Stuck in the Middle With You: A Memoir of Parenting in Three Genders (25 page)

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 refrigerator 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
.

A
T 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.”

E
ARLIER 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 two
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.”

I
N 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
.

I’ve been watching you
, said my father, without his lips moving.
There are a lot of things I understand now, Jim, that I didn’t understand when I was alive
. He inhaled his L&M King and blew out the smoke.
If you have to become a woman, you should know that I will always love you, and that your mother will always love you. But if you do go through with this, there is something you have to know
. He gave me a cold look.

I’m not going to be watching out for you anymore
.

He stared at me with that harsh, judgmental expression. And then he disappeared.

I sat up from the dream into the darkness of my high school bedroom. I turned on the lamp, my heart pounding away.

The room was full of the smell of his hair tonic. I’d have recognized it anywhere.

I
N THE MORNING
, I went for a long walk around the old neighborhood. I stood by my friend Mark’s old house, a house not unlike the one
my mother lived in. After Mark’s family moved out, Lenny Dykstra had moved in. He had been the center fielder for the Phillies, but he was gone now too. I didn’t know the people who lived there now, or what was inside their barn, the place where we’d had the cast party for
Our Town
back in 1975. I thought of a poem by Edwin Arlington Robinson, and the man who looks down at the town “where strangers would have shut the door that friends had opened long ago.” I walked down the street and stood by the meadow with the stream, where once Mark and I had spent a whole evening watching fireflies electrify the night.

Then I walked back to the house, and I sat down with my mother, and I said, “Mom. There’s something I need to tell you.”

She put down her knitting. Day after day she made baby booties for her church’s charity. I can’t even imagine how many pairs she’d made, all those booties for babies she did not know.

“Is it something good?” she said, although she knew better.

“I don’t know what you’re going to think,” I said. “But I’m afraid it’s something that’s going to hurt you, no matter how much I want not to hurt you.”

My mother drew into herself a little bit. I could feel her raising her shields, as if to prepare for whatever blow was surely coming next.

“You need to know I’m not sick,” I said. “I’m not gay, and Deedie and I aren’t getting divorced.” And for a moment my mother relaxed a little bit, since the three of these were the obvious first choices. That there was something other than these, that it was something she had hardly heard of, was what she did not yet know.

“You have always been the best mom,” I said. “You have always had that optimism and faith in everything, and I think I’ve inherited that, too; it’s given me a sense that things are always going to get better, no matter what happens.”

I was reaching the hard part. I couldn’t believe the words that were falling from my lips, couldn’t believe the pain I was about to cause her, wondered even now if there was any way to protect her from what I had to say. Hadn’t that been my job as a man, protecting my mother
and my sister and Deedie and the boys from all the battering evils of the world?