Stuck in the Middle with You: A Memoir of Parenting in Three Genders

by Jennifer Finney Boylan

  From my mother’s bedroom I heard the soft tinkling of a music box. There was a small ballerina figurine in her jewelry box that pirouetted and danced to the music when the box was opened. When no one was home, sometimes I went into my parents’ bedroom, and wound up the music box, and watched that ballerina dance to the weird, sad music. That distant music now meant that my mother had opened her jewelry box, that she was taking off her earrings and laying them next to her necklaces and pins.

  Beyond a line of trees Dr. DeWees was running his mower in his backyard, and the sound of the blades echoed in the hollow. Suddenly, there was a sharp crashing sound, and a moment after that the tractor’s engine died; and then there was the sound of Dr. DeWees cussing out the rock that had gotten jammed in the blades. The cussing continued for a while, as Dr. DeWees addressed himself to the rock and then the tractor.

  I was drinking Wink.

  A copy of Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird was lying facedown on the back step. I’d had to write a theme about it for school, on what Atticus Finch meant when he said, “You never really know a man until you walk around in his heels.” His shoes, I mean. At school we’d kept talking about Atticus, but that wasn’t the character I was interested in; I was much more concerned with Boo Radley. More than anything else I wanted, like Scout, to let him out, even though I knew it was impossible. Hey, I’d say to him. Hey, Boo.

  My father was building a wall in the side yard. There was a chunk as he hit the slate with his hammer. Then he pulled the stone over to the wall and found the right place for it. There was a soft flinty snick as he struck his butane lighter and lit up an L&M Filter. On his transistor radio was the sound of the Phillies game, the boys playing over in old Connie Mack Stadium, the sound of the distant crowd roaring as Jim Bunning hit a grounder to second.

  It was a boyhood, and it was mine, and it was typical, with the exception of the business inside my heart.

  My mother stood on the threshold of the front door and rang a copper cowbell. The sound of that bell—clanky and slightly obnoxious—had the ability to reach my sister and me, wherever we were, and get us to drop whatever it was we were doing and run toward home. On this day, I simply stood up and walked around from the back porch to the front yard, where my mother stood. My sister, who’d been out in the woods, walked up the driveway toward us, in no particular hurry.

  My boyhood, like others, ended over a period of years. Even the melodramatic and salacious event of gender reassignment didn’t represent the moment it all finally ceased, assuming that there even was such a moment. Sure, you could conjure such a moment up, if you wanted—say, the day I dropped out of Boy Scouts because I was tired of the angry ex-marine scoutmaster lining us up for inspection every Wednesday night and yelling at us, telling us we were all soft, that we were weaklings. Or maybe you could say it all ended when my parents packed up the Oldsmobile Omega and drove me and my Grateful Dead albums the five hours north to Wesleyan, in the fall of 1976. Maybe you could nominate the day of my first kiss, or the day I met Deedie Finney, or the day I got married, or the day my first child was born. There are many such days marking the end of a boyhood, you could argue.

  But most of the time I think that the boy that I was is still with me, in spite of the woman’s life that is now mine. I hear that boy’s voice when I tell a joke or raise my voice to sing some filthy song I picked up in Cork. I feel his loneliness, sometimes, when I hear children in our neighborhood in Maine, calling to each other, as twilight falls at the end of a day in summer. And sometimes, if I hear the clanking, toneless ringing of a cowbell, I’m still tempted to get up from where I’m sitting and start running through the grass toward home.

  THIRTY-FIVE YEARS LATER, in the late afternoon of an October day, I went for a bike ride on the golf course with my boys. At ten, Zach was emotional, buoyant, a child who liked to sneak up behind people and hug them. His brother, Seannie, was the exact opposite—quiet, sturdy, private. Seannie still had his training wheels on but could outpedal both his brother and me. On one occasion he skidded off the path and bounced right off a large boulder. Without a pause, he looked up at me and said, “That was fun. Let’s do it again.”

  I felt proud of my children as they biked on ahead of me, up the gentle slope of the path that circumnavigated the fifteenth green. We’d been out on the course now for almost an hour. With their mops of blond hair, the ten-year-old and the eight-year-old zoomed ahead of me, and as I watched the bikes ascend the hill I could only feel pride and wonder. They were turning out all right, my kids, in spite of everything. Like everyone else, I watched them for signs of trauma, but so far there was nothing that distinguished them from their classmates in the third and fifth grades.

  The wind blew in my hair, and I paused for a moment to catch my breath. I thought about Deedie back at the house, making a rub for a slab of barbecued ribs we hoped to be devouring later that day. We had all come so far as a family, and yet in some ways things had not changed at all. My heart, and Deedie’s heart—in Russo’s phrase—still “inclined toward the other,” and for the most part that which made us similar to other families seemed a whole lot more important than that which made us different.

  I saw my children ascending the hill, two blond boys on bikes, racing each other to the crest. The sound of their laughter came to me from a distance.

  I got back on my bike and followed them up the hill. It took a while for me to catch up with them. They were waiting for me at the water tank by the sixteenth tee. Seannie had leaned his bike against a bench and was filling a cone-shaped cup from one of the water barrels that was stationed around the course. Zach was waiting in line behind his brother, holding a cone cup in his hand.

  “You know what I could do with a cup like this?” I said to Zach.

  “What?”

  “Well, if I ran a string of elastic through it, and cut a small hole in the bottom, you could use it as a beak for your costume.”

  Zach thought this over. “Really?” he said cautiously.

  The griffin costume that Zach had settled on for Halloween had been the cause of unending discontent. I had purchased a set of wings in Camden when I went over to see Russo the weekend previous, but Zach wasn’t thrilled about them. “They look like angel wings,” he’d said grumpily. “Not griffin wings.” I understood his dissatisfaction. To be mistaken for an angel when what you are aiming for is griffin is not a small thing.

  Then I’d found a lion costume at a local flea market. I figured, you take a lion costume, you put wings on the back of it, you got yourself a griffin. Zach thought otherwise. “It’s a baby costume,” he said, looking at the lion in dismay. “I’m not wearing it.”

  “Okay, well, you solve the problem,” I said.

  “I don’t know where to get a griffin costume!” he said. “I’m just a kid, I don’t have any money.”

  But these water cups from the golf course gave me a new idea. I could make a griffin beak out of one and attach it to Zach’s nose with elastic. Then I could sew a tail onto a pair of his yellow pants. It might work. At any rate, the important thing to bear in mind about a Maine Halloween is that no matter what kids dress up as, they always wind up buried beneath heavy coats and mittens and hats anyway, since by the end of October, winter is beginning to move in, and sometimes we even have snow.

  I stuffed a water cup in my fleece jacket, thinking, I’m going to make a griffin beak out of a cone-shaped water cup I’m stealing from the golf course! Zach clicked his helmet back on. “I’m going to go on ahead,” he said.

  I looked at the steep hill before us. There was a small bridge without a guardrail at the bottom. A ravine filled with boulders and a small stream ran beneath the bridge. Sometimes the boys and I followed the stream from our house, through the woods, and onto the course, and hid beneath the bridge.

  “You wait at the bottom of the hill,” I said. “Seannie and I will be along in a second.”

  We would be back at the house in a minute, I thought. I could
almost see our house through the trees at the back of the hole on the other side of the ravine. We’d be inside in twenty minutes, and I’d make a fire in the fireplace, and perhaps I’d try to make a griffin beak out of a water cup. I imagined the taste of the ribs Deedie was making, the meat with the vinegar and cumin and molasses and salt.

  Zach biked on ahead. Seannie drank from his cup, then snapped on his helmet. His bike with the training wheels was blue. He called it “Shooting Blue Moon.”

  From the ravine I heard a soft snap, like a tree branch falling.

  Seannie and I sailed down the hill. We both kept our brakes on; the rear tire of Seannie’s bike locked and smoked against the pavement as we skidded downward. We stopped at the bottom of the hill, halfway across the bridge, and looked up at the ridge before us. Sunlight was sparkling off the trees, and fleetingly I actually thought, If I could relive a half hour of my life over again, it would be this moment, the boys and me together in this amazing soft light.

  But it was at that moment that I realized that Zach was not waiting for us at the bottom of the hill, as I’d asked.

  Neither was he up at the ridge before us. Could he have biked on up the hill and gone home already? It seemed impossible.

  From the ravine I heard a soft cry. I looked to my left. Zach’s bicycle lay against a rock, mangled, the front half crushed like aluminum foil. The child was nowhere near it.

  I dropped my bike to the ground and ran across the bridge, then down into the ravine. There were shoulder-high thistles and brambles I had to crush past in order to get to the stream. “Zach?” I shouted. “Zach?”

  The boy was lying on his back a few yards from the stream. His eyes were closed. I called to him, and his eyelids fluttered halfway open, and for just a second he seemed like he recognized me, as if I were someone he had known a long, long time ago.

  I lifted him in my arms, and I drove him to the hospital. It was the same hospital in which he had been born. I remembered the night Zach had come into the world—the cold snow coming down all around, the sound of Stealers Wheel on the car stereo, the dads in the waiting room with their copies of Sports Illustrated.

  It was a whole lifetime ago, by which I mean just a few seconds.

  The doctors put Zach on a gurney. As they wheeled him away, he whispered to me, “Don’t worry, Maddy. I’m going to be good as new!”

  My throat closed up as he disappeared behind a set of swinging doors. My boy, I thought. I’ve lost my boy.

  A nurse handed me a clipboard filled with forms. “So,” she said. “You’re his mother?”

  EDWARD ALBEE

  Courtesy of Augusten Burroughs

  There is no one to tell you who you are except yourself.

  Edward Albee is an American playwright. A three-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize, as well as a recipient of a lifetime achievement award from the Kennedy Center, he is known for the plays The Zoo Story, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, A Delicate Balance, Tiny Alice, Three Tall Women, The Goat, and my own favorite, Quotations of Chairman Mao Tse-Tung.

  We first met after he saw a play of mine at Johns Hopkins in 1986, a work titled Big Baby, which was a short dramatic piece about a baby that gets really big. After the play, Albee stood up in the audience and asked me, “Mr. Boylan. Could you please explain—why is the baby—so large?”

  Edward was adopted at birth by a couple he calls “those people.” We met at his loft in New York—a beautiful space filled with modern and impressionist paintings and primitive sculptures—to talk about waifs, orphans, angels, and imagination. Albee being Albee, of course, he started asking me questions the moment I stepped through the door.

  EDWARD ALBEE: What is the need to make this distinction between being a father and a mother?

  JENNIFER FINNEY BOYLAN: [Sitting down on couch] Well, it may be that there is no distinction. That’s one of the things I’m exploring, Edward. I know that my sense of the world is different, but it may be less about the difference between male and female than the difference between someone who is bearing a secret and someone who is not.

  EA: I guess I’m really asking because it seems to me in some way that you are less different to your sons because you’re the same person.

  JFB: There’s definitely a before and an after in my life. For them, the before is such a long time ago. So their memories of me as a man—

  EA: Can you think about being a father? You must remember very specifically their birthing. And your response as a father, yes?

  JFB: Yes.

  EA: Was it more complicated than that?

  JFB: My response was astonishment at the otherworldliness of it. And joy and concern for the woman that I love. I was hoping she was all right.

  EA: When they were born, did you have any intimations of what might be going on later?

  JFB: I hoped it would not come to that.

  EA: So that must have affected your response to being a father.

  JFB: My fear that this would come to pass?

  EA: Mm. Well, not fear, but concern.

  JFB: Well, there are all kinds of dads, including ones like me who were better known for making a good risotto than being able to throw a football.

  EA: But when they were born, you were a guy.

  JFB: I was.

  EA: Therefore, you were their father.

  JFB: Am I or was I?

  EA: You haven’t become their mother.

  JFB: Well, I’m their sire.

  EA: Yeah. So, you are a parent. I just wonder, aside from all sorts of things, what difference it really makes.

  JFB: Well, maybe none. Perhaps none. Perhaps what’s more important than us being male or female is the fact that we’re human. I’m comfortable with that.

  EA: You see, if you’re a father it means you’ve had sex with a woman, your wife or someone else, and impregnated her.

  JFB: You think that’s what it means? Seriously?

  EA: You never birthed those two. Isn’t that a different quality of parenthood?

  JFB: I think it is. On the other hand, I know gay men who have adopted children and neither father gave birth to the child.

  EA: Well, that’s very, very complex.

  JFB: Well, yeah. Welcome to my world, Edward.

  EA: Ten weeks of discussion. My God.

  JFB: We don’t have ten weeks.

  EA: I’m getting awfully concerned about so many of my gay friends who are adopting kids. I’m getting very worried about them. They don’t know what they’re getting into.

  JFB: What are they getting into?

  EA: They’re getting into a long-term thing, a very long-term thing that I don’t think that they ever anticipate.

  JFB: Why should they not be able to understand a long-term commitment any more than a straight couple? Straight couples can be just as blind.

  EA: Because it has nothing to do with sex. If neither of you is the parent, neither gay guy is the parent, is a parent of the offspring, then all the rules are off.

  JFB: But are they not the parents? Does parenthood have to mean biology?

  EA: Does it mean making or is it the being?

  JFB: I think it’s the being.

  EA: Yeah. Well, what do we do about the making then? You made two boys. Through your own need and choice, you have become their mother rather than their father, but you’re still their father.

  JFB: Well, even if that’s true—which I’m not sure it is—it makes me a very different kind of mother than most other women I know. And it makes me different from most of the fathers I know. And yet, my experience as their mother, as their parent, has been more universal than—absurd.

  EA: Do you find that you think about them differently as a woman than you did as a man?

  JFB: Well, I think as a father I was a little bit more feckless. I just wanted to make them laugh. I was very goofy and I would do these ridiculous stunts and things to make them laugh. I loved hearing that.

  As a mother, I keep after them a lot more. I nag them mor
e, sometimes—

  EA: You’re behaving like a woman. [Laughter] But do you think about them differently?

  JFB: I worry about them more. Because they’ve had a parent who is so different.

  EA: When you look at them now do you ever say to yourself, “I am their father”?

  JFB: No.

  EA: But you are. You’re also their mother.

  JFB: It’s a long way from Tipperary, but we came from there. It’s also the trick of memory. Trying to remember who we have been.

  EA: And what we choose to remember, yes.

  JFB: I try to remember who was I when I was your student in 1986—that frightened, hopeful scarecrow of a boy.

  EA: You were also cute.

  JFB: Was I?

  EA: Yeah. [He smiles wistfully.]

  JFB: Well, look who’s talking.

  Do you remember those long talks we used to have about James Thurber?

  EA: I don’t know why people don’t read Thurber anymore.

  JFB: Sometimes I think it’s just down to you and me. I was thinking about how, when I was a thirteen-year-old transsexual on the Main Line of Pennsylvania, I wanted to be James Thurber. That’s who I dreamed of being, of all of the artists that I could have chosen to be. It seems so strange to me now.

  EA: There are so many things that I admire about Thurber’s work. I thought he was an extraordinary prose stylist, among other things. I found those few very, very, very serious old-fashioned stories that he wrote quite amazing.

  JFB: “The Cane in the Corridor.” And “One Is a Wanderer,” in which that sad, lonely protagonist walks around singing “Bye, Bye, Blackbird” to himself. I got to play “Bye, Bye, Blackbird” on Thurber’s piano at the Thurber House in Columbus. I felt rather cheeky doing it.

  EA: Nobody could be funnier than Thurber when he was being funny.

  JFB: He was funny, but you also felt this kind of smoldering anger and resentment. Was it the blindness? I think what I related to in Thurber was that as a young transgender person so deeply in the closet, I felt that my problems were fundamentally unresolvable. But that there was a way of getting along in the world and that my sense of humor was going to help me. Writing was going to help me too, but I would never have a sense of resolution in my life, or so I believed back then. As a young man did you feel that your situation in the world was unresolvable?