Prayers for Bobby - Leroy Aarons [31]
She set to work. She sent Ed to the library and the bookstore at the church for some works on homosexuality. She culled the Bible for appropriate verses. Ed could find only three books on homosexuality in the bookstore and the small Walnut Creek library. One was by Tim LaHaye, an official of the Moral Majority, and took a frank fundamentalist line, confirming that homosexuality was a distortion of God’s will for mankind. The others stressed the popular theory that homosexuality was caused by an overbearing mother and distant, indifferent father.
Mary began her search for a counselor. Her sense of urgency escalated to alarm when Ed finally disclosed that Bobby had told him he had taken an excess dose of aspirin. Mary pleaded with Bobby, “Please don’t ever do that again. I’d rather have a homosexual son than a dead son!”
She called a former assistant pastor at Walnut Creek Presbyterian and asked if he knew of a Christian counselor “to deal with a family issue.” Yes, there was Del Jones, a psychologist with a local practice who was religiously sensitive and had done seminars at the church. Mary called and made an appointment for Bobby.
The day came. Joy drove Mary and Bobby to Jones’s office in Walnut Creek. In the waiting room, Bobby was asked to fill out an information form. There were one or two others waiting, and Mary felt their eyes burning into her with certain knowledge. The form asked, “Reason for seeking counseling,” and Bobby hesitated.
“What should I write?” he asked.
Mary thought for a moment and then said, “Put down ‘I’m here because I want to be the kind of person God wants me to be.’” Bobby wrote it in.
Del Jones was a round-faced, balding man of about thirty with a friendly, soft-spoken manner. Bobby saw him once a month (at fifty dollars a session) for four months but didn’t provide many details at home, except that Jones felt that father and son needed to develop a firmer relationship.
Mary bought into it, and at a group session with Jones, Bob, and Bobby, she unloaded on her husband. “I’ve always taken the kids to church…. I’m the one who’s taken this burden on. Sometimes I feel like a single parent.”
Bob said laconically, “Yeah, maybe we could do more things together. We could try. I don’t now how much it would help.”
Bobby’s sessions with Jones tapered off and finally ended. He told his mother he wasn’t getting enough out of them to be worth the time and money. Mary did not inquire further.
But Bobby wasn’t giving up. This was his intense self-help period; he was attempting to get on top of the forces that seemed to be taking over his life. He enrolled in a communications workshop at the Center for Living Skills in Walnut Creek. And after leaving Jones, he enlisted in a thirty-one-day experiment in “dynamic Christian living” through the church.
The communications workshop posed a series of problem areas and goals that Bobby painstakingly answered in a notebook. “Problem areas: ’Saying I’m sorry. Keeping my anger inside. Avoiding people I don’t like. ‘Saying what I really feel.’” The ideal parent, he wrote, understands, doesn’t act like a know-it-all, is easy to talk to, and, “does not try to mold my life after anyone else’s”
“I think my parents trust us kids,” he wrote in an essay. “We can talk openly about things if something is bothering us…. I don’t think of them as ‘parents,’ but two grown-ups who we love and who we try to work our problems out with. Sometimes we can, other times we can’t.”
Bobby dropped out of the workshop before it ended because of cash problems. He soon plunged into the demanding Christian living experiment devised by Walnut Creek Pres’s high school ministry, then headed by Dave