wondered what possible explanation I could offer if the boys woke up. Who’s Joni Mitchell, Daddy? Worst of all, I knew that the thing I felt inside could not be expressed with clothes. To be honest, clothes weren’t really all that interesting to me; they’re still not. All they were was a means of making the thing I felt on the inside visible. But it was the thing inside that haunted me.
By the time we got to school that day,
the tears were rolling down my face as well as Sean’s. I pulled into the Montessori parking lot and I unbuckled Sean from his car seat and I held him in my arms. “I’m so sorry, Sean,” I said. “You’re not a bad boy. You’re a very good boy, and I love you.”
I remembered the time my father had accidentally burned me with the soldering iron while trying to fix my flying saucer. I’d never hurt you, Jim. I’m so sorry.
ON WEDNESDAY NIGHTS, Deedie and I would head down to the Gables pub on Douglas Street and listen to the session. We sat on stools, drinking our pints of Murphy’s and Beamish, as some of the finest musicians in the world sat in the corner, waving their fiddle bows around, playing banjos and guitars and bouzoukis and the Irish box. We befriended a guy named Johnny Neville, who played in a band called North Cregg. During the break he’d talk to us about his family. Johnny had two boys about the same age as our sons.
“Who’s taking care of the kids while you’re out here playing?” Deedie asked.
Johnny nodded. “That would be,” he said, “my good wife.”
He and his friend Christy Leahy played a wide range of old tunes, a lot of it in the Sliabh Luachra tradition, but there were a few original songs as well. There was one of Johnny’s that always made my throat close up, a ballad about his abusive, alcoholic father. It was called “The Wobblin’ Man.”
You’d wind him up and let him go,
And watch him wobble to and fro.
As I listened to this tune, my eyes shone with tears. But they did not fall. Deedie reached out and clasped my hand. “Are you all right, Jim?” she asked.
I said that I was fine.
ONE DAY, WHEN I picked Zach up at the Montessori School, I found him sobbing uncontrollably. “What happened?” I asked his teacher.
“Ah well, you know,” she said. “He’s had a bit of a disappointment.”
Stuck in the Middle with You Page 9
