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

by Jennifer Finney Boylan

  JFB: Were the rules different for different siblings depending on who they were and how old they were?

  SM: Not really, because there were so many of us. There was no talking back. We were always marshaled and told to be quiet. Now I see why. Six young kids must have just been a madhouse.

  JFB: I think it is kind of like having your own private army.

  SM: Yeah.

  JFB: What was your father like?

  SM: He was quite idiosyncratic. He didn’t appear to need to reveal himself. He had a wry sense of humor and was smart but not particularly intellectual. He was a very good athlete and kind of a—well, not a cynic, but he would say things like, “I never met a man I liked. I only like women.”

  Then he married this woman full of joie de vivre. I think she loved him and she was happy to be married to him and she loved having lots of children. Since she took care of everything, he could kind of check out a bit. I think there was a little melancholy thing in him, again, that he would never really acknowledge.

  He had his shop where he liked to make things out of wood. He’d build boats and he’d build houses.

  You were allowed to go down there in the basement with the rocks coming out of the floor and you could build stuff if you wanted. He wasn’t overly precious about it. The cans of paint would be crusted over. It was fun playing down there, a place for creating things.

  JFB: And then, right in the heart of this, your mother is killed in this terrible way.

  SM: Sudden accident, yes.

  JFB: She’s in a car that was hit by a train?

  SM: It was a Monday morning and there had been an ice storm the night before. It was in January. The Boston-to-Maine railroad line goes along the coast there just below our driveway. Usually there was a little ding, ding, ding, ding, ding at the crossing with an arm coming down. We were always told to stop at the railroad tracks when we were on our bikes, even if the signals weren’t flashing.

  That morning she was on her way to an exercise class. There’s a big barn blocking the view of where the train would be coming from. So you couldn’t see it. If her windows were up and she had the music on, she wouldn’t have heard anything. The train hit her car right smack as she was crossing the tracks like a bull’s-eye. The timing wasn’t three seconds before or three seconds after. She was killed instantly. My youngest sister was seven.

  For my father, it was as if the curtain sort of rose and here were seven children suddenly looking at him, the one parent left. He was a good man, but he had never learned how full-fledgedly to embrace a child.

  JFB: So did he learn that on the fly? Or it just kind of—he was never going to learn now? Was it too late?

  SM: I think he did learn from my mother, watching her. His own mother had a lot of fortitude.

  There was actually a very funny moment right after my mother’s funeral. You laugh, you cry, you don’t even know where you are. We were all in the kitchen and no one had been sleeping for days and it was maybe the third, fourth day after she died.

  There was a pause in the conversation and everyone was kind of looking at Dad. He said, “Well, I suppose we could all go our separate ways.”

  Everyone laughed really hard. That was his humor. Nothing would ever be surprising now. In a way he was also saying, “This is how out of my depth I am.”

  JFB: I’m thinking about the differences between fathers and mothers. And here’s a father who has left most of the command center to Mom who suddenly is the single parent of seven.

  SM: I have two people in my family now, my brother and my stepson, who both have children out of wedlock because they weren’t in a committed relationship with the mothers. Both of them are 50/50 down the middle committed as fathers. And this is co-parenting with a mother with whom they had not shared a life. They are totally great and involved fathers.

  JFB: It’s fathering without husbanding.

  I wonder sometimes if I am fathering my children without maleness. Deedie and I have very different relationships with our kids. There was a time when I thought, No, I need to be more womanly with my sons because otherwise I’m shortchanging my identity as a female. But now I believe that parenthood is a mutable experience. There’s a lot of room for me to be whoever I want to be with my children without having to lose any of my own identity.

  SM: It’s interesting to think about how much sexuality does or doesn’t come into parenthood. When I look at my brother and stepson, they maintain a whole parenting attitude, not letting the mother take certain areas, if you follow. I see a lot of maternal behavior coming out in those fathers, or what would have been traditionally considered maternal.

  JFB: And by “maternal behavior” you mean …?

  SM: Good question. I guess, a more gentle handling of disciplinary things. And being aware of the trivial things that have to do with the particulars of a child’s life, really tracking with them.

  JFB: You think of that as maternal?

  SM: In my generation the father would kind of swoop in, have his say or be the final word on something, whereas the mother was more constant and there.

  JFB: Yeah, the father was like the Supreme Court and the mother was more like the—

  SM: The mother was all the lower courts.

  JFB: Did your father become more maternal? After you lost your mother? Did his manner of parenting you change now that he was the only one responsible?

  SM: He was forced to be more clued in to his children, but his manner didn’t change, not really. He was an isolate, in a family of many children! My sisters and I turned into Mum.

  JFB: So how many years between when your mom died and when he got remarried?

  SM: A year.

  JFB: Was there the traditional resentment, “Oh, no one gets to marry our father”?

  SM: Just the opposite. It was more along the lines of, “Please marry him, someone. Because we can’t keep looking after him.”

  JFB: Were you worried about him? I remember that the father in Monkeys turns to drinking.

  SM: Yes, there was worry. He had had this huge shock and his whole life had changed. So drinking was definitely an issue for him, especially that year after.

  JFB: What would he do when he was drunk? Was he angry? Was he a singer?

  SM: My father was a nice man with bits of anger buried in him. He’d turn into sort of a bobbing head with a smile that made you cringe because you knew it wasn’t real. He became sentimental and gentle but you knew he was just out of it and therefore, as a father, lost to us.

  JFB: Later, after you’d left home and moved out in the world, did you think, I’m never having kids, or, I want a big family just like the one I grew up in?

  SM: I did think, I’m never having kids.

  JFB: Never?

  SM: I thought so—for about ten years.

  JFB: Because …? Enough was enough already?

  SM: It more had to do with the domestic life as I saw it. I was not interested in having a domestic life.

  JFB: So it wasn’t even children so much. It was the idea of kind of signing on to the grid? Ann Beattie said something like that to me. She said, “I’m not so keen on joining up with the operative system.” But you did have children in the end.

  SM: I knew I wanted an artistic life. Earliest on, I wanted to be an actress. When I was very young we watched a lot of movies and put on plays. Then I loved painting and art and did that. Then, I think because it was easiest to be compulsive with it, I concentrated on writing.

  JFB: Some people call you a minimalist. Is there a connection between that style and the family that you grew up in?

  SM: I prefer the term brevetist.

  JFB: A brevetist. Is there any kind of line you can draw between your artistic style as a brevetist or as a subtractionist—as Mary Robison calls it—and that house that you grew up in with all those brothers and sisters and wanting to get out on your own, and finding a more simple life?

  SM: Interesting thought. I would say the style has more to do with
my taste in fiction, with the kind of fiction that I aspire to write. Because being minimal does not come naturally to me. In fact, it is the opposite. It’s like my house. I think, I want to live in a simple, unfettered house. And look, I can’t stop gathering things that have meaning to me, they just keep piling up.

  JFB: So how did you get to the point where you decided to have a child?

  SM: I’ve been married twice, both quite surprising to myself since I didn’t think, again, I would ever get married. I didn’t think I needed to. I believe in partnerships and union and love between two people but not marriage necessarily. But I have been married twice.

  The first time I got married I was in my early thirties. The urge for a child initially was, “Let’s make a creature together.” But we didn’t. Our marriage didn’t last. It lasted three years. After that I started to travel. I went about. I liked being free. I definitely liked not being in a house in a domestic situation. I wanted to see the world.

  Then, in my late thirties, early forties, not in any major relationship, I thought, If I don’t have a child I’m going to be sorry. A strong maternal urge came over me. It didn’t have to do with making a creature with someone else. I just wanted to use the part of myself not being used which wanted to be devoted to the nurturing and raising of a child.

  I don’t know if that’s because my mother had been such a strong figure in my life or if it had just finally appeared in me.

  JFB: What amazes me is the way our feelings towards babies and children change. When I was a single man—I love being able to say that—I remember getting on an airplane and somebody, some mom with a screaming baby, would sit down in the seat next to me and I would freak out. Ask to change seats. Whereas now if a woman, or a man, for that matter—it’s usually a woman—sits down with a baby, I’m all over that baby and I’m all over helping that mom. “Here, I’ll hold the baby while you go to the bathroom. It’ll be okay.” I’m just fascinated by kids and I’m drawn in. Is that because I’m female now or is it because I have children of my own and I know how cool it is?

  SM: Well, I think it’s partly because you’re female. If you were a man the mother would be less likely to hand you her baby. She’s thinking, Oh, you’re a sister so you get it. With a man you’re not sure if he gets it. Nothing against men, just how it is.

  JFB: How old were you when Ava was born?

  SM: I was almost forty-four. I adopted her at birth. She’s brought her own biology with her.

  I was single. But by the time she arrived I was with her dad and he was there at her birth. He’s been her dad since the moment she came out.

  JFB: Do you feel that you understand your parents better now that you have been a mom? Is there a way in which suddenly you go, “Oh, now I get it”? Or was it not that much of a mystery in the first place?

  SM: It’s very hard to see your parents as people, I mean really. I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about them and have hashed it out in therapy. I’ve tried to think of my mother as a person I could meet, to imagine what she was like at age forty. But I can’t do the flips in my mind it requires to think of her as only a person and not my mother. I know what her personality was and how she was socially but to me she was that kind of godlet in my life and there’s no way I can switch that impression.

  JFB: What do you think you know now that you didn’t at the time your mother died?

  SM: Well, I’m not sure this is about being a mother, but it has to do with being older. The older you get the more you realize how much you don’t know. I feel that as a mother.

  JFB: The wisdom of realizing how stupid we are?

  SM: I thought then that my mother knew more than I feel I know now.

  JFB: I don’t know, Susan. Looking back, it’s amazing to me that your family origin could not be more different from the family that you—

  SM: That I made. Yeah, short of being married to a woman, which would have added one extra level—

  JFB: Or changing genders completely. Which is more than we can say about some people.

  SM: Then I would have really gone and done everything as much the opposite as possible.

  JFB: Well. The day is young.

  We were driving up a dirt road together, Zach and I, fighting about this essay he’d written for school, “Where I’m Going to Be Ten Years from Now.” His prediction? Australia. Developing anti-venom, for the Australian Death Adder.

  I offered my opinion. “No,” I said.

  “You should be proud!” he said. He was eighteen now. “Me, getting a PhD. In toxicology. Helping to save lives.”

  “You’re not handling poisonous snakes. For a living. Okay? You’re just not.”

  “It’s my life!”

  “I know it’s your life, but if you’re dead, it’s my life. Plunged into darkness!”

  “I’m not going to die.”

  “Of course you’re going to die! Australia has the deadliest snakes in the world!”

  We were driving toward the cabin of his former fiddle teacher. She was having a party. My son cast a glance at me. “You should believe in me,” he said.

  “Of course I believe in you. I just don’t want you to get hurt.”

  “I’m not going to get hurt.”

  “You’re going to handle deadly snakes, how can you possibly not get hurt?”

  “You pick them up with a long stick.”

  “A long stick. Wow! That really puts my mind at ease!”

  He shook his head. He was irritated now. “You don’t believe I can milk the venom from snakes.”

  “Zach, you failed your driver’s license three times. You’ve lost every pair of glasses you’ve ever owned. Of course you’re going to get bitten by a poisonous snake! And die! And then my life will be plunged into darkness! Darkness!”

  “They have anti-venom for the death adder,” he explained. “If there’s any trouble, I’ll just take the anti-venom. Okay?”

  “If they already have the anti-venom, why do you have to handle the snakes in the first place?” I was pretty sore at him. “I thought developing the anti-venom was the whole point! Why would you handle the snakes if you already have the anti-venom?”

  “You’re shouting,” Zach noted.

  “Of course I’m shouting!” I shouted. “This is why I changed all those diapers? This is what I gave my whole life to? You, dead in Australia! Poisoned! Alone!”

  He just shook his head. In lieu of conversation, he turned on his iPod, which was wired to the car stereo. The car filled with blarney, the pipes and fiddles and all the rest. To Dublin town I made me way, then to Cobh, and Amerikay. Now I’m in the land of liberty, a fig for all me foes!

  I guess his theory was, a little music from the Olde Countrie would soften me up. He was wrong about this, though.

  Something ran across the road before us, and Zach jammed on the brakes. It all happened quickly. One minute we were listening to Irish music, the next we were spinning through space, waiting to see if we would live.

  We skidded into the ditch. From the woods, a coyote paused and looked back at us. I saw the wildness in its eyes.

  “Good driving,” I said. “Excellent reactions.”

  Zach started the car again and got us out of the ditch. We started up the hill again. “I told you that you could trust me,” he said.

  A few months before this, he’d been admitted to Vassar College, early decision. I loved telling people my son was going to be “a Vassar Man.”

  In April he’d been cast in the school’s musical, The Wizard of Oz, as the Cowardly Lion. The director had his actors talk about their characters. “What’s the most important thing in the world for the Cowardly Lion?” he’d asked Zach. My son did not hesitate with his answer. “His tail,” he said.

  Deedie and I had sat in the dark theater, watching our child sing and dance. Put ’em up, put ’em up. At the end of the third act, he bid farewell to Dorothy. I would never have found my courage, he said, if it wasn’t for you.

  One Sat
urday he went to the barber and cut off all his long hair; he gave it to an organization, called Locks for Love, that makes wigs for cancer patients.

  Then he fell in love with the girl who played the talking apple tree in Oz. Her name was Hana, and she came from the Czech Republic, a land where the word for beloved is amado. They went to the prom together.

  Hey, she had asked, how would you like it if someone came along and picked something off of you?

  Seannie was in South Africa. He’d been accepted as an exchange student for the last third of his sophomore year at a school in Cape Town called Bishops Diocesan College. A month earlier we’d taken him to Logan airport and loaded the fifteen-year-old on the plane.

  “Please, please, please be careful, Seannie,” Deedie had said.

  Sean gave her that sly grin. “I got it,” he said, and then walked off toward Africa without his mothers. What did he do in South Africa, by way of being careful? He went bungee jumping, and skydiving, and rock climbing, and shark-cage diving.

  Now the sun was sinking toward the ridge to my right. The long shining mirror of Long Pond was visible in the valley. Silence hung in the air between us, and not for the first time. My sons were leaving me, going out into the broad world.

  “Zach,” I said at last, “if you really, really want to milk the poison from deadly snakes in Australia—if that’s your dream—I’ll support you.”

  “Thank you,” he said, and rubbed my shoulder. “This means a lot to me.”

  “I’ll always support you, and your dreams,” I said. “Even if your dreams … are stupid.”

  My throat closed up. The tears rolled down.

  Of course, if it was the stupidity of dreams we were considering, I was one to talk. I mean, please. I thought of the hours I’d spent at Zach’s age, lying in bed, staring at the ceiling, imagining a world a lot farther away than Australia.

  We pulled up at the violin teacher’s house, right at the top of Buttermilk Hill. The pastures of her farm were all around us, and beyond that the mountains and the lakes. Her husband’s single-engine plane sat at the edge of a long field. A wind sock dangled from a pole just beyond a field of tomatoes and cabbages.