Becoming a Man – The New York Times

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In the last few years of his life, Frank was a man divided in two. He started watching Fox News on a loop and saying things I didn’t know how to engage. He and his brother would sit in front of the TV in Buffalo, and his brother would say, over and over, that Obama (using a racial expletive to refer to him) should be killed, while Frank sat silently. Our debates turned to shouting matches, mostly me yelling because Frank never yelled. This was a man who had over more than a decade taught me about goodness. Frank had come to our gay wedding and wept with joy. When he was in a rehab facility in St. Charles, Mo., after breaking his hip, he said, beaming, to the nurses: “This is my daughter and her wife. They just got married.” His next line might be, “Obama isn’t an American citizen,” and that line would sit right next to his explanation that he gave away his winter coat because the son of a nurse at the hospital where he volunteered every week needed one.

We are all contradictions. We are all doubling as ourselves. Lynette and I doubling as queer and straight now. I am doubling as someone who only ever felt like a boy and a man but knows viscerally the harsh realities of living as a girl and a woman. I love my father in some abstract way, and I can’t be near him.

I see all the flaws of men, all the ways their fragility makes them dangerous and powerful and dismissive and sure that they know it all, and I love being a man. I love masculinity, and I love hanging out with men. My body is a contradiction. I feel a fiery rage toward men for treating me like a woman, for making women seem crazy and emotional and inferior, for what men did to me. I feel so much joy living in a man’s body, my natural physicality, and I am trying to find a path toward becoming a good man.

My father is increasingly anxious as he faces his own end times. All he can think about is the next doctor appointment, the rash on his back, the oxygen level on his tank, the money my mom spent at the grocery store to buy the expensive ice cream she likes. He does not double for me during his illness. I can see only one thing, and I am trying to distance myself from him to escape what Polly knows in order to create Carl. We are in his home. He has had a stent put in for each kidney and has a catheter. He has cancer. I am in the TV room with him. We have just had a brief argument about the black men arrested in Starbucks. He thinks the woman had the right to call the police. He is in the blue leather recliner and is watching “Tales of Wells Fargo,” a western TV series that ran from 1957 to 1962. He watches it every single day at 5:30 p.m. The catheter is leaking through his diaper. “I’m miserable. I’m so miserable. I can’t do this.”

I lift him out of the recliner with one arm, get him to his feet. I hold the catheter. He is mostly peeing blood now. I get him into the bathroom. I put on latex gloves, release the lever on the catheter and drain the blood into a measuring cup, record the cubic centimeters. I put a towel underneath him, and I pull down his soaked pajamas, and I pull one swollen foot and leg out at a time. I pull down the diaper, and blood and urine drips out all over the towel.

I get a washcloth and soak it in warm water. First, I wash his face, gently moving the cloth over his forehead and cheeks and eyelids, underneath his neck and his arms. I rinse the cloth, and I wipe his penis and in between his thighs and down his legs. He doesn’t have his partial teeth in, and he is drooling all over the top of my shaved head, the drool running down the left side of my forehead. He hums the entire time, except when he says, “Now that you’re my son, it’s O.K. for you to do this.”

Now that I’m his son.

As I wipe the drool off my face and situate my father back into his recliner, I’m hit with the terrible grief, the unresolvable loss. My only chance of becoming a good man hinges on not becoming my father’s son.

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