I AM IN A WAITING ROOM on the thirteenth floor of the Institute for Psychoanalysis in downtown Chicago, having arrived more than an hour early for an appointment. I’ve spent the past ten minutes staring at a small sign below a buzzer near the office’s inner door: Push to let your therapist know you are here. I don’t push it, though. I’m not here to see my therapist. I’m here to see my father.
He and I are meeting today to discuss a personal essay I’ve written about growing up the son of a Freudian psychoanalyst who withheld too much and a possibly bipolar mother who withheld too little. The essay contains raw, intimate details about my parents and their fierce, decades-long battle of a marriage: how they sometimes fought through their children (“Start your story over, Lad. Your father wasn’t listening. Apparently he was thinking about something more important”); how they lived for a while in separate parts of our house and used my brothers and me as go-betweens; how my sobbing mother once told us at a restaurant that they were divorcing because my father wasn’t willing to save the marriage, and he, apparently unfazed, continued to consult with the waitress about the daily specials.
