First off, to set the record straight, my philosophy is that every parent is a single parent in our society; most of us just don't realize it. The myth of the nuclear family remains so entrenched that two adults who try to fuse their parenting methods into one consistent set of rules and activities may think they have outwitted the fates, but I doubt it.
Children have an eerie arsenal of highly developed extra senses to employ against their parents. Most adults lose these skills; they atrophy as we become independent and no longer need to fantasize what those who hold power over us are thinking or feeling (except in abusive relationships or in dictatorships.)
Among their unique talents, children push and probe, pitting one parent against the other repeatedly, and use their photographic emotional memory to ascertain the places where gradations of nuance, no matter how minor, exist between their parents that might be exploited to their advantage.
In this way, the gain access to resources that otherwise would elude them. To our children, we parents are transparent. They see us in every circumstance, including the stressful times when we forget who is watching. They never stop watching us, until they have learned what they need to know, then they become teenagers and use all of that accumulated wisdom to manipulate us into helping them do what they want most to do -- follow their hormones.
I remember thinking my Dad was the most powerful man in the world. But then I observed a strange gesture he made, rubbing his chest nervously, when talking to the head nurse at the facility where they held my grandmother.
I should explain. My grandmother was feisty, and into her 90s, and we'd been told she was "causing trouble." From what I could gather, she'd acquired a boyfriend in the nursing home, and when they wouldn't let her visit him one night, she tried to kick a nurse, and fell out of bed in the process.
Who knows if I have this exactly right; it’s a good story, and this is the way I remember it. We were there to visit her and had driven quite a distance from our town to do so, but the head nurse was punishing Grandma by prohibiting any visits that Sunday afternoon.
Dad was trying to challenge her, but he was rubbing his chest in that way that I just somehow knew meant he felt nervous, outgunned, intimidated by her authority. He wasn't going to win this confrontation, and his children were there witnessing his humiliation.
My sisters probably have a different memory, no doubt more compassionate. It's not that I loved my father less for turning out to not be the most powerful man in the world, it's that I noted this weakness of his for future use.
My own first two children were girls. When my first son was born, I'd been a parent for five years, but suddenly I felt something new -- "My God, what if Peter grows up to see through me, that I am hardly the powerful man my girls see me as?"
A new kind of witness had shown up in my world, and that made me uncomfortable.
Women possess many advantages over men, emotionally. We're all used to the social narrative of women's oppression these past 40 years, and many inequalities remain. Pay disparities, who gets top jobs, sexual abuse, and many other legacy systems remain in place.
But men have vulnerabilities that would kill women; in fact, that is precisely why we die at younger ages than they do. After a breakup, a man has lost his confidant and best friend, more times than not. He's lost that one person whom he felt he could count on to take care of him. He's lost the mirror he relied on to make him feel like he matters in this world.
I'm not suggesting women don't lose important things when they lose their men, but my experience and my observation is that they almost always come out stronger, better able to cope, and less prone to self-destruction than we do, particularly in middle age, which is when breakups begin to really take their toll.
My children, all six, see through me in ways that I hate to consider. It's not that I have a certain image I'd hope they could hew to; far from it, my one true hope would be they would integrate my experience into their own in ways that help them avoid some of my worst mistakes and pain. So, I want them to truly know me.
Maybe that is an element in what is going on here, for me. I'm conscious that time is accelerating, and I may not be able to get everything out about how I feel in the world in the right ways, so they have something later to review and match up with their own observations and insights.
Since when I'm in love with somebody I tell her all the rest of my story, the parts we don't necessarily tell our kids, being in an intimate relationship is like appointing our partner as the custodian of our life story.
Think about it: there are so many secrets we tell our lovers, things we would never share with other friends, co-workers, neighbors, parents, siblings, or our kids. Things like our sexual fantasies or what we really think of the pomposity of others around us, as well as our dreams for wealth, a perfect house, travel, and artistic hopes.
As we lurch fitfully through our lives, absorbing so many wrenching changes and unwanted transitions, it can feel as if our stories have all been reduced by post-modern discontinuities to a series of random and barely related chapters. Maybe that's why memoirs have supplanted autobiographies?
No one's life could ever have enough coherence to be a book anymore.
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