Hello, Good-bye - Page 5

 

There's no getting around that, as a lifelong, fully vested member of the In Treatment generation, I've spent more than half my life talking through just about everything with my son: the divorce, the years he spent commuting between his father's house and mine, the rotten boyfriends I subjected him to before I met Hugh, his marriage to Tamar, his longing for fatherhood, the difficulty we both still have when we say good-bye—a difficulty he now also experiences in relation to Isabelle when he travels for photo shoots, as he does often. He and I don't have many secrets, not the usual scenario among previous generations of parents and children—certainly not in my family of origin, where just about everything that mattered was sealed away in some dark collective psychic attic, never to be opened.

I sometimes wonder what it'll be like if Clay and I ever do find a way to occupy the same latitude and longitude for more than a few weeks or months at a time. Will we take each other for granted? Forget to call? Annoy each other in the petty ways that parents and adult children who live in close proximity often do? And this: can geographic proximity heal the fissures that rent us apart, each in our own way, so long ago? I hope that someday we'll have the chance to find out.

Until then, our lives will continue to be a little bit like the video my son shot of his daughter running toward the Eiffel Tower—each of us turning around every so often to make sure the other is still there.

Barbara Graham, an author, playwright, and memoirist, has written for publications such as National Geographic Traveler; O: The Oprah Magazine; Time; and Tricycle. Her latest book is Eye of My Heart: 27 Writers Reveal the Hidden Pleasures and Perils of Being a Grandmother, and she's a columnist for Grandparents.com. Contact: www.barbaragrahamonline.com. Tell us what you think about this article by e-mail at letters@psychnetworker.org, or at www.psychotherapynetworker.org. Log in and you'll find the comment section on every page of the online Magazine section.

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