by Ben George
“What,” I said. He was seven years old.
“We can’t keep calling you ‘Daddy,’” he said, shaking his head. “If you’re going to be a girl. It’s too weird.”
The whole bait and switch was nearly over by this time. It seemed like it had been going on for years, and in a sense it had: since the days of my father’s sleepwalking, since the days I’d walked through the woods as a child in Pennsylvania, hoping that “I could be cured by love,” praying to God to make me whole. In the end, the prayer was answered, although not in the way that I had expected. Because of the love of my spouse, Grace, not to mention that of my boys, I found the courage, somehow, to traverse the weird ocean between men and women, to make the voyage not only from one sex to another, but from a place where my life was defined by the secrets that I kept to a new place, a place where almost everything I’d ever had in my heart could finally be spoken out loud.
But by then, my father had been dead for fourteen years.
“Well,” I said to my sons. “My new name is Jenny. You could call me Jenny if you want.”
Luke laughed derisively. “Jenny? That’s the name you’d give a lady mule.”
I tried not to be hurt. “OK, fine,” I said. “What do you want to call me?”
“The important thing, boys,” said their mother, Grace, “is that you pick something you’re comfortable with.”
Luke thought this over. He was pretty good at naming things. For a while we’d had a hermit crab named Grabber. Later on, we’d briefly owned a snake named Biter.
“I know,” he said. “Let’s call you ‘Maddy.’ That’s like, half Mommy, and half Daddy. And anyhow, I know a girl at school named Maddy. She’s pretty nice.”
His younger brother, Paddy, who was five, thought this over. “Or ‘Dommy,’” he added.
Then we all laughed at “Dommy.” Even Paddy laughed. “Dommy”! What a dumb name for a transsexual parent! After the hilarity died down, I nodded.
“‘Maddy’ might work,” I said.
By the time my boys were in middle school—six years after Luke had decided to name me Maddy—our family had begun to seem normal to us again. I was in charge of waking everyone up and making breakfast and straightening the house and getting the boys to practice their instruments: Paddy on French horn, Luke on the three-quarter-size tuba. Grace was in charge of dinner and shepherding the boys through their homework and coaching Paddy’s traveling soccer team. After a time, Grace and I even began to seem familiar to each other again, and the things that had changed in me seemed, incredibly, less important to Grace than the things that had remained the same.
Was she crazy to stay with me, after I’d come out with the truth and announced my intention to go from regular Coke to diet? Maybe. But that’s another story, isn’t it. For now let’s just agree that she decided, at great length, that her life was better with me in it than not, and if this makes her nuts, well, fine, have it your way, she’s nuts. Sweet though.
In the fall we picked apples. In the winter we skied, and sat around the fireplace in our living room afterward, drinking hot chocolate. In summer we fished on Long Pond, and Luke landed one giant largemouth bass after another. Most of the time we forgot that there was anything extraordinary about our family, and—who knows?—perhaps there isn’t.
But even though we had now crossed that wide, strange ocean of gender together, and come to rest at last, a nagging, unsettling question still occasionally returned to me, usually at night when I found myself awake in the wee hours. What kind of men would my boys become, I wondered, having been raised by a father who became a woman? How could I possibly show them, in the years to come, the lessons that I myself had apparently failed to learn?
I’d hear the sound of the grandmother’s clock ticking downstairs as I lay there in the dark, awake. I’d think about my own precarious boyhood, with its hidden panels and its deadbolts, and wonder how I was going to help my sons become themselves. At times, I’d even hear a voice in my heart demanding an answer to the same question that my harshest critics had asked of me. “What about the children?” the voice said. “What about the boys?”
This is a question I sometimes wonder if my grandmother ever asked herself. My father’s mother was a colorful woman who liked to dance on top of pianos and sing and tell obscene stories and drink vodka on the rocks. Her nickname was “Stardust.”
She was married four times, we think, although her first marriage—to the gentleman whom, later, she called only “the Jew”—seemed not to be in the tally. My father was her only child, but she appeared to lose interest in him after her second husband, my grandfather, dropped dead of a brain hemorrhage, just after my father’s ninth birthday. By the time my father was sixteen, he was living virtually all the time at a friend’s house, on a cot out in the hallway. Now and again he’d show up at his mother’s house to find smashed bottles on the floor, dishes in the sink. Apparently a wild party had begun at Stardust’s house sometime in 1938 and didn’t really finish until 1946.
My grandfather had left her a fair amount of money, but by the time my father hit high school, the cash was gone. What happened to it? As my mother politely put it, years later, “Stardust drank the money.”
My father’s hobbies, in childhood, had been collecting baseball cards and playing marbles. So it was a surprise when he introduced me to model rockets on my twelfth birthday, with the gift of a kit from Estes. The name of the rocket was BIG DADDY.
Our launch pad was an abandoned horse-racing track on an abandoned farm a few miles from our house. The grass had grown thick and snarly in the center oval of the track, and in the distance we could see the burned-out remains of what had once been the farmhouse. The farmer’s windmill had survived the fire, somehow, and it spun in the breeze not far from the ruins. I set up the launch pad, unwound the wires with the alligator clips that connected the rocket’s igniter fuses to a battery-powered launch controller. After checking the wind, I adjusted the angle of the launch rod so that the rocket would fly in the windward direction at first, because I knew that once the parachute opened, and the breeze filled it, BIG DADDY would begin to drift.
My father stood at some remove, watching as I ran through my prelaunch checklist. I was very thorough, applying the proper amount of chute wadding into the fuselage (so that the detonator charge that caused the nose cone to eject, thus activating the parachute at apogee, would not cause the chute’s plastic to melt). I secured the igniter fuses with masking tape. I double-checked the wind speed and the angle of the launch rod. Then I looked at my father.
“Are we go for launch?” I asked, dramatically.
He replied, with as little enthusiasm as it is possible to imagine, “We are go.”
Then I started counting down. “Ten…nine…eight…seven…—Ignition sequence start!—six…five…four…three…two…one! LIFTOFF!”
For a moment BIG DADDY sat there on the pad. There was a sizzling sound. I was afraid that the launch was a dud—that, as they say at Mission Control, we’d have to “scrub the launch.” Then, all at once, there was a vast, silvery swooshing sound, and BIG DADDY raced into the sky, leaving only a vaporous trail behind.
We stood there watching the rocket rise out of sight. It neared the sun, and I shaded my eyes with my hand, like I was saluting. A moment later, I felt a hand on my shoulder, and when I looked over, it was my father, who’d placed his hand on my back, probably without even thinking about it. I remember that his other hand was shielding his eyes from the sun as well. I saw the look on his face, a look of surprise and wonder, not only at the miracle of space flight—which was wondrous enough—but also, I imagined, at me. I was a boy of whom nothing might be expected, at times a strange creature delicate and frail. But I’d done this: I’d made this homely creation fly.
I looked back up at the sky. The far-off speck of the rocket passed directly in front of the sun. For a moment I lost sight of it.
Then we saw a bright flash. A moment later there was
a fiery, popping sound. I felt my father’s hand grip my shoulder blade a little harder. Then there was smoke, and the pieces of the rocket fell to earth. We stood there in silence as the ruins rained down around us, some of them still smoking.
I looked down at the ground. “I’m sorry, son,” my father said. Then he got out a cigarette—an L&M King—and lit it with a butane lighter. As he blew the smoke into the air, he gave me a weary look that suggested that this was exactly what the world was like, that in the years that lay before us both, it should be expected that all sorts of things would explode and scatter.
“Stupid thing,” I said, angrily. “Stupid BIG DADDY.”
Luke got off the bus one afternoon at the beginning of his eighth-grade year, came through the door, and told Grace and me that he “needed to talk about something serious” with us. He said he’d reached two very important personal decisions in his life, and that, as a family, we needed to sit down and talk.
Grace and I exchanged glances. We’d been expecting something like this since the time my transition began, seven years before. And even though both of my boys had reached middle-school age without any apparent psychological trauma—as a result of having me as a parent—we never stopped worrying about them, never reached a point where I didn’t wake up, now and again, pondering the same question that had haunted me from the beginning. “What about the children? What about the boys?”
“OK,” said Luke, as we gathered in the living room. (His brother wanted no part of whatever this was about, and headed downstairs toward the Xbox.) “First off, I’ve decided—” He looked down.
Grace and I looked at each other uneasily. What, son? What have you decided?
“I’ve decided that I want to become—”
What? What does he want to become?
“A pacifist.”
Grace and I exchanged glances again, relieved. “A pacifist,” I said.
“Yes,” said Luke. “I want to work for peace.”
There was a moment of silence as we thought this over. Then Grace spoke for us both. “Good for you, Luke,” said Grace. “We’re proud of you. We’ll go online, see if we can find, like, some peace marches we can all go to. If you want.”
“Yeah,” I said, cautiously. “But you said you’d made—two decisions? What was the other one? Do you want to share that with us as well?”
“Yeah, OK.” He blushed. “This is the hard one.” He looked at me and said, “Maddy, I really don’t want to disappoint you…”
“It’s all right, son,” I said, and shot him a look. I wondered, briefly, if the look I was giving him was similar to the look my father had given me, years earlier, when we’d shared a fleeting glimpse of Frank N. Furter together, dancing in his fishnets.
“All right,” he said. “I think I want—to stop playing tuba? And instead to start playing—the Irish fiddle.”
He let this sink in. Luke knew how much I loved his tuba playing. I’d even bought him, a few months earlier, a sweatshirt into which was stitched his name as well as the words TUBA KING.
Apparently Luke was afraid that if he switched from tuba to fiddle, somehow I might love him less.
“That’s it?” said Grace.
I went over and hugged him. “It’s OK, Luke,” I said. “You were great on tuba. I know you’ll be great on fiddle.”
He heaved a sigh. “Whew,” he said. “That was really hard.”
A month later, he had to write an essay for school about “an experience that changed me.” He told me early on that his topic was going to be his own variation on Stupid BIG DADDY.
He wrote this:
An experience that changed me is that my dad is transgendered, and became my “Maddy.” A person who is transgendered has a lifelong sense of being born into the wrong body.
I was about four when Maddy began the “transition.” I don’t really remember the experience well because it was over nine years ago. Once the transition had taken place, I was comfortable with it. But I was worried what my friends would think. I kept it secret for a little bit, but eventually they found out on their own. They all accepted it a lot better than I thought they would.
Maddy is funny and wise. We go fishing and biking. We talk a lot, about anything that is on our minds.
One night this spring, Maddy and I had a fancy dinner at a restaurant called A——in Waterville. It was a special night. I wore a jacket and a tie. I had a steak. It made me feel like Maddy and I were really close. Maddy said that she thought I was growing up and that she was proud of me.
Sometimes it’s true that I wish I had a regular father, but only because I don’t remember what it was like to have a normal family. Sometimes it’s hard to have a family that is different. But most of the time I think I am the luckiest kid on earth. Even though my family is different, I can’t think of any way that life could be better.
From this I learned that everybody is different. No matter how different people are, you should treat them all with respect and kindness.
I hope to help support the rights for everybody, no matter how different they are.
I know people from lots of different kinds of families. Some families are divorced, so some of my friends only live with one parent at a time. Other families have someone who is mentally challenged in their family. But no matter how different they are, they are all people. My goal is that some day everybody will be treated with love.
This summer, on my fiftieth birthday, my children and my wife gave me a rubber chair that floats in the water. Since my birthday was rainy, though, I didn’t get to repeat the ritual of my father, thirty years earlier, listening to Bach at top volume.
But we had a bottle of dandelion wine that a cartoonist friend had made on his porch, and I drank it, and it instantly made me nuts, in the most pleasant way imaginable. I put the rubber chair on the wooden floor of our house, and put Peter and the Wolf on the stereo, and as I listened to the Prokofiev I happily floated around the room as my family waved from the couch. “And if one would listen very carefully, he could hear the duck quacking inside the wolf; because the wolf in his hurry, had swallowed her alive.”
One night back in 1973, I was up late in my room with the deadbolt drawn. I was wearing the green paisley skirt and a halter top filled with grapefruits, and I was reading Tonio Kröger in German. Your typical Friday night. From a long way off, I heard a glass break, down in the kitchen.
That was weird.
So I took off my girl clothes, stuck them back in the secret panel that swung out from my wall, then put on my boy pajamas and a bathrobe and went downstairs. It was almost midnight.
There in the kitchen was my father. He was sweeping glass off the floor. “What happened?” I asked. “Are you OK?”
“Gotta clean up after Mom,” he said, in a sleepy, mumbly voice.
“Dad?” I said. “What’s happening?”
“Daddy died,” he said, sadly.
This is when I realized that my father was sleepwalking, and that he was playing out some crazy scene from his childhood, from the days after the death of his own father, when Stardust, along with her many suitors, was drinking the money at the endless party. I could see my father’s boyhood self, trying to straighten up the house while his mother lay passed out on the sofa.
He was being very methodical, putting the shards of glass in the dustpan. I held the pan still for him as he swept, again and again and again. Then I poured the glass pieces into the trash, and I said, “All done.” He stood there with the broom, deep in his trance.
“Do you—,” he said, his soft voice sounding as if it were coming right out of the grave. “Do you live near here?”
I wasn’t sure what the proper answer was, but I told him no, I was just visiting. Then I suggested it was maybe time to go back to sleep.
“OK,” said my father. “We have to make sure—not to wake—my mom.”
“We’ll be quiet,” I said, and I moved him toward the back stairs.
“Who—?” said
my father. “Who are you?”
I had never told anyone my real name before. “I’m—Jenny—,” I said.
“You should,” he said, in his soft, unconscious voice, “come over again.”
I looked at my father’s face—and even though he was forty-five, and asleep, it struck me that, perhaps for the only time in my life, I was seeing what he’d looked like when he was a boy.
“Maybe,” I said.
“Maybe,” said my father.
Then I led him up the creaking stairs, tucked him in his bed, and kissed the boy good night.
EVERYONE INTO THE BUNKER!
How Obsessive Parenting Became the New Counterculture
STEVE ALMOND
When I was about four years old, our parents called a strange family meeting, just before bedtime. They sat us three boys down and told us that my father might be away for a couple of days. I can’t remember the exact language they used, but I remember them explaining that Dad was going to be protesting the war. Meaning Vietnam.
My older brother Dave (he was six) wanted to know how. Our dad explained that he and some other people were going to link arms—like in the playground game Red Rover—across the road leading into Moffett Field, the local military base, so that vehicles couldn’t go in or out. They would probably be put in jail for this.
I’m sure I felt frightened and probably confused by this announcement. But I remember that my parents were very matter-of-fact about all this. They didn’t want us to react to their own fears, though they both were scared. My father later told me that he was shaking involuntarily as he stood there, the next morning, defying the police.
What I remember most vividly about this episode was that next day. My twin brother Mike and I were out in front of our house on Frenchman’s Hill, near Stanford University. We were pretending to make pancakes by pouring some ghastly red concoction onto the sidewalk, which we imagined as a griddle. This was an homage to our father, in fact, because he made us buckwheat pancakes on weekend mornings.