She shot me a look. Ladies of her generation didn’t say vagina or vote for Democrats.
“That’s not what makes someone a woman,” she said authoritatively.
“Really?” I asked. “What does make someone a woman then?”
Gammie took a long drag on her cigarette, then blew all the smoke into the air.
“Suffering,” she said.
WHEN ZACH WAS about six months old, I met my former student Veronica Gerhardf in a Portland bar called Gritty McDuff’s one Friday afternoon. She’d spent the years since graduation working in Vice President Gore’s office. But she was ready for a change, she said.
“Seriously?” I replied. “Because if you want you could come back to Maine and work as our nanny. That would be awesome.”
Veronica lifted her pint and drained it. Then she put the glass down on the bar. “Okay,” she said.
FEMINIST SCHOLAR Sara Ruddick, a pioneer in the field of motherhood studies, writes that mothering is about nurture and protection—her trinity is “preservation, growth, and social acceptability.” To Ruddick, motherhood focuses on the ways moms protect their children from the world even as they slowly move them into it. More interesting—to me at least—is her suggestion that it’s not a job limited to women. According to Ruddick, men, too, are capable of “mothering,” when they act to shield and educate their young.
This makes plenty of sense. Still, if someone had shared this theory with me when I was a father—and I identified as a feminist even then—it would surely have hurt my feelings. At the heart of this theory seems to be an assumption that caring for children is something women do. If you’re a man and you’re trying to nurture and protect your kids, it seems to me as if you’re being called an honorary woman.
There are lots of men who don’t feel that expressing love makes them honorary women. One would think it makes them fathers.
Of the two of us, Deedie was more protective of our son, more conservative, more worried that he was going to, for instance, poke his eyes out with that thing. Whereas I was more likely to show my son—just to pick an example at random—how to put spray cheese on the dog’s head. Was it the experience of having carried Zach in her womb for nine months that made her more cautious than I? Was the fecklessness of my fatherhood the direct consequence of not having had the physical experience of labor? I have my doubts about this, although it’s also true that I don’t think I ever worried about anyone poking his eyes out with that thing when I was a dad, and I never cautioned Zach, upon finding him cross-eyed, that they might stick that way.
On the whole, I think, I was more liberal when it came to encouraging Zach to take risks, or to do something out of the sheer goofiness of it. I pause here to remember Jerry Garcia’s actual advice to his daughters, and I quote: “Hey! You guys should do more drugs!”
But any sweeping insights about what fathers do, as opposed to mothers, seems to me fundamentally bound not only by issues of gender, but by issues of class as well. I don’t think it’d be too radical to suggest that mothers and fathers of the American upper middle class may well have more in common with each other than any father from this group does with a blue-collar dad. But even this observation may be suspect. I know plenty of blue-collar dads who are all about the spray cheese.
It doesn’t take too long to see that any particular father’s or mother’s parenting strategy is a complex set of behaviors resulting not only from gender and class but from the individual web of history and character, and—above all—the agreements, spoken and unspoken, at the center of their relationship with their partner.
Sue Shellenbarger, writing in the Wall Street Journal, says that father figures “tend to challenge crying or whining children to use words to express themselves. Men are more likely to startle their offspring, making faces or sneaking up on them to play.” And while “the average behavioral differences between large samples of moms and dads are small, in statistical terms,” fathers spend about 6 percent more time in play with their children than mothers do.
I have found this to be sort of true, both in the hetero parents I know as well as the same-sex ones. In some ways, it’s only common sense—even among families with two moms, or two dads, there’s usually one parent who’s more rambunctious than the other.
That said, goofiness—a kind of joyful foolishness—still feels to me like one of the more dependably gendered character traits that I know. There are plenty of funny women in my life; it was Deedie’s levity of spirit that surely attracted me to her in the first place. But it is only with a man that I could imagine hanging a giant stuffed rabbit from a tree with a noose and taping a sign to it that read, HERE IS A LETTUCE-RUSTLIN’ CARROT-THIEVIN’ NO GOOD SON OF A BITCH, as I did on one memorable occasion with the cartoonist Timothy Kreider. This occurred at the end of a very long day, one that had in fact begun with our taking a giant stuffed dog, attaching a cinder block on a rope to its leg, and throwing it off a bridge. Afterward, in our fake mobster voices, we allowed as how “Mr. Whiskers sleeps with the fishes.”
I don’t do stuff like that anymore, although there are plenty of times my boys wish that I would. Is this because hanging stuffed animals from trees is an inherently masculine activity? Or is it because that was a long time ago, when I had considerably more time on my hands? Have I grown less ridiculous over time because womanhood feels less absurd to me than manhood? Or is it that, now that I’m in my fifties, the whole wide world just seems a lot less funny?
When I was seventeen, my friend Zero and I once drove a car through Atlantic City, New Jersey, throwing hot pancakes at people through the Volkswagen’s open window.
It would be nice, I suppose, to do that sort of thing again, to take on the character of “rear bombardier” and fling those cakes like Frisbees out at the citizens of the unknown world. But I can already hear the voice of reason interceding. Oh, Jenny, says the voice. That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard of. Throwing hot pancakes, at total strangers. What if you get syrup on people? You could wreck someone’s clothes! You could get arrested! It would wind up in the papers: PROFESSOR, AUTHOR, JAILED FOR ASSAULT WITH BREAKFAST ITEMS.
“I THOUGHT IT WOULD BE FUNNY,” SAYS SEX-CHANGE SCRIBE.
ONE AFTERNOON IN late spring, Zach and I lay around on the kitchen floor, building towers out of blocks and knocking them to the ground again. I’m not sure how this came about, but somehow I had a can of whipped cream that I was squirting into the dog’s mouth. Zach was laughing so hard he fell over. Falling over struck him as even funnier. I righted him again and squirted some more whipped cream into Lucy’s mouth. She lapped it off her lips with her big pink tongue as Zachary laughed and laughed and fell over once more. It seems as if we spent the better part of a day doing this, although more likely it was just a few minutes. I remember how remarkable I found the sound of my son’s laughter. Somehow children arrive on the planet knowing how to suck on a breast, knowing how to crawl, and knowing how to laugh. They know how to laugh before they know how to talk, as if joy itself is a more important survival skill than language.
The power was out that day. Living in a place as remote as Belgrade Lakes, having the electricity go out now and again wasn’t all that unusual. But with a baby, it surely complicated my life. For instance, I couldn’t heat up the breast milk Deedie had expressed and left in the refrigerator. I couldn’t play music or turn on Sesame Street or warm up Zach’s lunch. Maybe that’s why we were on the floor playing with the can of whipped cream and the dog: It was desperation wrought from powerlessness.
The child and I laughed our heads off while the dog looked on with suspicion and contempt. Sunlight streamed through the window and reflected off our wooden floors. You people, said the dog. Imbeciles. The wind blew through a set of chimes that hung down outside the kitchen.
Then Zach looked at me with a curious, knowing expression. He hadn’t spoken yet, at least not with words, but it seemed as if he had something he wanted to say.
“Hey, Za
chary,” I said. “Can you talk?”
The child smiled mischievously.
“Hi, Daddy,” he said.
WHEN YOU’RE A father of a very small child, right in the heart of that experience, time passes with the speed of a glacier. Now, in retrospect, those years appear to have passed in a heartbeat. This strikes me as the fundamental irony of fatherhood—the odd disconnect between the speed of time passing and the speed of time remembered. Sitting here in the twenty-first century, with my boys now on the verge of college, the days of toddlerhood seem to have vanished in an instant, to have disappeared—as Captain Beefheart once noted—“like breath on a mirror.” But back then, time had never seemed so slow. If, at seven A.M. for instance, I had read a book to Zachary, gotten out the Duplo blocks afterward, made and fed him his morning meal of rice cereal and apple juice, hauled out the easel and the watercolor set for a little creative time, then read him another book, and after that bundled him into the stroller and wheeled him along the dirt roads of my town, and then returned to the house and made him a snack, and finally settled onto the couch together to read another book—after all of this, were I to glance up at the kitchen clock I would note that exactly fifteen minutes had passed. Before the clock struck eight, I would have long since exhausted every possible means within my imagination of passing the time. It’s no wonder parents suspend their children in bouncy-wouncy harnesses from door frames or lock them into swings. I remember on a least one occasion reading Zach the entire JCPenney catalog, in part because I hoped it would lull him to sleep, and in part because I was just plain out of ideas.
On another occasion, I told Zach to go hide in the house somewhere, and slowly counted down from a hundred before “seeking” him. When I reached the “ready or not here I come” moment, I closed my eyes, just in order to get a few blessed seconds of sleep. After ten minutes, I felt a small hand tugging on my shirt, and I opened my eyes to see my son’s hopeful, excited face. “Come on, Daddy,” he’d say. “Let’s do it again.”
Okay, Zach. One hundred! Ninety-nine! Ninety-eight! …
And so the days passed, hurtling and dragging. Each minute seemed like hours and hours. But then the years passed by like days.
AT THAT TIME I worked in the English department at Colby College with a number of other teachers who also had young children. There was an eccentric medievalist named Russell Potter who had had four children with his wife one after the other, producing babies just like Khrushchev had once sworn the USSR would produce nuclear bombs: “like we are making sausages in a sausage factory.” There was a Victorianist named David Suchoff with two girls in elementary school, and a Shakespearean named Laurie Osborne who had a boy and a girl. We used to have lunch together, all these teachers and I, and we’d talk about the joyful misery of our lives. None of these people had been among my closest friends when they first arrived at Colby, but the shared experience of parenthood had immediately promoted all of them to the inner circle, in the same way that you might wind up forever bonded to someone you shared a room with at the burn ward. (In a similar fashion, people who’d been my bosom companions since adolescence—who had not had children—slowly fell out of the rotation, and while my love for them remained undiminished, we found less and less common ground to talk about as the days drew on. I could sense what they were feeling about me—that I had become another one of those young parents unable to talk about anything other than diapers and roseola. I’d become, in spite of myself, one of the zombies. Don’t fight it. It’s good. They’re smarter than we are.
During this time the professors and I frequently talked about the advantages and the disadvantages of having children close together. Deirdre and I were already talking about Science Experiment Number Two. Was it better, I asked, to have two kids close together—what some of my friends called “Irish twins”? Or was it better to spread them out, waiting two or three or four years between Entings?
The Potters recommended having them all at once, of course. That way “they could all be friends.” Which was funny, considering the way the Potter kids were always threatening to kill each other. The Osbornes, on the other hand, said it was prudent to wait. You had to think ahead to things like college. If you waited four years between the pregnancies, you wouldn’t wind up having to pay two college tuitions at the same time.
It was hard to make sense of this advice. My sister and I were a little more than a year apart, and we hadn’t been friends until we were each in our teens and realized that we had a common enemy in our parents. Before that, though, my sister had spent a fair amount of time pounding my head into the cement floor of the basement. On another happy occasion, I remember she had laid me down on my back, pried open my mouth with her fingers, and poured the entire sugar bowl down my throat.
I turned to David Suchoff and asked him for his opinion. Suchoff just shrugged. “What can I tell you, Boylan,” he said, “whatever you do, no matter what choice you make, you will suffer.”
THE PHONE RANG EARLY. I could tell it was trouble just from the sound of it. It was Deedie, and she was weeping. “Something’s wrong with Sean,” she said. He’d just been born the night before. “They’re mede-vacing him off to Portland.”
“What?” I said. “What’s wrong with him?”
“It’s his heart,” she said.
By the time I got to the hospital, Sean was already gone. They’d bundled him up, his tiny body surrounded by tubes and wires, and rushed him to the Maine Medical Center, leaving Deedie weeping and bereft in the maternity ward. She’d had another cesarean, a spinal headache, mastitis, a failed epidural, and a head cold. And after all of that, her son had been taken away in an ambulance.
Her doctor was there, an obstetrician somewhat lacking in bedside manner. “Is he going to be all right?” I asked. “Doctor? Is he?”
She shrugged. “I don’t know,” said the doc. “His heart is out of control. If we can’t get his pulse down … your son might not make it.”
“Jim,” said Deedie. She couldn’t leave her room. “Go to him. Please. Someone should be with him if …”
I drove to Portland. My friend Rick Russo was waiting for me at the hospital; he’d flown back from some book tour he’d been on (for Nobody’s Fool, I think) to help us through whatever terrible time was now beginning. I was led through the infant ICU to an incubation chamber, kind of like the device you’d use to hatch chicken eggs in elementary school. There, wrapped in every imaginable wire, was Sean Finney Boylan, age: one day. His heart rate was 250 beats a minute. Doctors and nurses surrounded him. As I entered the ICU they all looked over at me with grave expressions.
I emerged from the room a little later. As I took off my mask and sterile gloves, Rick gave me an agonized look. He had two daughters of his own. “What’s going on, Jim? Is he going to be all right?”
“I don’t know,” I said to my friend. “I don’t know.”
A WEEK LATER we came through the door holding the baby. They’d discharged us after a week of trauma, a week in which the doctors thought they had Sean’s heart rate under control, only to find it skyrocketing again. He’d been born with a condition called supraventricular tachycardia, which more or less consisted of an extra nerve between his heart and his brain that caused that connection to short-circuit. One night, after his pulse hit the roof again, I had held the child in my arms looking into his tiny face, as the tears rolled down my cheeks. I thought to myself, There is never going to come a time in my life when I’m not worried about this child. I’m going to spend the rest of my life in constant fear I’m going to lose him.
His accelerated heartbeat made sweat course down his week-old temples. “Seannie,” I whispered. “Please. Stay with us. Don’t go away. You’re just getting started.”
When I was a newborn, I too had suffered a trauma at birth. I’d been born three months premature, which in the 1950s—like now—meant that the odds were against me. My mother had been discharged from the hospital without me, and she went back to my fami
ly’s small row home in Upper Darby, Pennsylvania, to wonder what was happening to her child. Every day after work, my father took the trolley to Sixty-ninth Street in Philadelphia, and walked to the hospital and stared down into an incubator at his unwell son.
One day, his mother—Gammie—had asked him if she should visit me in the hospital too.
“I don’t think so,” said my father. “He’s not much.”
THIRTY-SEVEN YEARS LATER, when Deedie and I came through the door holding our son, we got a different reaction. Zachary and his aunt Katie—Deedie’s sister—had decorated the house to celebrate Sean’s arrival and rescue. There were signs that said, GOOD JOB SEAN! And CONGRATULATIONS MOM AND DAD!
Zach, two years and two months old, didn’t know how much trouble Sean had been in, or how much trouble he continued to be in, for the first year of his life. Throughout 1996 and ’97, we had to dose the baby with a syringe of digitalis, morning and evening, to keep the tachycardia at bay.
All Zach knew was that his brother had at last arrived, and that we had gone from a family of three to a family of four. We laid the sleeping Sean in his bassinet. Zach stood there, looking in wonder at his new companion.
He turned to us. “Mommy, Daddy?” he asked. “Do you think Baby Sean is proud?”
WE SURVIVED those days. Sean did not die, and instead grew slowly round on breast milk. Zach took his painting seriously. “I call this one Crazy Town,” he said, showing us a canvas with a series of swirling rectangles. There was paint all over his face. Our house filled with blocks, and books, and stuffed animals, and syringes of digitalis, and tiny pairs of shoes.
We’d sit on the couch, Deedie and I, our children in our laps, reading Go, Dog. Go!
“What a party! What a dog party!”
We’d done it. The days raced by, at the speed of molasses.
Sometimes I’d look at the boys and wonder, How on earth are you going to teach them how to be men? You, of all people, Boylan?
Stuck in the Middle with You Page 4
