I'M Sorry You Feel That Way: The Astonishing but True Story of a Daughter, Sister, Slut, Wife, Mother, and Friend to Man and Dog by Diana Joseph

Author:Diana Joseph [Joseph, Diana]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, Women, Personal Memoirs, Family & Relationships, General
ISBN: 9780425232217
Google: ZmeTNQEACAAJ
Publisher: Berkley Books
Published: 2010-07-15T18:44:29+00:00

At nine o’clock p.m., the boy emerged from his room. He’d washed the blood off his arms and leg and he seemed to be in a better mood. He announced he was starving, he asked if I would fix him two grilled cheese sandwiches, he said he and Louis had been IM’ing.

He wanted to know if Louis could sleep over tonight.

Is this boy for real? Is he normal? Does he have the skills he needs to survive? He’s so different from me. When I was his age, small children were left in my care, and I rooted through their mother’s medicine cabinets in search of a small white pill called Valium. Because I didn’t like to be in my room, I popped out the window screen and climbed out. I smoked pot with the high school senior across the street. But I also combed my hair and wore clean underwear and took some pride in my appearance.

It seems to me that any human boy who will be old enough to vote in less time than it would take for me to pay off a new car should know to brush his teeth every day without my having to tell him to. The boy should know to go outside into the bright sun-shiny daytime, he should want to go outside, he shouldn’t want to be so pale. He should prefer interacting with others to endless hours of slack-jawed, mouth-breathing video-game playing, and he should, over the course of a summer, pick up a book and read it. His mother is a college English professor married to another college English professor. A boy who is being raised by two college English professors should have a deep and profound love of the written word. But the boy says he doesn’t like to read, he hates Language Arts, he hates books and having to write book reports about them. “I think reading is a waste of time,” he says.

The boy is so different from boys I grew up with, from my rough-and-tumble brothers, from boy as I thought I understood the word. This boy doesn’t like to be sweaty, he doesn’t like to get dirty. He doesn’t like to play sports except for Madden NFL on Xbox 360. He says words like “flash memory” and “firmware dump” and “removable hard drive”; he made a video of himself downgrading 2.6 to 1.5 on his PSP that is over six minutes long; he says he has a bunch of illegal games and stuff he got off the Internet. “If I died and they searched my PSP, they’d know,” he says, “but they’d need a warrant.”

The boy doesn’t run. His walk is plodding, pokey, he drags his feet. He doesn’t like to hurry. He has a bike and knows how to ride it, but he’d rather not. Riding a bike means going outside. He doesn’t like leaving his room. When I asked him if he thought he might be agoraphobic, a thirteen-year-old agoraphobic, did he think he needed help because I can get him help, he told me that was a mean thing to say.

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