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

by Jennifer Finney Boylan

  And she just looked so pretty and happy, and she looked like she loved me, and I looked well cared for. I think it was just a load off her mind to see that, “Okay. Decent people, who loved this child, got him. He was okay. I made the right decision after all. It all worked out.”

  JFB: How did she break the news to your half sisters?

  TK: She had often wanted to tell them about me, but she felt like there was no ending to that story yet. And she, I think, felt like she would be at a loss for words if they asked, “Well, what happened to this kid? Where is he?” You know, she had no idea.

  That would be a scary thing to tell a kid if they were really young. “Oh, you had a brother, but I gave him away.”

  But those girls are nobody’s fools. They intuited that something was up with her before she told them. In fact, one of them caught her compiling what looked like a family medical history as if for one of them, and their mother acted all sheepish as if she’d been caught at something when she saw her. And that was Emma, my younger sister, and after that episode, she called her older sister on the phone. She said, “So listen. I think we maybe have a secret half sibling.”

  JFB: You’re right. She is nobody’s fool.

  TK: No, she’s not. Very Nancy Drew–like.

  JFB: So how did she break the news?

  TK: My birth mother sat them down and said, “Okay. Look, girls, I know you know that there’s something up. Here’s—I have something to tell you.” And she told them.

  JFB: And their reaction was?

  TK: I do not know what their reaction was at that time. I think, in a letter, she described them as being, you know, in a little bit of shock but basically taking it well.

  JFB: Shock that there had been such a secret or shocked that their mother had a—

  TK: I think shocked that there had been such a secret. Yeah. I mean it would completely revise your little story in your head about what your family was. There’s not just the four of you. You’re not the oldest child anymore, for example. All that stuff suddenly gets revised. It’s weird.

  Although, when I met them, about a week after I met her, they were unbelievably kind and warmhearted and open and accepting with me. They were really just nothing but nice about the whole thing, although they could easily have been standoffish or jealous or hostile.

  JFB: It seems, in some ways, as if finding out that you had half siblings was at least as powerful as meeting your biological mother. Is that right?

  TK: It was very moving.

  JFB: In the fantasies of wondering about your biological family, you’d always wondered about your parents. The fantasy did not necessarily include the siblings.

  TK: No. I don’t think it really occurred to me, and it turned out I had these two half sisters who were twenty years younger than me. And there are all these factors that sort of conspire to arouse this great tenderness in me toward them. Like they’re female. They’re much younger than me. They’re very smart and lovely. They’re people I would like anyway.

  But I felt totally blindsided by this affection for them. I mean, I adore them horribly. I can’t help it.

  JFB: One of the things that we had in common, back in the day, when I was a guy, was that we both had the sense of not fitting in, the sense of not being right, and for me, there was always a name for the way in which I didn’t fit.

  I remember you writing to me, during the flurry of letters we swapped back and forth during the time of my transition, something like, “Well, I never felt like I was at home in a man’s body either, but it’s not like I want to be a woman. I just wish there was some pill I could take that would make me feel like I fit.”

  When you met your biological mother and your half sisters, you told me that it was as close to that moment as you’re likely to get.

  TK: Did I say that?

  JFB: Well, yeah. I think you said to me there was a profound sense of feeling less vulnerable.

  TK: Most of the good things that have happened to me, in life, have radically cheered me up for about two weeks and then I was pretty much back to complaining about them.

  JFB: Well, except when you got stabbed in Greece; you were in a good mood for a whole year.

  TK: Yeah, then I went back to complaining.

  JFB: I guess you didn’t—

  TK: I mean, getting stabbed’s a big deal.

  JFB: It’s like Flannery O’Connor. “If only there was someone to shoot you every day.”

  TK: Exactly right. And, you know, I feel like most people, good or bad things happen to them, and eventually, they just return to their same old emotional baseline and they have to contend with the same bullshit of being a human being in the world.

  JFB: We probably need, just for the sake of exposition, to provide a couple of sentences explaining the whole stabbing thing.

  TK: Oh, I got stabbed in the throat years ago and nearly died but, instead, did not and was considerably cheered up by that whole experience. There.

  JFB: See? That wasn’t so hard. The stabbing story is now down to two sentences.

  TK: Now, finding this family was not like that, in a sense, because even though, you know, the initial euphoria of meeting those people has somewhat passed, those relationships are human relationships. They’re complicated. You know, we have fallings-out. We have stuff we have to figure out together.

  The euphoria hasn’t completely gone away because they’re not going to go away. You know? And it’s going to be part of my life forever, and it really is one of those changes that I—I don’t know. I haven’t thought of an articulate way of putting this, but it ups the plateau a little bit. Instead of just returning to the same old plateau, I think it raises your baseline.

  JFB: But is it fair to say you feel more like you fit in the world?

  TK: Well, that seems like a two-part question. I mean I think that, to the extent that I feel more like I fit in the world, is mostly because of being in my forties instead of my twenties, which is a miserable time for anybody who’s smart. Actually, it’s a miserable time for everyone generally. Although incredibly fun.

  JFB: Yeah. And when you’re in your twenties, you’re beset with everyone telling you it’s the happiest time of your life.

  TK: Yeah. Those people are misremembering. I mean, I long to feel as if I get to belong with these people in a way, and some of that you have to earn by actually living with them and having fights and reconciliations with them. But some of it, you don’t have to earn. I am like them. We’re like each other.

  You know, I just had drinks and dinner with my younger half sister, Emma, last night, and she and I are like, in so many ways, we’re the most alike of everyone in that family, I think.

  JFB: How are you alike?

  TK: We’re both really—we’re both trouble. You know, we’re—that’s with a capital T. You know, both have very histrionic breakups and are then devastated months afterwards.

  In the midst of one of these, she asked me, through tears, “Has anything like this ever happened to you?”

  And I wanted to laugh very loudly in her face for joy. Instead, I looked sympathetic and said, “Why, yes, Emma. In fact, it has,” and told her about one of my own many, many histrionic breakups.

  JFB: Of all my friends, you were the one who has always had the most contempt for the idea of people having children.

  TK: For a long time, it just seemed to me like, at a certain age, everyone in the world wanted to go into the field of tax law, and everyone was like, “Don’t you have any interest in tax law? Don’t you think you’d find that fulfilling?”

  And I was like, “No. That sounds really boring and awful.” It just seemed like something everyone else had an inexplicable craving to do that I did not share. I did not get it. Never once entered my head.

  It still sort of seems like that, but I would say that meeting my half sisters, in particular, has given me some inkling as to why it might be rewarding for people because, as I may have said, I adore them horribly.

&n
bsp; This is embarrassing to admit, but I have a photo of them on my desk, and looking at the photo reliably makes me happy. You know, just the fact that they exist cheers me up.

  A few years ago, if you’d asked me what my favorite things were in life, [I] probably would have said fucking and drinking for hours with my friends. And now, pretty much my favorite thing in life is just spending time around my sisters. It’s crazy and a little bit humiliating, but there it is.

  I would rather just hang out with them than do just about anything else.

  JFB: Do you think there’s any connection to having been adopted, having gone through the childhood with this mystery somewhere in the back of your mind, and your general disinterest in being a father?

  TK: Yeah. I mean, as is true of just about everyone, I don’t think my reasons, my conscious reasons for doing what I do, are my real reasons. I mean, I think it’s no coincidence that I was given up by my birth mother right after being born and that I’ve never had any interest in reproducing myself.

  And she, also, did not want to have any more children after giving me up for adoption. I think that that was probably traumatic for everyone involved.

  JFB: So you’ve gone through this process, and now, that mystery is now not a mystery. Now it’s an answer that you have, and it seems as if the answer has been one that has provided some degree of wholeness to your life and taken away some mystery, although also replaced it with all sorts of new problems, complications.

  TK: Yeah, but they’re better problems. They’re problems that are involved in just being connected with people.

  JFB: But somewhere out there, to this day still, is your father. Do we know where your father is now?

  TK: No, not for sure. I know what town he was from, and I found one mention of him online on Classmates.com. Just a record that he had, in fact, gone to that high school, and I believe he is still in that same area.

  JFB: Your mother is not—hasn’t been in touch with him since—

  TK: No. He—no. The—their last exchange, forty-four years ago, was not amicable, and she’s heard nothing from him since.

  JFB: Did he—was he part of the decision to give you up?

  TK: He, I believe, had offered to marry her, and she wanted no part of that. And I think he was angry that what he thought of as his gallant gesture had been rebuffed.

  JFB: Who was he?

  TK: I don’t know much of anything about him. He was—

  JFB: You know a name?

  TK: Yeah, which I don’t think I’ll state for print. But he was a friend of my birth mother’s. And she has not told me much about him, and I don’t think she knows much about him anymore.

  JFB: So are you curious about him? Are you curious about him in the same way that you were curious about your mother?

  TK: Well, somewhat. I mean, half the genes come from him. Although, at this point, I’m honestly hard-pressed to think of any characteristics of mine that can’t be attributed either to my birth mother’s family or to my adoptive family.

  JFB: To some degree, it sounds as if, for many people, searching for a birth parent means searching for a birth mother.

  TK: Well, they’re easier to find. There’s some record of them. Also, and maybe this is a sexist assumption, but it seems safer for me to assume that she would have some interest in getting back in contact with me. A birth father might well be more ambivalent about it.

  JFB: Why is that? I mean, I think you’re right. But why do we assume fathers would be more ambivalent towards parenthood?

  TK: I think there is a chemical bonding process that happens when you’re carrying a child, and that’s a very real thing, but then there’s also just the cultural stereotype of women as more nurturing.

  It’s perhaps unfair for me to imagine that. Maybe that guy wonders where I am and what happened to me every day. He knows I’m out here.

  I’ve heard from people who have a lot of experience with adoptees searching for their biological parents that there are a lot of women who are ambivalent about getting back in touch with their biological kids. And they first say they don’t want to know anything about them. They don’t want to hear from them, but almost all of them eventually do.

  I guess I find it easier to understand the man being more ambivalent or actively resistant to finding out anything. Seeing it as some sort of unwanted, unwelcomed responsibility.

  JFB: Your mother said something to you like, “I’ve thought about you every day”? Isn’t it possible to imagine a father wondering the same thing?

  TK: Yeah, sure. Of course.

  JFB: But we’re less likely to sentimentalize that. It sounds like you want to leave your biological father alone. You’re not driven to find him at this point. Is that right to say?

  TK: No. It’s more like she was easier to find. She was the first one I found, and you know, as I said, it’s like having in-laws. I mean, I now have a whole other family. It’s a lot. And I have complicated relationships with all those people, with both my birth mother and my two half sisters. You know, there’s a lot going on there.

  It would be like opening a second can of worms when the first can is still wriggling everywhere. Like, let’s just leave it until we’ve gotten these worms all sorted out and in their special worm cases.

  JFB: But those worms could wriggle—

  TK: We’ll never really have all the worms put away. It just seems like I’ve got a lot on my plate right now, with family number two, and then inviting family number three into my life would be more than I can handle at this time. I got a lot going on.

  JFB: Who do you imagine he might be?

  TK: His name is an unusual one, and it sounds like the name of a black man who would play piano. Although I do not appear to be black myself.

  JFB: You do play piano, though.

  TK: It seems possible that, by not knowing him, I just avoided years of being called a little pussy. I wound up being estranged from him without having to go through having known him in the first place. Who knows?

  JFB: That’s very efficient of you.

  TK: Yeah. No, I don’t know anything about the guy. I mean, it’s—yeah, for some reason, it’s easier to imagine your biological father just slumped over a beer in a dive bar somewhere saying, you know, after beer number eight, “Yeah, I’ve got a kid out there somewhere.”

  JFB: Would it cause trouble for your mom, too—your biological mom—if you got in touch with this man from her past?

  TK: Well, maybe.

  JFB: That, suddenly, old Dad is back in the picture.

  TK: Well, I wouldn’t necessarily have to put them in touch.

  JFB: But you’d probably tell your biological mom.

  TK: Yeah, I probably would.

  JFB: So he asks if he could have her phone number. I mean, that would happen.

  TK: Oh. Oh!

  JFB: Can I just say, for the record, Tim is now grasping his forehead—

  TK: In pain.

  JFB: And holding his face in his hands.

  TK: It just doesn’t bear thinking about.

  JFB: Yeah.

  TK: Right. Yeah, see, this is the kind of thing I hadn’t even considered yet.

  JFB: So it’s a good thing we’re having this talk.

  TK: That’s another thing. It’s not just you got two cans of worms open now. It’s that those worms are now interacting. They’re playing with each other. They’re having little worm fights.

  JFB: It seems to me if I were in the situation, I might think, Well, I opened up the door of mystery one time, and I was incredibly lucky that my mother and these two half sisters turned out to be wonderful and interesting people. Maybe I won that roll of the dice the first time. Why should I roll it again?

  TK: Yeah. If you’re on a game show, you wouldn’t open the second door because you’ve already won the car and the trip to Japan.

  JFB: And yet, I’m moved by this abstract idea of this man out there who has you for a son and doesn’t know.

  I mean,
who wouldn’t love you?

  TK: You’d be surprised.

  “I NEVER DOUBTED YOU’D RISE TO THE TOP.

  YOU HAD SUCH A STRANGELY SHAPED HEAD.”

  The Boylans, with Ranger and Indigo, on Long Pond, in Belgrade Lakes, Maine, summer 2010.

  © Heather Perry

  I opened my eyes in a dark room. Moonlight reflected off the snow. I went to the bathroom, brushed my hair, swallowed a tiny light green pill. Estrogen dissolved upon my tongue.

  I walked down the stairs. The game was afoot. In the basement I split wood for the stove, carried it back up to the kitchen, and got the fire going. I woke up the boys and plugged in the waffle iron, put the bacon in an iron skillet. It was not quite six A.M.

  I went into the laundry room. Zach’s snow boots were still wet, and I turned on the dryer. The boots thunked and rang inside the drum.

  Sean had gotten himself as far as the music room. The sun was just starting to break through the trees, and the early morning light shone off the piano’s raised-up lid.

  Zach’s feet clumped up the stairs. A moment later came the rushing of water through the pipes as he turned on the shower.

  I put a couple more logs on the woodstove. It was beginning to send out some heat. I removed a waffle from the iron, slung it on a plate. I put this on the table, along with the bacon and a pitcher of pure Maine maple syrup.

  “Okay, Seannie,” I said. “Let’s get the day started.”

  Sean came into the kitchen and looked at his breakfast and smiled. “It’s Waffle Tuesday,” he said.

  At six thirty, Deedie burst into the house with the dogs. “Oh my God is it cold!” she said, her cheeks red, tiny icicles clinging to the bottom of her blue wool hat. The dogs sat down in front of the roaring woodstove and raised their noses in anticipation. Deedie dug into the giant box of dog biscuits in the cupboard and then gave one to each of the creatures. Then she handed the newspaper—the Morning Sentinel—to Sean. “Here’s the paper,” she said. Sean opened the paper to the comics section, where once again Mark Trail was struggling with poachers in Lost Forest.