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

by Jennifer Finney Boylan

  The dogs crunched their Milk-Bones on the floor. I got up and poured more waffle batter into the iron for Deedie. Zach came bounding into the room, fresh from the shower. “Hi, Mommy. Hi, Maddy. Hi, Sean.” Deedie and I gave him a hug. Sean raised an eyebrow. “Hey, Baby Sean! It’s Waffle Tuesday!”

  “Mark Trail is chasing poachers,” said Sean.

  “Okay, Boylans,” I said. “What do we got?”

  “They have band this afternoon, and Sean’s playing soccer. It’s book group night for me,” said Deedie.

  “I’ve got a faculty meeting at four,” I said, “and then I’m supposed to be playing rock ’n’ roll.”

  “You have to take Sean to soccer. I told you about book group yesterday.”

  “Oh,” said Zach. “I forgot to mention we’re going on a field trip today to the Lobster Museum. I need you to sign some forms. Also, can I have ten dollars? Plus I said we’d bring snacks.”

  I pulled Deedie’s waffle out of the iron and put it in front of her. Steam rose toward the ceiling. I poured one for Zach. Deedie looked at the clock. “The school bus is coming in ten minutes,” she said. “I don’t have any snacks for your class.”

  “I said you’d bring pumpkin muffins,” said Zach.

  “When was it you were going to tell me about this?” said Deedie.

  “I just did tell you about this,” said Zach.

  “I can’t make muffins now,” she said. “Maybe I can buy some at the store and bring them by the school on my way into work. What time is your field trip?”

  “I don’t know,” said Zach.

  “Do you have the forms?” said Deedie.

  “I think so,” said Zach. He bounced toward the front hallway and opened his backpack. Juice boxes, crayons, notebooks, and rubber balls rolled onto the floor. “Here it is,” said Zach, holding up a crumpled piece of paper. There was jelly on one corner.

  “I can get the muffins,” I said to Deedie, pulling Zach’s waffle out of the iron.

  “Will you remember?” said Deedie. It was fairly typical in our family for me to be given tasks that, since they were inherently annoying, I immediately forgot all about, thus saving me from the trouble of having to do them. It was a good system.

  “Doubtful,” I said.

  “What is the Lobster Museum?” asked Sean. From beneath his chair came the sound of thick black tails slapping against the floor.

  “Are you feeding the dogs your waffle?” said Deedie.

  “Just the syrup,” said Sean. Pink tongues lapped just out of the range of vision.

  “It’s time for everyone to start getting ready,” I said. “I’ll get the muffins and drop them by the school.” Deedie signed Zach’s forms.

  “It’s a museum about lobstering,” said Zach. “You’ll see when you’re in fifth grade.”

  “So what do they have there? Famous lobsters?” said Sean.

  “I said it’s time to get ready,” I said. “Zach, finish your breakfast. Sean, get your things together.”

  “It’s about the environment,” said Zach, climbing on his high pony. He took issues of ecology seriously and at that point was determined to devote his life to saving the manatee, a creature not known to have come within five hundred miles of central Maine. “It’s about how to save the lobster’s ecosystem. So the lobsters can have a future!”

  Deedie finished her coffee and looked at the clock. “I have to be at work early today,” she said.

  “What kind of futures can lobsters have?” asked Sean. “They’re still getting boiled. Aren’t they?”

  Zach stuffed an entire waffle into his mouth. “Oink,” he suggested.

  Launching children into a Maine winter is not totally unlike preparing them for life at the international space station. On a February day, for instance, the children had to be strapped into enormous snowsuits reminiscent of the various layers of sarcophagi encapsulating a boy-king of Egypt. Then they had to be equipped with both boots and shoes (they changed out of the boots and into the shoes once at school), high-tech mittens, thermal hats, scarves, earmuffs, backpacks containing all the right books and the completed homework and that day’s permission forms. Sean had to bring his French horn. Both boys needed their music. (Zach, being a tuba player, did not carry his instrument on the bus; according to the school district, a tuba was a fire hazard.)

  “I can’t find my boots,” Zach said.

  “They’re in the dryer,” I said, and he went into the laundry room and pulled them out and popped them on his feet.

  “Woo! Woo!” said Zach. He was hopping and jumping around the house. “Hot shoes!”

  “Zach?” I said. “Are you all right?”

  Sean looked at me with that ironic grin. “He’s got hot shoes,” he noted.

  “Woo! Woo!” said Zach.

  “Do you want me to try to find some other boots?” I asked.

  “Are you kidding?” said Zach, still dancing. “This is the greatest thing ever! Woo! Woo! Hot shoes! Can I have hot shoes every day, Maddy? Please?”

  Sean shook his head sadly. There were times when I feared Sean had fallen into the role of Marilyn on the old television show The Munsters. This was the one so-called normal child, brought up in a family of Frankensteins and vampires.

  “Do you want hot shoes, Baby Sean?” said Zach.

  Sean thought it over. “I’m good,” he said.

  He was good, now anyway. There’d been a season not too long ago, however, when Sean had lain in bed in the morning with tears in his eyes. We’d arranged for him to see a counselor at school, so that he could have someone to talk to about whatever was in his heart. I assumed that whatever was bothering him was a direct result of having me as a parent, but after a few weeks, the therapist said, Actually, we think the issue is that he hates his math teacher. In any event the weepy mornings had passed, which of course left his parents relieved. I wasn’t certain we’d seen the last of the tears, though. I suspected that for the rest of their lives, I’d be waiting to see just how much damage I’d done to my children. I remembered holding Sean in my lap, the week he was born, as he struggled with supraventricular tachycardia. Seannie, am I never going to stop worrying about you?

  The clock struck seven, and I opened the door and walked with the boys bearing their backpacks and French horns, wearing their astronaut clothes, down to the end of our driveway in the shocking Maine cold. Our breath came out in clouds.

  We waited for the bus. The sun was now shining through the bare branches to our right; we could hear water moving beneath the frozen ice of the creek that bordered our property on its eastern side. Down the street about a quarter of a mile, we could see our neighbors, the Elliott brothers, waiting at the end of their driveway.

  Zach hopped up and down. Sean looked at me knowingly. “That’s my brother,” he said dryly. “He’s got hot shoes.”

  “Woo!” said Zach. “Woo!”

  The bus came down the hill, and we saw its red lights flashing in front of the Elliotts’ house. This was my cue to leave. Zach turned to me. “You won’t forget the muffins, will you?”

  “What muffins?” I said.

  “Maddy,” said Zach.

  I walked rapidly up the driveway and stood on the porch. The yellow school bus came and the boys stepped on board.

  As the school bus pulled away, I made eye contact with an older boy sitting toward the back. He laid eyes upon me, and his features curled into a malicious grin.

  Deedie rushed past me.

  “You won’t forget the muffins?” she said.

  “What muffins?” I said.

  “Maddy,” she said. She kissed me on the cheek and then headed toward her car. A moment later, I watched as the minivan turned right out of the driveway and climbed the snowy hill.

  I stood there alone for a moment, listening to the silence. Then I went back inside.

  I gathered up the dishes and loaded the dishwasher. I put the cap back on the syrup and put the eggs and milk and butter back in the refrige
rator along with the bacon. I cleaned out the waffle iron and the skillet. I folded up the newspaper and put it with the recycling. I washed out the sink and dried it with a towel. I wiped down the table.

  Then I poured another cup of coffee and sat down in a rocking chair and looked out at the snow. Tears flickered in my eyes.

  Ranger came over and put his head in my lap, gave me that dog look. What?

  A year or two before this, the boys and Deedie and I had been out at our place on Long Pond. A neighbor boy named Finn had befriended my sons, and on this morning, as on many others that summer, I found Zach and Sean and Finn curled up together on the couch, watching cartoons. They were eating Lucky Charms right out of the box.

  “Green clovers,” Sean noted. “Yellow moons.”

  Finn looked at me curiously. “Are you Zach’s mom?” he asked.

  “Well,” I said. “Actually, Deedie is their mom. But I’m part of the family too.” This vague answer was the best I could do at the moment, wanting neither to overtly lie (on the one hand), nor to embarrass my sons with an airing of the complex truth (on the other).

  Finn seemed satisfied with my half-baked answer. But Zach looked at me aghast. “Maddy,” he said sternly, shaking his forefinger at me. “You tell him the truth!”

  I thought back to the morning on the beach at Sanibel, when Zach and I had found the dead seagull, and I’d tried to get him to believe that its dreams were too wonderful to wake up from. He hadn’t bought that line from me then, and he didn’t buy this one now.

  “Okay,” I said. “The truth is, Finn, that I used to be the boys’ father. But I had a condition that made me feel like a woman on the inside. And so I took some drugs that helped my insides and my outsides match. They call me Maddy now. That’s their combination of ‘Mommy’ and ‘Daddy.’ ”

  “Oh,” said Finn. He ate another big handful of Lucky Charms.

  “Pink hearts,” said Sean.

  “I don’t know if that seems weird to you, that someone’s insides and outsides wouldn’t match.”

  “That’s not weird,” said Finn, fixing me with wide eyes. “I feel like that all the time.”

  Finn’s nonchalant response to the truth, to our surprise, had been the prevailing one, especially among children. We’d waited and waited for some terrible doom, but the days had passed and we all continued to thrive. It had seemed incomprehensible to us, that the world could be as forgiving as we had found it, especially since I’d heard stories firsthand from other trans people who, in nearly identical circumstances, had found only cruelty and rejection. Some had found violence. On the whole, it was hard to deny that our family had been very, very lucky.

  But every once in a while something would happen to remind me of the strangeness of the journey I’d forced upon my family, and how close the danger was that still awaited us all. I thought of that kid on the bus, looking at me with those eyes of scorn.

  In my heart I heard the words of Gandalf, considering the hopeless mission he had given to Frodo and Sam.

  I have sent them to their deaths. It’s only a matter of time.

  AT THE END of the day, the school bus pulled up in front of the house again. I opened the front door. The dogs galloped down the driveway. Usually the boys threw their backpacks down in the snow and spent a few minutes cavorting with Ranger and Indigo. On this day, however, Zach walked toward the house with his head down.

  Uh-oh, I thought.

  They came through the door with the dogs. Zach headed for his room.

  “Hey, Seannie,” I said. “Is Zach okay?”

  “I don’t know,” said Sean, as if it were impossible to know anything about his brother’s state of mind. As Sean settled down at the kitchen table to start in on his homework, I went down the hall to check in on Zach.

  “Are you okay?” I said through the door.

  “I’m fine,” he said, in that voice that means, I’m not.

  This much was clear: His shoes were no longer hot.

  A few hours later, he came out of his room. Deedie was home by now. The two of us were sitting by the fireplace in the living room.

  “Mommy, Maddy,” he said. “There’s something I need to talk to you about.”

  EARLIER THAT DAY, the phone had rung. I had a pretty good idea who it was and what she wanted.

  “Jenny. Can you help me? I’m stuck.”

  We had this same conversation every day, my mother and me. It’s worth mentioning that my mother’s name, incredibly, is Hildegarde. I remember lying on the couch in my parents’ house in high school, thinking with a kind of adolescent terror, My parents’ names are Dick and Hildegarde! I had the sense that no one whose parents were thusly named could ever hope for a normal life. Forget the transsexual thing; my parents are named Dick and Hildegarde!

  There were times when I figured the odds against me were just too long.

  “How many have you got, Mom?”

  “I have the first two and the fourth one. The number three has me stumped.”

  “Okay, let me get the—” I paused to snuff back some tears. Mom had a way of calling at exactly the moment when I found myself verklempt. Would I have this same ability, decades from now, to know when Zach or Sean was in trouble? Would something in me reach for the phone and dial my sons, wherever on the planet they’d be by then?

  “Are you all right, Jenny?” I was in the recycling pile now, hauling out the comics. There was Mark Trail, right where I’d left him, hunting poachers.

  “I’m okay, Mom,” I said.

  “Oh, Jenny,” said Hildegarde. “What is it?”

  “Nothing,” I said. “It’s just the boys. I worry about them.” I have sent them to their deaths. It’s only a matter of time.

  “Well, of course you do,” she said. “That’s what parents do. You worry about your children! If you weren’t worried about them, you wouldn’t be doing your job.”

  My mother had an unsettling talent for looking on the bright side of things. She’d always been this way. When I was a teenage boy, and my friends and I came up with cruel nicknames for all our parents, the name we’d devised for Mom was Glinda the Good Witch.

  There really was a fair amount of Billie Burke in Hildegarde. Only bad witches are ugly.

  I looked at the Jumble. It was a crazy mixed-up word game. “What can’t you get, the third one?”

  “Yes. TETREL. I tried title and titter, but those don’t work. What do you think? Is it litter?”

  I thought for a moment. “I think it’s letter, Mom.”

  “Letter! Of course.”

  “What did you get for the first two, Mom?”

  “Well, RTCIK is trick, of course, and OFPOR is proof.”

  “And number four, EKDDEC, is decked, isn’t it?”

  “Decked?” she said. “I didn’t have decked, I had docket.”

  “Mom?” I said, wiping my face. “There’s no T. And there’s no O.”

  “I know,” said Mom. “But it’s so close. I didn’t think anyone would mind.”

  My mother’s cheerful, buoyant optimism had carried her through two world wars; the Depression; an abusive, abandoning father; poverty; the death of her husband; and her son’s sex change. Still, there were times when she placed too much faith in the idea of things just working out. When she drove her car onto the interstate, for instance, she rarely checked her mirrors as she merged into traffic. Hildegarde just assumed things would “work out for the best,” and that “nice people would make room.”

  “It’s decked,” I snapped. “You can’t just put in any letters you like, Mom. You have to use the ones they give you!”

  Mom paused before replying. “Are you sure you’re all right, Jenny?”

  “I’m fine,” I said. I looked at the cartoon. There was a drawing of a man hanging a portrait on the wall. The clue was: The Farmer’s Photo of His Cornfield Wasn’t Perfect Until He Did This.

  “Sowed his oats?” said Mom.

  “There is no S.” I sighed. “There’s tw
o P’s. It can’t be ‘sowed his oats,’ Mom. Okay?”

  “Of course. You know best.”

  “Cropped it.” I said. “He cropped it.”

  “Davy Crockett?” said Mom. She was totally deaf in one ear. I hoped that wasn’t the one she had toward the phone at this moment.

  “Cropped it!”

  “Oh, ‘cropped it.’ ” She wrote it in the little squares. “There!” she said. “Another success!”

  I nodded. I loved my mother, but there were times when all of her optimism and cheer made me feel as if I had strayed into some fantasy world where people lived wholly on marshmallows. I wondered if people felt the same way after hanging out with me for more than three minutes.

  “I’m so glad my daughter is an English professor,” said Mom. “If it wasn’t for all those years at Johns Hopkins I’d never be able do the Jumble.”

  “I know,” I said. “Thank God it’s good for something.”

  I heard the sound of her putting the Philadelphia Inquirer down on her table.

  “You know they’re very good boys,” said Mom. “I just believe they’re going to be fine.”

  “I know,” I said. “I just worry. I don’t know how to help them sometimes.”

  “Well, you love them all the time,” said Mom. “What more can you do? Let them alone, and give them time to become themselves.”

  My parents had had a strangely hands-off approach to raising my sister and me. Maybe it was because we lived in such a giant, drafty old house; in our falling-down haunted mansion, if you played your cards right you could go for days without running into another member of the family.

  “Mom,” I asked, “when I was a boy, did you ever worry that I wasn’t going to make it?”

  I heard Mom sip her coffee. “Oh, sometimes,” she said breezily. “But I never doubted you’d rise to the top. You had such a strangely shaped head.”

  IN EARLY 2001, I had taken my strangely shaped head down to Pennsylvania to tell my conservative, religious mother the news. I spent the night in my old high school bedroom, in the very bed where for the first eighteen years of my life I lay on my back and dreamed that I was someone else. That night, I opened my eyes in the middle of the night to see my father standing next to my bed smoking a cigarette. There were at least two things wrong with this. For one, he had been dead for fourteen years. For another, why was he smoking? Surely in the world beyond this one there are pleasures more satisfying than tobacco? It didn’t make any sense. All I could think was, Once you start a habit like that, it can be tough to break.