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Back from Syracuse.
RTT is fine.
Really.
I was shocked.
Fine meaning he hasn’t decompensated to any perceptible degree. He’s still incredibly disorganized and has an enormous chip on his shoulder. A good deal of that chip seems to be resentment over the fact that neither of his parents have any money – which is certainly true. Should I be apologetic about that? I had a business that failed, I quite literally lost everything, and finally, this year, managed to claw my way back into the lower rungs of the middle class. I actually think that’s an accomplishment.
Of course, they didn’t keep him at the hospital. He ended up spending all night on one of those orange plastic chairs under those ghastly unblinking fluorescent lights, waiting to be seen by the resident shrink.
He’d slept all day after finally getting home. I’d arrived just as he was waking up and immediately scooped him up for dinner at the neighborhood Chinese buffet. There’s nothing like fatty foods, MSG, and Red Dye II to celebrate your discharge from the nuthouse!
“There was this one guy who wouldn’t stop masturbating,” RTT said, grimacing.
“Very sad,” I said. “Lots of crazy people in the world. You know in nursing school, I did a six month rotation through the psych ward at Highland, which is the provider of last resort for Alameda County. It was kind of like spending six months in one of Dante’s circles of hell.”
“But, I mean, they would tell him to stop and he’d just keep doing it –“
“Obsessive compulsive disorder,” I said. “Maybe schizophrenia on top of that.”
“They kept me for seven hours! They kept letting people see the shrink who got there way after I did –“
“Triage,” I said mildly. “They see the sickest people first. That’s generally how they do it in emergency situations.”
“I’m really pissed off at Pat –“
Pat is the roommate who called 911.
“Really?” I asked. “Why?”
“Because I told him, I’m fine. I wasn’t going to commit suicide! I told the cops and the ambulance guys too when they got there!”
I sighed. “Robin, when you say stuff like, ‘I wish I were dead!’, people are going to react to that. This is probably something you picked up from me, by the way. I used to say, ‘I wish I were dead!’ quite often when your father and I used to fight, and you probably overheard it.
“What I meant by those words, of course, was that I wished I was not in this situation, that I felt really trapped, and that I couldn’t see any way out of it. Hyperbolic language is a measure of intensity for me, not of intent. I have a tendency to overdramatize. But other people can’t be expected to know that.
“You and I are very much alike in that regard, by the way.”
“Pat didn’t have to call,” Robin insisted.
“Well, I happen to think he behaved very responsibly,” I said, as mildly as I could.
Unspoken between us hovered the thought: And if someone had called about Justin that night, Justin would still be alive.
###
The next morning I took him out to breakfast, and we went through the usual basse pavan, a partnered standoff, the emotional equivalent of those strange, stiff dances favored by the Plantagenet court in the 15th century.
I wanted him to get up at 8:30; he wanted to get up at 10.
I wanted him to make phone calls. To reschedule his finals. To give the hospital his insurance information. To set up a dentist appointment to get the toothache he’d been suffering from for the past six months looked at –
“Stop telling me what to do all the time,” he snapped.
“Can we have a conversation that’s a real conversation?” I asked. “Like two adults?”
He nodded warily.
“Here’s how I see it,” I said. “Your financial aid is tight. It would have been tight under any circumstances. But you have expenses that weren’t entered into the original equation. You decided you wanted to live off-campus, which is more expensive than living in the dorms –“
“Well, it wouldn’t be if I didn’t have to pay rent for the summer when I’m not there,” he snapped.
“But you do have to pay rent for the summer when you’re not there,” I said. “And then you joined a fraternity that has fees –“
“I paid the fraternity fees out of my own money,” he said.
“No. You paid the fraternity fees out of the stipend that was given to you for your support,” I said.
“That’s my money,” he insisted.
“It’s your stipend,” I said. “If you hadn’t used it to pay fraternity fees, it would be available for your rent right now.”
He glowered at me.
“Robin, I don’t have very much money. If you want to see that as a source of shame and embarrassment, then I guess you will. But what I’m seeing is that I’m being asked to give up my recreational budget so that you can be in a fraternity. And I know how much you love your fraternity, and I think it’s been a really positive experience for you. But frankly, I’m ambivalent about giving up my recreational budget to subsidize your fraternity fees.”
“I paid my own fraternity fees,” he insisted. “I get it, okay? You and Dad are poor.”
He spat the word as though it was some kind of invective.
Poor.
Yes. Certainly. That’s part of it.
Another part of it is that I put myself through college. No one in my family gave me a penny after I left my mother’s home at the age of 15.
I get that times have changed, that education is now an expensive commodity, almost a utility because we’re told that unless you’re Steve Jobs or Bill Gates, without a college education, your career trajectory will consist of asking, “Do you want fries with your Whopper?” for the next 60 years.
But it’s one of those understandings that’s intellectual rather than emotional. I have a hard time wrapping my head around the fact that it’s my responsibility to help him now. Truth be told, I begrudge having to help him.
The third part of the equation, though, is that I stayed in Ithaca – a place where I was absolutely miserable for three years – because of Robin.
When Ben decided to walk, he simply disappeared for two weeks. Didn’t make any announcement of his intentions. Just… vanished.
And for those two weeks, RTT was out of his mind with worry. So was I, of course. But I’d spent 17 years at that point dealing with Ben’s constant lying and intermittent passive aggressive behavior. And trying, as much as possible, to shield Robin from it. What constructive purpose would it serve to let Robin know?
(Max was old enough to observe some of it. And Max loathes Ben with an intensity that’s really surprising because Max isn’t a hater generally speaking.)
When Ben went off the radar, Robin was frantic that Ben had killed himself.
I will say that apart from this episode, Ben has always been a really good father to Robin.
But when Ben finally resurfaced – at Robin’s school one afternoon, with a new True Love and a shiny new set of resolutions to go with that new True Love – no doubt forged through earnest conversations with the TL about the negative harpy a/k/a moi who’d driven a Good Man to desperate behaviors that weren’t really him! – Robin didn’t want to have anything to do with him.
By his senior year of high school, all that had changed. Ben was living in Trumansburg where Robin had friends; Ben had the advantage of living with someone who was earning a comfortable middleclass income. I could have left then and I doubt very much it would have damaged Robin. But for whatever reason, I stuck it out until Robin graduated from high school before taking off.
We had that blowout fight where Robin told me I was always painting myself out to be a victim. I don’t think anyone’s ever said anything to me that was so hurtful before or since. Right, he’s a 17 year old, my mind told me. You can’t take anything a teenager says seriously.
But my heart said, Fuck you, asshole. Victim, huh? Well, I won’t be making that mistake again..
A response that is neither a particularly mature nor appropriately maternal.
But there you have it.
Sigh.
I love Robin enormously but I always feel like I’m under siege when I’m around him. And I don’t particularly feel like putting any of my own small margin of comfort on the line for him, although, of course, I will because in the end, it’s not about my feelings. It’s about what’s doing what’s right.
###
So. He made the phone calls he needed to make. I went to the Laundromat and washed and folded about 100 pounds of his laundry since the drier at his house had been broken apparently for months.
I’d originally planned to stay in Syracuse until this morning so I could clean his room, and cook and freeze some meals, but he’d neglected to let me know that the house was having some huge-end-of-the-semester party Friday night, so I left in the late afternoon instead.
He did agree to seek some kind of therapy.
I will be putting more money toward his education.
He’s not depressed all the time. He’s depressed much of the time when he’s alone, which, of course, is when it counts. I think his depression is compounded by the fact that his living space is so fucking disorganized and his sleep cycles so out of whack.
Some time as we were out driving around that afternoon, he remarked, “You know, I think you love the idea of me more than you actually love me.”
And I thought, Well. Duh. As a parent, you love your child because he or she is your child. The pleasures of compatibility may factor in, but that’s not the reason you love them.
But there was no way I could articulate this complex thought in a way that he would not misunderstand. And anyway, what he was really asking was, How much do you love me?
“I love you so very, very much, Robin,” I said in answer to his unasked question.
RTT is fine.
Really.
I was shocked.
Fine meaning he hasn’t decompensated to any perceptible degree. He’s still incredibly disorganized and has an enormous chip on his shoulder. A good deal of that chip seems to be resentment over the fact that neither of his parents have any money – which is certainly true. Should I be apologetic about that? I had a business that failed, I quite literally lost everything, and finally, this year, managed to claw my way back into the lower rungs of the middle class. I actually think that’s an accomplishment.
Of course, they didn’t keep him at the hospital. He ended up spending all night on one of those orange plastic chairs under those ghastly unblinking fluorescent lights, waiting to be seen by the resident shrink.
He’d slept all day after finally getting home. I’d arrived just as he was waking up and immediately scooped him up for dinner at the neighborhood Chinese buffet. There’s nothing like fatty foods, MSG, and Red Dye II to celebrate your discharge from the nuthouse!
“There was this one guy who wouldn’t stop masturbating,” RTT said, grimacing.
“Very sad,” I said. “Lots of crazy people in the world. You know in nursing school, I did a six month rotation through the psych ward at Highland, which is the provider of last resort for Alameda County. It was kind of like spending six months in one of Dante’s circles of hell.”
“But, I mean, they would tell him to stop and he’d just keep doing it –“
“Obsessive compulsive disorder,” I said. “Maybe schizophrenia on top of that.”
“They kept me for seven hours! They kept letting people see the shrink who got there way after I did –“
“Triage,” I said mildly. “They see the sickest people first. That’s generally how they do it in emergency situations.”
“I’m really pissed off at Pat –“
Pat is the roommate who called 911.
“Really?” I asked. “Why?”
“Because I told him, I’m fine. I wasn’t going to commit suicide! I told the cops and the ambulance guys too when they got there!”
I sighed. “Robin, when you say stuff like, ‘I wish I were dead!’, people are going to react to that. This is probably something you picked up from me, by the way. I used to say, ‘I wish I were dead!’ quite often when your father and I used to fight, and you probably overheard it.
“What I meant by those words, of course, was that I wished I was not in this situation, that I felt really trapped, and that I couldn’t see any way out of it. Hyperbolic language is a measure of intensity for me, not of intent. I have a tendency to overdramatize. But other people can’t be expected to know that.
“You and I are very much alike in that regard, by the way.”
“Pat didn’t have to call,” Robin insisted.
“Well, I happen to think he behaved very responsibly,” I said, as mildly as I could.
Unspoken between us hovered the thought: And if someone had called about Justin that night, Justin would still be alive.
The next morning I took him out to breakfast, and we went through the usual basse pavan, a partnered standoff, the emotional equivalent of those strange, stiff dances favored by the Plantagenet court in the 15th century.
I wanted him to get up at 8:30; he wanted to get up at 10.
I wanted him to make phone calls. To reschedule his finals. To give the hospital his insurance information. To set up a dentist appointment to get the toothache he’d been suffering from for the past six months looked at –
“Stop telling me what to do all the time,” he snapped.
“Can we have a conversation that’s a real conversation?” I asked. “Like two adults?”
He nodded warily.
“Here’s how I see it,” I said. “Your financial aid is tight. It would have been tight under any circumstances. But you have expenses that weren’t entered into the original equation. You decided you wanted to live off-campus, which is more expensive than living in the dorms –“
“Well, it wouldn’t be if I didn’t have to pay rent for the summer when I’m not there,” he snapped.
“But you do have to pay rent for the summer when you’re not there,” I said. “And then you joined a fraternity that has fees –“
“I paid the fraternity fees out of my own money,” he said.
“No. You paid the fraternity fees out of the stipend that was given to you for your support,” I said.
“That’s my money,” he insisted.
“It’s your stipend,” I said. “If you hadn’t used it to pay fraternity fees, it would be available for your rent right now.”
He glowered at me.
“Robin, I don’t have very much money. If you want to see that as a source of shame and embarrassment, then I guess you will. But what I’m seeing is that I’m being asked to give up my recreational budget so that you can be in a fraternity. And I know how much you love your fraternity, and I think it’s been a really positive experience for you. But frankly, I’m ambivalent about giving up my recreational budget to subsidize your fraternity fees.”
“I paid my own fraternity fees,” he insisted. “I get it, okay? You and Dad are poor.”
He spat the word as though it was some kind of invective.
Poor.
Yes. Certainly. That’s part of it.
Another part of it is that I put myself through college. No one in my family gave me a penny after I left my mother’s home at the age of 15.
I get that times have changed, that education is now an expensive commodity, almost a utility because we’re told that unless you’re Steve Jobs or Bill Gates, without a college education, your career trajectory will consist of asking, “Do you want fries with your Whopper?” for the next 60 years.
But it’s one of those understandings that’s intellectual rather than emotional. I have a hard time wrapping my head around the fact that it’s my responsibility to help him now. Truth be told, I begrudge having to help him.
The third part of the equation, though, is that I stayed in Ithaca – a place where I was absolutely miserable for three years – because of Robin.
When Ben decided to walk, he simply disappeared for two weeks. Didn’t make any announcement of his intentions. Just… vanished.
And for those two weeks, RTT was out of his mind with worry. So was I, of course. But I’d spent 17 years at that point dealing with Ben’s constant lying and intermittent passive aggressive behavior. And trying, as much as possible, to shield Robin from it. What constructive purpose would it serve to let Robin know?
(Max was old enough to observe some of it. And Max loathes Ben with an intensity that’s really surprising because Max isn’t a hater generally speaking.)
When Ben went off the radar, Robin was frantic that Ben had killed himself.
I will say that apart from this episode, Ben has always been a really good father to Robin.
But when Ben finally resurfaced – at Robin’s school one afternoon, with a new True Love and a shiny new set of resolutions to go with that new True Love – no doubt forged through earnest conversations with the TL about the negative harpy a/k/a moi who’d driven a Good Man to desperate behaviors that weren’t really him! – Robin didn’t want to have anything to do with him.
By his senior year of high school, all that had changed. Ben was living in Trumansburg where Robin had friends; Ben had the advantage of living with someone who was earning a comfortable middleclass income. I could have left then and I doubt very much it would have damaged Robin. But for whatever reason, I stuck it out until Robin graduated from high school before taking off.
We had that blowout fight where Robin told me I was always painting myself out to be a victim. I don’t think anyone’s ever said anything to me that was so hurtful before or since. Right, he’s a 17 year old, my mind told me. You can’t take anything a teenager says seriously.
But my heart said, Fuck you, asshole. Victim, huh? Well, I won’t be making that mistake again..
A response that is neither a particularly mature nor appropriately maternal.
But there you have it.
Sigh.
I love Robin enormously but I always feel like I’m under siege when I’m around him. And I don’t particularly feel like putting any of my own small margin of comfort on the line for him, although, of course, I will because in the end, it’s not about my feelings. It’s about what’s doing what’s right.
So. He made the phone calls he needed to make. I went to the Laundromat and washed and folded about 100 pounds of his laundry since the drier at his house had been broken apparently for months.
I’d originally planned to stay in Syracuse until this morning so I could clean his room, and cook and freeze some meals, but he’d neglected to let me know that the house was having some huge-end-of-the-semester party Friday night, so I left in the late afternoon instead.
He did agree to seek some kind of therapy.
I will be putting more money toward his education.
He’s not depressed all the time. He’s depressed much of the time when he’s alone, which, of course, is when it counts. I think his depression is compounded by the fact that his living space is so fucking disorganized and his sleep cycles so out of whack.
Some time as we were out driving around that afternoon, he remarked, “You know, I think you love the idea of me more than you actually love me.”
And I thought, Well. Duh. As a parent, you love your child because he or she is your child. The pleasures of compatibility may factor in, but that’s not the reason you love them.
But there was no way I could articulate this complex thought in a way that he would not misunderstand. And anyway, what he was really asking was, How much do you love me?
“I love you so very, very much, Robin,” I said in answer to his unasked question.
