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By Root 411 0

when the bickering reached a fever pitch, my mother would say: “Let Mike choose for himself.” My father would agree to this plea, but it was apparent from the way he looked at me or instructed me that I really had no choice. “Go ahead,” he would say. “Choose which of us you want to be with. Stay with your mother if you like. I’ll just go away by myself, and maybe I won’t come back. If you don’t want me, nobody wants me.” Also, by this time the arguments would invariably have reached a point where my mother had been called crazy and was hurt enough to appear that way, and the prospect of staying alone in that house with her terrified me.

I would be standing there, looking back and forth between my father and my mother, and I would almost always choose my father in these moments.

I remember well—indeed, will never be able to forget—the impact this decision would have on my mother. Her face would lose its frantic aspect and would fall into undisguised heartbreak and I would feel a horrible guilt, as if I had just hit her myself. I remember one time watching her crumble into a heap on the sofa, crying into her hands. I immediately regretted my choice, and I wanted to comfort her. I went to my mother and reached out to hold her. She flung me back, anger reddening her face, and cried: “Stay away from me. You don’t love me.” I ran to my father’s side for protection. My mother said: “Oh, Mike, I would never hurt you. I do love you. Come to me.” But by that time I was too wary, and I would stand next to my father, my arms wrapped around his strong legs, fearing her, pitying her, and wanting to be as far away from her as possible.

“That was your cross,” my brother Frank told me, many years later. “I used to see you carrying that around inside you when you were little, the way you stayed away from everybody else. Many years later I used to think about that—you, stuck between them, having to choose which of them to be with. I felt for you at those times, but there wasn’t anything I could say or do. There wasn’t anything any of us could say or do.”

This is the way I learned how to love: choosing between two loves that I could not live without and that I could never hope to reconcile. I learned that, in some ways, loving could be like killing—or that at least a certain kind of choosing was like murdering. I knew I had to hurt my parents by choosing to abandon one or the other, by being forced to declare which one I preferred over the other, which one I loved more than the other. In effect, I would kill the heart of one of them by revealing this truth, and for the most part, it was my mother’s heart I had to kill. (No wonder I feared her.)

Years later, all this would feed into not only my own betrayals in love, but my misgivings about the hopefulness of the whole enterprise. Because I knew how awful it was to withhold or withdraw love, I came to fear somebody doing the same to me. I knew that to be left was to be rejected, condemned, declared unworthy. I feared, above all, somebody telling me that they didn’t love me or want me or need me or want to share a life with me. In other words. I became afraid of ending up as the victim of the same sort of choices I’d had to make virtually every season of my early childhood. So sometimes I would withhold love or hedge its bets, sometimes with one too many lovers at the same time. Just as often, I would end up on the receiving end—as the one not chosen, the one left behind.

It’s possible, of course, that I’m leaning too much on these childhood dramas. Maybe my failures in love are simply mistakes that I alone hold the deed for. I botched the chances God gave me for love, on my own. I made for myself the unworthiness that lives in my life.

But still I have to wonder: I never thought of my parents when I kissed a woman. So why did I think of them every time I lost or failed a woman?

A FEW TIMES, WHEN MY mother would threaten my father with murder in his sleep, he took her warnings seriously—or else decided to dramatize her craziness further—and folded out the couch in the living room, to