Stuck in the Middle with You

by Jennifer Finney Boylan

  BS: Most people go through with it. Whether it’s for religious reasons or “I’m forty years old. I don’t think my body’s ever going to get pregnant again. I want to be a mother, whether it’s for four days or four hours.”

  JFB: Moms choose that, even knowing that they will lose the baby, because they just want to have the experience of being a mom? Even for such a short time?

  BS: Yes. Or they just truly believe that it is a life and it’s not their job to take that life. Whenever divine intervention decides the life is over, that’s when it is. There are a whole bunch of different reasons people might go through with it.

  But a lot of people don’t want to roll those dice. One of our children is adopted.

  JFB: It’s a genetic—

  BS: Mutation. Although I hate that word. It makes me sad, like there’s something wrong with me. But, whatever. It’s a genetic mutation, it’s not me, per se.

  But I should say that adopting a child is rolling the dice too. Our adopted daughter is from Russia. We had to answer questions like, “Well, you have one child already, why do you want to have another one?”

  JFB: What was your answer to that question?

  BS: Because we fell in love with her.

  JFB: Do you ever feel that people—average-size people—in their experience with you, in some ways, are taught to be more loving, because they see in you another way of being human?

  BS: Absolutely not. My friends deal with the same shit as anybody else.

  There are some neighbors that—I wouldn’t say they’re nicer to me, because this is not exactly the warmest and fuzziest neighborhood. At least not for us. One neighbor, when we first moved in, actually we were at a party. In somebody’s drunken stupor, they sat next to me, on the stairs, at the club, and were like, “You know, I think it’s really cool that you’re little.”

  I looked at them and I was like, “Well, that’s good that that’s cool because there’s not jack I can do about it.”

  JFB: What was it like for you to fall in love the first time? Did it change the way you saw yourself?

  BS: My parents were—messed up. They were average-size people. They divorced when I was three. I lived with my mother for a couple of years and then—due to an unstable household—I then went to live with my father and stepmother.

  I would often hear from my stepmom, “If you were average-size, you would have guys knocking down the door for you, but guys aren’t going to give you the time of day.”

  My stepmother would remind me how I wasn’t like everyone else. It was a very screwed-up situation. But I grew up confident despite her. Like I was going to prove her wrong.

  JFB: For people who believe that no one’s going to fall in love with them, that first romance does change who you are. I—I don’t know if you’ve figured this out already, but I’m transgender.

  BS: Yeah. I read up about you.

  JFB: You did? Okay. So, I’ve been comparing our experiences in my head. For me, being different was—well, it was invisible for a long time. But I still had that feeling—no one’s going to fall in love with me. As for now, well. Invisibility is a luxury which neither you nor I actually get.

  BS: When you’re a little person, you don’t meet people eye to eye.

  JFB: Eye to eye?

  BS: I’m always having to look up at average-sized people. I remember that’s how I met my ex-husband—he’s a little person too.

  JFB: How did you meet?

  BS: I was taking out the garbage. He was walking by. I was cleaning out a dead woman’s apartment.

  JFB: Wow. Romantic!

  BS: I know. Our fairy tale. Right there on the streets of New York, me hauling out the trash.

  JFB: Did you date a lot of other little people, back when you were single?

  BS: Almost never. We got more attention, the two of us being together, than if it was just me.

  JFB: And attention was a bad thing?

  BS: It was annoying because it felt condescending. Because it was like, “Oh, how cute!” “Oh, how cute”? I mean, really?! Why is it cute? If a man and woman get married and have children, in the average-size people, it’s, “Oh, that’s wonderful, congratulations.” But with us, it was, “Oh, it’s so great that you found each other.”

  [Talia crawls over to her mother, and Barbara picks her up. For a moment she looks at the child in her arms.]

  JFB: So what do you imagine for the future? What do you hope for your daughter?

  BS: That she can be as well adjusted as her sisters are. And that when she gets older, that she can kick some ass.

  TIMOTHY KREIDER

  © Timothy Kreider

  She told me that she couldn’t really bear to see pictures of soldiers killed in Iraq or Afghanistan because, for all she knew, I might be one of them.

  Tim Kreider and I have been friends for over twenty-five years. For years he was a political cartoonist before turning to essays; his most recent book, We Learn Nothing, was published by Free Press (Simon & Schuster) in June 2012 and contained a short essay on the changes in our friendship in the wake of my gender shift. Kreider, forty-four at the time of this conversation, also wrote about the revelations of finding his biological mother and his unexpected half sisters in the essay “Sister World.” We met in the lobby of the Algonquin Hotel in October of 2011 to talk about biology and destiny.

  JENNIFER FINNEY BOYLAN: Here we are in the lobby of the lovely Algonquin, where Tim is eating barbecued pork sliders—

  TIMOTHY KREIDER: Just like Dorothy Parker used to eat.

  JFB: It was in this lobby that you first met me en femme.

  TK: You were not only a lady but were drinking a very ladylike drink. It was something in a secondary color with fruit and a parasol, and I got a big, honking martini.

  JFB: Yeah. Were you disappointed?

  TK: Disappointed? What do you mean?

  JFB: The fact that I would be the kind of woman who would drink drinks with a parasol.

  TK: No. I guess I figured as long as you’re going to be a woman, you might as well go whole hog.

  I remember sitting in this lobby with you. At moments it was weirdly normal, and at other moments, it felt like the LSD was kicking in.

  JFB: Is there any more tea?

  TK: I’m sorry. I took it all.

  JFB: Oh, we’ll get some more hot water from the waiter.

  TK: Good luck with that.

  JFB: So I remember asking, a long time ago, “Do you ever want to go find your biological parents?”

  I remember you kind of looked at me. You said, with what seemed to me like disdain, “I have parents. Why would I want to find some strangers? I have a mom and a dad, and they’re good parents.”

  How did that change?

  TK: [To waiter] Hi. Could we get another pot of hot water, please? Thank you, sir.

  You know, I felt, in many ways, I’d won the parent lottery, and I think I was a little more conscious of that than people who happen to be born to great parents because it had been, at one time, such a crap-shoot. I mean, there’s a whole room of infants that they had to choose one from.

  And it’s got to be like going to [a] pound, you know, like, “Oh, this one has a floppy ear. Let’s get him.” So I lucked out, I felt. They were very smart. They were kind. They were funny in different ways, and they encouraged all my interests even though they weren’t all interests that they shared or understood.

  You know, maybe this is a big digression and not what you want to talk about, but did you know that my mom and I took part in a very famous study at Johns Hopkins?

  JFB: No.

  TK: It’s called the Strange Situation, and it was a landmark study in attachment theory.

  JFB: The Strange Situation.

  TK: There would be a mother and infant in a room by themselves. Then the mother would leave, then the mother would come back. Then a stranger would enter the room and then the mother would leave the child with the stranger and then come back again. Something like th
at. And, by observing the reaction of infants in this situation in a very formal, clinical way, they were able to group people into several different classifications as either securely attached, ambivalently attached, insecurely attached, et cetera. And longitudinal studies show that people stay in those same categories or tend to stay in those same categories by and large for long periods of time, if not for life.

  JFB: Do you know what group they classified you in?

  TK: It sounds like, based on my mom’s description of my behavior, I might have been ambivalently attached, but that’s not something I can gauge.

  JFB: At what point did you change your mind about your biological mother? Was it like a nagging feeling that came over you, the older you got?

  TK: I think that the older you get, the more aware you become that you are, to some extent, a prisoner of your genes and there’s certain things about you that are, if not impossible to change, really not very malleable.

  Certain aspects of your personality are pretty set, and eventually, you start to wonder, Okay. What’s the deal with that? Where did I—where did this come from? And your parentage starts to seem like one possible answer to that.

  Also, this was around the time I was forty, and it occurred to me that my birth mother, who was twenty-one when she had me, would now be sixty-one, which isn’t old, but it’s not young either. And you don’t know. Anything could happen.

  You don’t necessarily have all the time in the world to make these decisions, and also, I’m just usually up for an adventure. And it seemed like something I’d rather do than not.

  JFB: Were you afraid of spoiling the mystery?

  TK: Yeah, sure. I like mystery. In fact, when they sent me a report from the adoption agency containing a lot of nonidentifying information, which included way more detailed information than I expected, about the circumstances of my birth and adoption—well, really, a whole little like nativity story of me.

  JFB: Would you be willing to tell the story?

  TK: It’s not entirely my story to tell. I would say it was, you know, pretty typical of millions of stories that happened around that time. Let’s just say it was youthful recklessness that led to a pregnancy. And this was pre–Roe v. Wade.

  So she was sent away with a cover story from her father—everyone agreed he would be killed by this—and, you know, went to some home for miserable teen mothers overseen by mean ladies where she waited to have me, give me up for adoption.

  I definitely hesitated before reading this because no matter what the story was it would then be one thing instead of another. The mystery would be replaced with just the plain old facts and my life would be like everybody else’s life.

  JFB: What was your fantasy of who she might be or who your father might be? Wasn’t there some story about your horrible toe?

  TK: You know, I have yet to confirm this. I have this second toe which is longer than my first toe and crooked at the end. It kind of bends over towards the smaller toes. It’s called the Morton toe.

  It’s an indelicate thing to ask girls to see their feet, but I have yet to ask my birth mother or half sisters whether they have this toe.

  JFB: So you knew you had the toe. There was nothing in the birth report—P.S.: Has hideous toes, same as mother.

  TK: Nobody in my adoptive family has the toe. I’ve got this Other—this Other toe—“other” capitalized like they do in grad school. This toe that is Other.

  JFB: Wasn’t there a long delay between getting the first report from the adoption agency and when you decided to actually make contact?

  TK: Uh-huh.

  JFB: I believe that you said to me, at one point, “Well, my biological mother gave me life and then gave me to a good family, and now, I will do her the favor of leaving her alone.”

  What did you just put on that slider? What is that? Applesauce?

  TK: It’s some sort of applesauce but—

  JFB: It’s applesauce on your burger?

  TK: Well, it’s not a burger. It’s pork.

  JFB: Awesome.

  TK: That folder sat on my desk for four years, and I don’t know why I kept not getting around to it. It was just like any other daunting chore. Like, you know, doing your taxes or filling out insurance forms. Except, obviously, there was something more to it than that. And I don’t know why I did it either.

  All it involved was filling out kind of a nosy little questionnaire for the state of Maryland and then writing a letter of introduction, which the agency would forward to my birth mother if they could locate her.

  But writing a letter of introduction to your unknown birth mother is the sort of task that can take a writer a while.

  JFB: So what was that letter like? Did you go through lots of drafts?

  TK: Mainly, I wanted, initially, to reassure her that I was not a crazy person who intended to glom onto her in some clingy, desperate way. I wasn’t hitting her up for money, didn’t want to intrude on her life, because, after all, it’s possible that she had her own family who she may never have told about me, and I didn’t want to wreck all that for her.

  I have another friend, who was adopted, who actually called her birth mother out of nowhere. Like, she did the tracking down herself rather than having an adoption agency. And she had scripted out her whole conversation in a very careful way, you know, in case her mother was not free to talk or didn’t want to acknowledge her.

  She had planned to say something like, “I was adopted. You know I was born on such and such a date in such and such a city and was adopted through this agency. I’ve been conducting a search for my biological mother, and that search has led me to you.” Not in any way saying, “You are my mother.”

  So she got through about half a sentence of that, and the woman on the other end of the phone said, “I know who this is.” Like she had been waiting for it every second of her life.

  JFB: So you wrote this letter to your mother saying, “I’m not a crazy person.” Tell me more about the letter.

  TK: I told her a little bit about my life now. I told her that my parents had been great parents and my upbringing had been fine. And another reason I’ll say that I think I wrote this at the time I did is that life had unexpectedly turned out okay against what might have seemed like the odds.

  I had a contract to write a book, and I got to be a writer. And I was living in New York and doing okay, and it seemed like possibly a narrow window in which this would be true.

  JFB: So then let’s cut, all Quentin Tarantino–style, to your biological mom’s house. Your mom finds a letter from you. What was that like for her?

  TK: She answered that letter within two weeks, and she told me later she would have answered sooner but she was on vacation in Italy. The night she got back—they’d just gotten off this long transatlantic flight back to the house.

  There was a heap of mail on the dining room table that their house-sitter had put there. She wasn’t going to deal with any of this. She wanted to have a glass of wine and put her feet up and then go to bed. And, as she tells it, at random, she picked one envelope up off the table, and she saw the return address, and she instantly knew what it was.

  She told her husband what it was, and he said, “Well, what are you going to do?” And she said, “What do you think I’m going to do?” You know, as if there was any question in her mind, and so she wrote back.

  And her letter, I would say, reciprocated the tone of mine. We were both very cautious and deferential. Wanted to make clear no one here is crazy.

  But, clearly, there were great and complicated emotions restrained behind both our letters, and so we exchanged a couple of more letters and then last names and other contact information so that we could write each other directly. Eventually, we talked on the phone and—

  JFB: So what was the phone conversation like?

  TK: Our first phone conversation lasted about an hour and a half, and it was a little bit like—it’s been a long time, I suppose, since you’ve been on a date. But when you go o
n a first date, even if the first date goes really well and you have a lot to talk about and you make each other laugh, when you go home, you’re completely exhausted because you’ve been on and evaluating a great deal of information and under a lot of stress. It was a little like that.

  JFB: Did she sound like you?

  TK: In a way, she seems younger than me now. She seems like me ten years ago. I was much more strident then politically, much more intolerant to the other side. I was just more absolutist in my views, and she seems like that.

  Like she seems like she’s in her twenties when she talks about politics, for example.

  JFB: I think you told me something about how she wanted to apologize for the wildness of her younger self to you.

  TK: Well, I wouldn’t put it like that. At no time did she apologize for anything, but she did tell me—this was the first time we met in person. She told me pretty much her whole life story, and I felt that she wanted me to understand why this had happened.

  She seemed very reproachful of her younger self in a way that you would if you hadn’t attained much distance from it yet. Most of us get to grow up gradually, and so, you know, for a while, we’re unforgiving of our youthful screwups and then, eventually, we’re like, “Eh, I was young.”

  JFB: We embrace them.

  TK: Yes. Though of course, I never had any accidental children. But she felt like she had just made irrevocable, terrible mistakes.

  JFB: Had the child that she’d given up haunted her? Was she somebody who had been waiting to hear from you all of her life?

  TK: She told me that she couldn’t really bear to see pictures of soldiers killed in Iraq or Afghanistan because, for all she knew, I might be one of them.

  You know, she just didn’t know if I was okay. I took with me all these visual aids the first time I met her, like childhood photos and drawings, because I was panicking a little bit. I felt I needed, you know, diagrams, charts.

  Mostly she didn’t want to look at that stuff. I suspect it might have been too painful for her, but the one thing that she looked at, that seemed to bring her a great deal of relief, was a photo of my young adoptive mother with me on her lap.