\u201cYou don\u2019t know who you are anymore!\u201d We\u2019ve just finished eating lunch and my grandmother is sitting across from me at her dining room table. \u201cAll your traveling, your reading, exploring other cultures,\u201d she purses her lips and looks down. Then she tilts her head ever so slightly to the right and nods a couple of times, a gesture that usually means she\u2019s looking for a nicer way to say what she really wants to say. After a few seconds, she raises her face to me but can barely meet my eyes. \u201cYou\u2019ve forgotten where you come from,\u201d she says at last, her voice more sad than accusing.<\/p>\n
I know what this is about\u2014I told her last week that my wife and I have decided not to have our son circumcised\u2014but I ask anyway. She knows I know, and I hear in her voice when she answers how much she resents my making her say it. Oddly, though, she does not try to make me feel guilty about denying my Jewish heritage or about marrying a non-Jewish woman. Instead, she says, \u201cYou\u2019re only asking for trouble, you know. When he gets older he\u2019s going to want to know why he\u2019s not like you; he\u2019s going to think you don\u2019t want him to be like you; and what are you going to tell him when he asks you? Have you thought about that? What are you going to tell him?\u201d<\/p>\n
\u2022<\/p>\n
My two-and-a-half-year-old son, who\u2019s been sitting without his diaper on the carpet in the living room, gets up and sits down next to me on the couch. \u201cDad,\u201d he says, \u201cmy dool<\/em> is soft.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cWell, it\u2019s supposed to be soft,\u201d I tell him.<\/p>\n \u201cNo, it\u2019s soft<\/em>,\u201d he says, his intonation making clear that I didn\u2019t understand him the first time.<\/p>\n \u201cYou don\u2019t like it when it\u2019s soft?\u201d I ask, waiting to see what he does with the opening I\u2019ve given him.<\/p>\n \u201cNo,\u201d he answers without missing a beat, \u201cI want it to be big\u2026like yours.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cDon\u2019t worry,\u201d I say, \u201cwhen you get bigger, your dool <\/em> will get bigger to. Right now, it\u2019s the just right size for\u2014<\/p>\n Before I can finish my sentence\u2014\u201cfor your body\u201d\u2014my son looks up at me, his eyes widening and his mouth curling into a smile. \u201cDad,\u201d he says, \u201ccome see my tools!\u201d\u2014my son is a budding handyman\u2014\u201cI need to fix the refrigerator!\u201d And as if the previous conversation had not taken place, he grabs my hand and leads me off to his room, where we retrieve his plastic hammer and screwdriver so he can make sure the refrigerator continues to keep our food cold.<\/p>\n As we\u2019re walking, I laugh at myself, for I of course saw in my son\u2019s desire for a penis as a big as mine a small moment of crisis, a foreshadowing of all the ways in which he will try to measure up to me and find himself wanting. Yet who knows what he really meant by what he said? And even assuming he meant exactly what he said, who knows what significance, precisely, he attaches to the notion of big or what he thinks it says about me that my penis is bigger than his, or about him that his is smaller? I remember how the other day when were watching television, my son made a point of laying on his side in as close an approximation to my posture as he could achieve and how he insisted that I notice him, \u201cDad! Look! I\u2019m sitting just like you are!\u201d Or how he takes his laptop-like alphabet-teaching-computer-game and sets it up so he can sit like I sit at my computer and type. More and more he wants to be like me, to do the things I do, and so it could be that his comment about his penis had nothing to do with any of the phallic anxiety I could not help but hear in his words. Maybe he was just acknowledging that while he can sit or type like I do, he cannot bring his body into congruence with mine.<\/p>\n My grandmother\u2019s question and accusation comes back to me\u2014What will you tell him when he asks why he\u2019s not circumcised and you are? He\u2019s going to think you didn\u2019t want him to be like you!<\/em>\u2014and I wonder not so much what I will tell him, but whether I will ever be able to know precisely what he means by asking.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" \u201cYou don\u2019t know who you are anymore!\u201d We\u2019ve just finished eating lunch and my grandmother is sitting across from me at her dining room table. \u201cAll your traveling, your reading, exploring other cultures,\u201d she purses her lips and looks down. … Continue reading