The Gay Uncle's Guide to Parenting

1 Sinking the Stockholm Syndrome Going Out Our friend Angela smirked guiltily as the waiter gave the cocktail shaker a final tremor. "I haven't done this in ages," she said. Tal squinted in disbelief. "Had a martini?" I squinted too. "Thought about your second martini before starting your first?" "No." Angela picked up her glass with both hands. For someone who'd once been nicknamed Guzzles, she looked out of practice. "Gone out on the town." "You call this 'on the town'?" Tal gestured at our surroundings. We were in a brand-new, brightly lit, sports bar/pool hall in a former warehouse in the middle of Helena--which, though it seemed to have only slightly more residents than our apartment building, is apparently the state capital of Montana. Angela shrugged. "It's as close as they come around here." "So then, this is your regular place? You come here and work the felts? Knock around the old stripes and solids?" Tal had had a pool table growing up, and in the rare circumstance in which we found ourselves around one, he took pleasure in tossing some lingo around. "Sure. I've been here before. Of course. Though it's been a little while." Angela took another, slightly less cautious sip. "To be perfectly honest . . . it's been a long while." She nodded. "It's actually my first time here since Seymour was born." She sighed. "Truth be told, I guess it's the first time I've gone out at night at all." My jaw tried to drop, but I held it shut. Seymour was Angela's son--her nearly three-year-old son--the one successful product of her failed relationship with a failed musician, a drummer named Lawrence, who had pretty much abandoned her when she'd discovered she was pregnant. She had subsequently left Brooklyn and moved here, back home, to the allegedly warm embrace of her family. But while her parents assisted her financially--paying for Seymour's day care, and allowing her to work a low-paying job teaching English to female juvenile offenders--the limits of their support ended there. I glanced at Tal. "I guess we sort of suspected as much." Angela set her shoulders. "What do you mean?" "Well, that twenty-minute monologue you delivered while we were waiting for our drinks? It was an annotated history of Seymour's recent bowel movements." Ever the polite one, Tal perked up. "Not that it wasn't interesting. Really. I never knew that thing about the protective enzyme around corn kernels that keeps them from being processed by our digestive system." "It would have been more interesting," I said, "if we weren't eating corn salsa." Angela sighed. "Okay. I know. I should get out more. But it's so hard to motivate. I don't have any real friends here. I'm not dating--unless you count Lawrence dropping by for sex once a year when his band is in town. Plus, I miss Seymour during the days when I'm at work, and he's only up for a few hours once I get home. I want to spend it with him. I don't want to miss anything." I nodded. "Fair enough." "You don't mean that." "You're right. What I meant to say was, you sound like you're suffering from a classic case of the Stockholm syndrome." "How's that?" "You know. When you fall in love with your captor . . ." "I know what it is. But he's not my captor. He's my son. It's my job to take care of him--all the time. Plus he's just so cute . . ." She got a doelike look in her eyes. "I don't want to leave him, even for a second, especially at night, when he's so tired and sweet. We've developed our little evening routine, where I give him his dinner and his bath, and we talk about our days. Then we get intoBerk, Brett is the author of 'The Gay Uncle's Guide to Parenting', published 2008 under ISBN 9780307381385 and ISBN 0307381382.