Memoir or Autobiography? Serial Musings on the Fiction of Memory
Written by MFA@CIIS candidate Guy Slater
Part Three: Mr. Mommathon
I didn’t find out I was adopted until after the two divorces, complicated by the unsolved murder of one would be step-mother. It’s hard to overstate the effect of any of these events separately, much less as a formidable torrent. As an adult writing about that period, the murder case in particular is undoubtedly a candidate for memoir, but I won’t delve into that here except to utter my common sense about it:
Terrible things happen. People either survive or don’t. Some of us can spin useful yarn out of life’s tragedies.
That said, the original adoption agreement was for my birth mother to remain anonymous, but the adoption had apparently not been fully ratified, and it was only the succession of unfortunate circumstances that finally forced the issue. So at twelve years old, I came to understand in fullness that neither of the doctor fathers, nor my siblings, nor my mother were blood related kin, not even legal kin to boot. Needless to say, this took me quite some time to sort out, and by the time of the “van incident,” I had reached an impasse about what it all meant. I wanted to believe I was impervious to the suffering of lineage because I felt I truly had none. The emotional ambivalence continues, as I only recently discovered that the birth certificate I had kept on file for years was a forgery. I petitioned for my original birth certificate only to find the space next to “Name of Mother:” blank.
Alas, life is not just the stuff issued in legal documents, nor is it the preeminent domain of blood ties, even with our newfound capability to connect with kin by spitting in a vial. The mapped human genome is the germ of the whole human tree of life yet undiscovered, which will undoubtedly bear all sorts of unintended fruit whose flesh is full of ethical dilemmas. The main of which is the fact that though there are many seeking connections, there are some who simply don’t want to be found. An evolutionary mutation of the tree I suppose, and invariably settled by law as well as the court of public opinion. As such, I understand that the woman who brought me into the world did not wish to be found because of the fraught circumstances surrounding her pregnancy with me, just as mother did not, in her van-life period, wish to be found either. They had their reasons. So I began to feel that maybe it didn’t matter that mother did not actually give birth to me and my former mantra transmuted: “Not of her flesh but of her spirit.” I wanted to believe that some silent, unwritten treaty could be issued between us because I began to understand her as someone who intended in the beginning to be “the real thing” whose charge would never be the wiser, even if she ultimately could not carry out the responsibility.
Speaking of documentation, none of us gets an instruction manual at birth as the saying goes, though many of us, with varying permutations of mental health and psychic scars, bring new humans into the world every second. In fact, according to the online Worldometer, in the two minutes it has taken me to think of and type the last six sentences or so, there have been 534 births in the world. If I do the math, that’s roughly four births per second (4.45 to be exact). Of course there were also 224 coincident deaths (1.86 p/second) in that same passage of time. There’s not exactly a manual for those either, religious doctrine notwithstanding. And so, like the vast proportion of the 7,902,890,532 living/dying people who came before me, I went and had a family of my own. And there was nothing like raising children full time to disabuse me of my penchant for parental blame and whining generally because I could recognize my very first natural and legal blood relations in them, and it suddenly made my own childhood seem very Old Testament.
I was (am, but they’re out of the nest now) a dedicated father to them. The man who raised me from time to time was not. He wasn’t cruel or anything, just negligent. And so my decades long experiment in stay-at-home Mr. Mom-hood was an act of compensation for what was missing. This one also a silent accord but more like reparations payed forward. In deference to doctor-father two and the doctor-father before him, I should say that my earlier characterization of “shameless cowards” (in part 1) should be revised to say “unyielding self-servers” whose “me generation” conceits often just boiled down to obfuscatory self-involvement. At the professional level, being a doctor is the quintessence of enlightened self-interest but it can leave little wiggle room for meaningful family life. Moreover, it seems to me that men of their generation were still quite vulnerable to the ways in which our culture breeds men to be cut off from genuine nurturing impulses while encouraging them to spend much of their adult life seeking career, status and self-gratification. Alas, they too, as I further discovered in therapy, were essentially just flawed children raising children like the rest of us, time immemorial.
However (and this is a big however), I discovered upon the birth of my two kids, that even the most willing and prepared parents realize very quickly that one’s image of the Self in the world is reset like a glitch in the Matrix. In my case, I found myself in a new generational category of American men: the post-modern, renaissance house-husband. Now, “renaissance” might be putting it a bit strongly. I mean, I wiped asses and made sandwiches with more or less good humor and discovered my own short-comings in fairly short order, but the difference was that I was thrilled to have a choice! I could’ve chosen the blue pill and carried on with a career and a few hours left over each day for my kids. But I gave all that up so that I could know my children, to feel them, suffer with them, talk with them– the red pill’s terrifying promise. And in that spirit, I brushed my kids’ cute little teeth and pulled their little shirts and pant legs over their adorable little appendages and shuffled them off to school while my partner went to her high paying job to bring home the bacon. And I cheerfully directed preschool art projects and conducted silly sing-alongs for classmates and DJ’d the school dances and fundraisers and joined the parade committee and so on. And when I wasn’t doing that stuff, I spent 13 years rebuilding our home from the foundation up. Building it up around my family. Containing us and giving us not just shelter, but a home. The home I never had.
So, despite my parents, or perhaps to spite them, I strove to be the world’s greatest dad. Super healthy motivation, right? What is the word for a kind of revenge that looks like justice? Retribution? Requital? In my defense, I had done the requisite years of the therapy and the life coaching and all that good stuff, allowing me to suppress the acute symptoms just enough to have lured a remarkable, stable, successful woman into my life who wanted to have children with me. One who was okay that I quit my job a few years in to raise them full time- not only agreeing with the material benefit of saving thousands of dollars a year in daycare costs but also acknowledging my vision of flipping the script so that I could play the role of primary caregiver. She knew that I really loved kids, having confessed to her that by the time I was twelve years old, I knew I wanted children of my own someday. Weird for a boy that age, I know. In my case, it was more like the fallout that becomes regenerative in the distant future, like mushrooms that burst through the soil of a bygone toxic landscape. So this was right, this was poetic justice maybe, and not at all a bad gig.
Now that’s not to say I didn’t despair my emasculation for a time, or my unrealized career as an internationally famous singer-songwriter. But I kept at it, though I made my share of blunders. I drank too much at the end of the day, for instance, so my parenting style was born in many ways of morning hangovers. My little guys quickly learned to dress themselves and fix their own breakfast long before most of their peers. “Do it yourself,” was my motto; my parents’ selfishness still reverberating in the world through me. The only comfort I had on the crummy days was that I always had another whole one to get it right.
So maybe the gap can never truly be filled. I’m not complaining. I feel that my unsteady upbringing led me to a life of caring for children that wasn’t as plausible for the doctor-fathers. Besides, I have a juicy childhood story to tell! I’ve won the memoirist’s cosmic lottery and should feel sorry for my poor happy children! I mean, they hardly have anything worthwhile to complain about and nary a soul to mourn! Or so I tell myself. One thing doctor-father two told me that really stuck was, “It doesn’t matter how great a parent you are; you’re still gonna fuck them up one way or the other.” Even if he just offered that as self-defense, I can’t help but wonder if it’s true. Only time will tell. What I’ve become more certain of is that mother’s influence, as mercurial as it was, had done its work on me in many deeply subtle and mysterious ways.
Final Segment (Part 4) — Mother Is a House Fire
Guy Slater is an MFA@CIIS creative writing student who is working on an autobiographical fiction with the working title, “A Year of Amnesty.” His goal is to complete it by the end of the program.
