Stuck in the Middle With You: A Memoir of Parenting in Three Genders (16 page)

The burden of shame fell even more heavily upon me. There I was, in my twinset and skirt, standing in the very shadow of the Anne Frank house. Where boys had looked upon me. And concluded I was German.

W
HEN
I
GOT
back to Cork, the boys were waiting for me at the door. They rushed forward, their arms spread, and I gathered my sons to me. They were still so small I could pick up one with each arm.

“Daddy’s back!” they shouted.

T
HE NEXT DAY
, I went to the hospital to have someone take a look at the piece of glass in my foot. Ireland, while enjoying what turned out to be its all-too-brief period as the “Celtic Tiger,” had not poured a lot of its newfound wealth into its health care system, and as a result, the wait at the ER at the Cork hospital turned into an ordeal the likes of which I’d have been more likely to expect from a hospital in, say, Libya. I waited in a decaying chair next to a guy with an open head wound for about five hours, until at last I was ushered into an examining room and a doctor sat me down. On the floor in front of me was a bright red pool of blood.

“Mind the puddle,” said the doc.

An hour later I was in an operating room, as surgeons used knives and tweezers to feel around for the elusive splinter. It took them a while. The anesthetic didn’t work. I spent some of the time screaming my brains out.

At long last, the doctor came up to me with the piece of bloodied glass held triumphantly in his tweezers. “You see?” he said. “There we have it at last!”

I looked at it, thought things over, and screamed some more.

When I came out of surgery, Deedie was waiting for me. “What happened to you?” she said.

“Glass in my foot,” I said.

We limped out to the car. “How long has there been glass in your foot?” she asked.

“A couple weeks,” I said. “Remember that goblet I broke when that guy delivered the flowers?”

She sat me down in the car, went around to her side to slide behind the wheel. “So you’ve just been walking around with a piece of glass in your foot for two weeks?”

I nodded. She was angry with me. “What’s wrong with you?” she said. “Why didn’t you say anything?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I didn’t want to be annoying. I figured it would work its way out.”

She drove me to the pharmacy to pick up my prescription for painkillers. “He didn’t want to be annoying!” she declared, as if making some sort of argument to an invisible third party.

“Kind of stupid, I guess,” I said.

She glanced over at me. “Did you have that glass in your foot the whole time you were in Amsterdam?”

I nodded.

She shook her head. “Why don’t you tell me when you hurt?” she asked. “Why do you have to keep it all inside?”

Deedie parked at the apothecary to get my drugs. As I waited for her, I thought about my friend Johnny Neville, singing about his father.

You wind him up and let him go
,

And watch him wobble, to and fro
.

Deedie came back to the car ten minutes later, drugs in hand, to find me wracked with tears.

“Jimmy? Oh, my sweet Jimmy-pie,” she said, and held her husband in her arms. I lay my head upon her shoulder and shook.

She had seen me weep, now and again, over the ten years of our marriage. But Deedie had never seen me weep like this.

W
HEN WE GOT HOME
, the children were waiting for us. As Deedie ushered their babysitter, Liz, toward the car, the boys hugged me tight.

“Daddy, you were crying,” said Sean.

“I was,” I said. My face was all red, and my cheeks were still wet.

Seannie pointed at me and grinned, as if he’d figured something out.

“Daddy,” he said. “You were a bad boy.”

I nodded. He had that right.

“Why were you crying?” said Zach. “What’s wrong?”

I gathered my sons into my arms again, wondering how on earth I could protect them, how I could save us all from the doom that was suddenly drawing near.

“I don’t want pants,” I whispered. “Oh, I hate pants.”

Zach was sitting
at the lunch table with his friend Emma, eating a peanut butter and Fluff sandwich. On his napkin I had drawn a cartoon of our dog Lucy. From Lucy’s mouth came a word balloon, and in the middle of the balloon was a cartoon heart. This of course was ironic, given the fact that the dog loathed all sentient creatures, my sons not least, as mentioned earlier.

“I saw your daddy,” said Emma. They were in second grade. “He looks like a girl.”

Zach looked at the cartoon dog, then back at Emma. “Can I tell you a secret, Emma?” he said.

“Yes.” By this, she didn’t mean that she would keep the secret, only that he could tell it to her. Emma had asked Zach to be the vice president of the Drama Club a few weeks before this, a post that seemed prestigious to Zach at first. Later, he learned that all the Drama Club did was appoint officers. They didn’t actually put on any plays.

“My daddy’s turning into a girl,” said Zach.

Emma’s eyes flickered. She put down her Ring Ding.

“That,” she said, “is the saddest thing I have ever heard.”

“It’s okay,” said Zach. “She’s still the same person.”

Emma shook her head, as if Zach somehow had failed to grasp the gravity of her words. “That,” she said again, “is the saddest thing I have ever heard.”

Zach didn’t understand what was so sad about it, but it was hard to disagree with Emma, once she’d decided something. In the years to come, he’d find this was true of lots of people.

I
N THE YEARS
since “transition” we’ve often been asked how it was our family survived the whole miserable business. Looking back on it all now, it seems inevitable that the love our family shared was bound to triumph, that the things that bound us all together were fated to prevail over the things that were tearing us apart. But it didn’t feel inevitable at the time. What felt inevitable was the complete loss of everything we had ever known or loved.

For one thing, the vast majority of our friends and relatives seemed to be subtly, or not so subtly, rooting for divorce. This was true not only among Deedie’s supporters, who just thought the whole idea of staying with a transsexual “husband” the height of absurdity; it was true among mine as well. “You’re never going to really be a woman until you get away from the life you created as a man,” one friend told me. “You need to move away somewhere and start over.” According to these well-wishers, staying with Deedie and the boys, continuing on as a professor at Colby and living in the town in which we had made our home, would be like trailing my male life behind me, no matter what sex I became. I might change my name to Jennifer and switch over to diet from regular Coke, but as long as I stayed put, I would still be casting James’s shadow.

People rooting for us to split weren’t necessarily mean-spirited, of course; splitting up and each of us “moving on” seemed like an obvious and generous way to do well by each other. Surely Deedie deserved what she had signed on for—a husband—and surely I deserved a chance to find the thing everyone presumed that I would now desire as well: a husband of my own. This solution—divorce for both of us, and a second marriage for us each to a decent, loving man—was the cleanest all around, it was felt. If the danger for me in staying with my family was that I would always still be casting James’s shadow, then the danger for Deedie was even more severe. If she stayed with me, she would be casting a shadow of her own, living the life of a woman who had never quite accepted the fact that the man she loved no longer existed. She would be like some twenty-first-century nether-version of
Miss Havisham, frozen in time, still going through the rituals of a life that had long since gone on without her.

In short, what our friends and family hoped was the well-intended hope of men and women in a culture riddled with homophobia—not to mention transphobia, a word most people had never even heard of. They hoped that Deedie and I, severed from each other, would henceforward be redeemed by the love of some nice man.

That we would want to stay together, that we would want to continue our marriage as quas-bians, wasn’t just a hope that had not yet occurred to our friends. It was also one that had not yet occurred to us.

I
F THERE WAS
a single person in the world who thought that my changing genders was a brilliant idea, it was Deedie’s sister Katie. Twelve years older than my wife, Katie was a United Church of Christ minister who had recently come out as a lesbian. It was Katie who had married the two of us at the National Cathedral in Washington back in 1988; it was Katie who had come to sit at Deedie’s bedside when the children were born. She had a mercurial, passionate, intense personality, and she was as quick to laugh as she was to dissolve in fits of bereaved, self-pitying tears. She had always been a big fan of mine, though; I think she saw in me an example of what she hoped a man could be—sensitive, emotional, and involved with his sons.

Katie knew that something was up with her sister and me in the months following our return from Ireland in late 1999. She heard the strain in Deedie’s voice; she could tell that we were holding something back. When at last I spilled the beans, her first reaction was one of relief. “Oh thank goodness it’s only that you’re a woman,” she said. “I was afraid it was something serious.”

Oddly—or perhaps not so oddly—Katie’s support for my transition (you really had to call it enthusiasm) wasn’t exactly what Deedie needed. (Quite frankly, at that point in her life, I think Katie thought it would be great if everybody became a woman.) But talking to a sister who thought that her husband’s transformation was an occasion for celebration wasn’t of much help when what Deedie needed most was sympathy
and support. And so, fairly soon in the process, Deedie turned to her oldest sister, Susie, for support. Susie, fourteen years Deedie’s senior, lived in Oklahoma, and while no one could consider her a conservative (all the Finneys had inherited the progressivism of their father, Tom, a major Democratic consigliere to Kennedy, Johnson, and Clark Clifford), she was certainly less thrilled for her sister at the prospect of her finding herself suddenly legally married to another woman than sister Katie was. Susie’s favorite expression was “Wellll …,” drawn out in a loving Southwestern twang. Susie’s “Wellll …” was a soothing, loving sound, an expression of both hope and humor, kind of the Oklahoman version of Tony Soprano’s “Whaddya gonna do.” It was this phrase, more than anything else, that helped Deedie negotiate the awkward, heartbreaking early months of her husband’s transition from male to female.

    
DEEDIE:
Susie, what am I going to do? The man that I love is a beautiful woman.

    
SUSIE:
Wellll …

And so each of us got our own Finney sister—Katie for me, Susie for Deedie. The fourth Finney sibling, Todd, was kept in the dark for now. Why was it that I failed to share our secret with him, a man who, in the long run, turned out to be as loving as a brother could be? Was it that, given the death of Deedie’s father, he was the closest thing to a father-in-law I had? He had given his sister away at our wedding; he had given the toast at our reception. Was it that, even as I exchanged my citizenship papers from the land of men for those from the land of women, I still felt the tug of the patriarchy?

Or maybe I was just afraid he’d drive over to our house from Vermont (where he lived in a cabin he had built himself) and beat the crap out of me. Todd Finney, a pacifist and a forgiver by nature, had—so far as I knew—never taken a swing at another living soul. But the way I figured, there was probably a first time for everything.

In the months that followed, Katie acted as my Sherpa to the world of women. She took me to Northampton, Massachusetts, for a long weekend—about as trans-friendly a town as can be imagined—where
we stayed at an inn and I got some heels-on-the-ground experience in walking around in the world. She was endlessly patient with me, serving as my chaperone as I got my hair done, and we went shopping in hippie boutiques for clothes and earrings. We had plans to go out to dinner, but she was plagued by a stomachache that had been bugging her off and on for months. On the last day, minister Katie held my hand and said a prayer. I was a man again, just about to get in the car and drive back to Maine.