To my sons,
Greetings and welcome to the year 2020. As I write this, Paris is burning, or at least the Notre Dame burned about a year ago and at present there are fires of rage and outrage outside our window as thousands (including your own parents) take to the streets to protest the violence perpetrated upon brown and black bodies for so many years. Perhaps we do so fruitlessly, as our family has a long legacy of civil rights activity that leads nowhere, but we are driven with the sense that, as the Talmud says, “It is not upon you to complete the work but neither are you free to refrain from it.” You have spent the last 12 weeks of the pandemic cooking and cleaning and caring for one another as I work countless crazy hours, zooming with person upon person about death after death. We have just returned from Florida where your aunt wore a mask as she buried your uncle, who was denied the Jewish burial rites he facilitated for so many others for over 40 years. Death surrounds us and suffuses our home, but I am rooted and grounded by the banal normalities of everyday life: “Can I dye my hair?” and “How do I share a Netflix password with more than 5 people in the house?” I sit here while the earth turns upon its axis and for a time reality as I know it seems impossible, so perhaps all things are equally possible. What is reality-testing anyway when I step out in a mask and wave to my parents through a window? So hard to know where reality begins and ends when you haven't really left the house in 12 weeks and you no longer need to change out of pajama bottoms.
So, I hope as you Back-to-the-Future it to this paper, you will note that I am living in this admixture of the morbid and the mundane as I write to you. I am reading Dr. Richards' paper in which she asks herself (and I ask myself) important questions: “What do I want for the next generation
of women? Do I want them to be ‘strong-willed and non-conformist’? ‘Rebellious’?” I think about these questions but I really don't know the answer. I am not a mother to girls; I have not been blessed with the privilege to look at the female-identified face of the next generation and to ask myself, “What would I like her to be when she grows up and how shall I do my best in order to shape it, to actualize it for her?” I have never had the pleasure of going to a mother-daughter night or brushing out long, tangly hair, and I have never needed to control my urge to comment on potentially too-tight shorts and the message they send. Instead, my life has been full of the questions of a psychoanalyst raising four boys (all born within six years of one another). The questions of my motherhood have been, “Should he take hormone shots as the doctor recommends for fear he won't grow tall enough, and what does that even mean?” “Should I admit that pregnancy and nursing are among the greatest gifts of my life and that I am saddened that he will never have the possibility to have this – what I have had with him?” “Is it odd that I consider it normal that the boys cook and clean so that I can work upstairs finishing this psychoanalytic paper?” (I hope not, or I will never get this in.) In short, guys, Dr. Richards has asked what I want for the next generation of women and I have no idea whatsoever, but I do know quite a lot about what I want for the next generation of men—for you.
Sandra Buechler (2004) asks how a clinician can evoke a range of values in his or her patient—curiosity, hope, kindness, courage, a sense of purpose, emotional balance, the ability to bear loss, and integrity—and I have asked myself the same question in raising my children. In everything I do, these are the values I hold most dear. I want you to grow up to be men who are not combative, obnoxious or dissociative when your wives, professors or daughters demand multiple things that cannot be achieved at the same time. Men who are not tripping up women in their desire to become what gives them the most pleasure and satisfaction and joy in life, but facilitating it in all its complexity.
I hope to raise men who, irrespective of their sexual orientation, see the impossible needs of their partners as their own impossible needs as well. But I especially hope that my sons who choose women as their life partners will bring these sensitivities to their most important relationships. This way, whatever the women of this generation grapple with, so will my sons, with deliberation and thoughtfulness and with kindness. I
expect and hope that they will choose women in their lives who in turn will treat my sons' problems as their own. As the Babylonian Talmud says, (Ketubot 48a) “Ishto k'gufo, ba'al k'ishto”, one's wife is like his own body; a husband is as one with his wife. Jewish thought views a husband and wife as one unit. As any good Interpersonalist in the spirit of H.S. Sullivan, Frieda Fromm-Reichman, and Eric Fromm knows, there is no self per se but only a self in relation to others. So the Talmud was onto something when it told its male reader that his wife was like his own self; a marital unit, whether good or bad, is a unit—that is, singular. We exist in relation to one another, either in dyadic attunement or in negation. Such is our lot in life, to live as relational beings, and our success as happy and fulfilled individuals only goes as far as the spontaneity, mutuality and harmonious discourse we achieve with the people we engage with.
My thoughts as to who I wanted to be in the world, and the ability to think beyond the neighborhood and environment in which I was raised, were a direct result of the creative and empathic parenting of your grandparents and were facilitated by your Dad (who is editing this paper as I write it). Unlike the subjects of Betty Friedan's work, I did not feel seduced or pushed into a role in life which did not suit me. In The Féminines Mystique (1963), Friedan notes the dysphoria, the baseline unhappiness of many educated women who somehow, because of unseen cultural and interpersonal forces, found themselves in the company of only their young children and a shiny new washing machine. As Dr. Richards notes, their dissatisfaction was treated as a neurosis by the psychoanalysts of the time and not as a social problem. In this sense, the psychoanalysts were co-opted by the culture to help these women become content with what to the outsider looking in were very privileged lives.
I was more fortunate. My deep and meaningful supervision and friendship with Miltiades Zaphiropoulos (who had personally known the “greats” in Interpersonal Psychoanalysis and truly understood their work) introduced me to Sullivan's (1956) concept of selective inattention, the process of how we unconsciously shift awareness away from anxiety-laden interpersonal situations in an attempt to place out of awareness things that can cause conflict. This enables a person to free up conscious awareness for new and useful information, but also precludes us from dealing with potentially difficult interpersonal patterns. This selective inattention limits our ability to perceive the obstacles that stand
between us and a fulfilled life. The women in Friedan's book would have foreseen their own unhappiness had they been able to think with “evenly hovering attention” (Freud 1909) about the conflict between their career interests and society's expectations of how they would mother. But they unconsciously shifted their awareness away from this conflict until they were living a particular sort of life that did not suit all of their various selves.
This was not my lot. I was fortunate to find a career and a life that let me “unite my avocation and my vocation,” in the words of Robert Frost (1934). Psychoanalysis and feminism were a wonderful counterpart to mothering. I was lucky in that both feminist and psychoanalytic voices spoke out loud the things I might not have attended to, that might have gone unseen and unnoticed, much like the case of the women in Friedan's book. Moreover, training as an Interpersonal Psychoanalyst at the William Alanson White Institute and undergoing training analysis with a deeply empathic, rigorous and extraordinarily kind and courageous analyst gave me more of an ability to make my unconscious conscious (Freud, , 1915)—a life-experience for which I am eternally grateful. This exposure to the thoughts and feelings that might have gone unnoticed, but came unbidden (Stern,1990), gave me a chance to actualize my own way of being in the world and to meet with joy and pleasure the choices I would make if given my actual druthers. Not only did feminism and psychoanalysis allow me a clear-eyed view of what lay ahead—they continue to inform my philosophy of parenting and my relationship with my sons.
So please know, my sons whom I love so much, that the most important part of what I have done on this earth is to attempt the impossible. To facilitate your becoming empathic, psychologically-minded, and thoughtful—and maybe a little less cutthroat and Uber-competitive—without diminishing your alpha-male potential. You've competed on the basketball court and the soccer field with the best of them. But I also know that when one of you falls asleep on the couch, another will drape a blanket over him, and I have witnessed the odd staring of friends as they see the unbelievable: four teenage boys curled up together on the couch like puppies. We have encouraged you to become physicians or artists or teachers or religious figures. To contribute meaningfully to the world while at the same time earning a living and being able to stand on
your own two feet. We have watched you succeed academically while at the same time turning down lucrative summer job opportunities in favor of just one more year of being a counselor in camp to the kids you have been watching year after year. Some might call these feminine traits, but it seems right and just to watch as you volunteer to deliver packages to elderly people stuck at home during this damned epidemic and how you continually place the needs of others ahead of your own. Have your parents succeeded in raising you? I have no idea. What I can say is that you embody the best of human ideals, not just of masculine ideals. That we knew no other gender in raising you, so we raised you as best as we could.
So if some day you are disappointed about missing out on a promotion, remember that moving up the ladder is a wonderful thing, but not the only thing. That you once were the children who cleaned the house and made the meals (chili every damned Tuesday) and took care of the dog so your mother could work. And that she tried to make the sacrifices of your childhood worthwhile by utilizing the time you freed up for her wisely. And that you were kind, and good, and nurturant, and supportive. You were masculine but you performed “men's work” and “women's work” and whatever your mother needed. That you are essentially just wonderful human beings that have allowed me to write this letter telling you how proud I am of you and that the woman in me would not have said it for fear of the narcissistic man you would become but that the masculine in me has to call a spade a spade so I am just being honest. Please read the rest of the papers that accompany this one in the journal so that you can see how the women of the past generations have tried their hardest to create a reality that was better for both you and the women you adore. And whether you choose male or female partners, or no partners at all, you are deeply loved, irrespective of gender identification or sexual preference. Forgive us where we went wrong and do better with your own kids, should you choose to have them. Ants on the shoulders of the feminists who preceded you—my four feminist sons.
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