Stuck in the Middle With You: A Memoir of Parenting in Three Genders (3 page)

She eyed the wedding ring on my finger. “What about you? Where’s yours?”

And just like that, I found myself in one of those situations where neither telling the truth nor coming up with a great big lie was going to accomplish anything. What could I say to her? Well, actually, I’m transgender. I used to be a man, but I’ve been a woman for ten years
now. I’m still married to the woman I married twenty-five years ago, back when I was a man. Crazy vorld, huh? Ha! Ha! Ha!

Wow, she’d reply. Isn’t your marriage really screwed up then?

I thought about Grenadine’s marriage and my own. People looking at my wife, Deedie, and me—two women, not lesbians, legally married to each other—would say we were insane, way out of the mainstream, a threat to traditional American values. And all that. Whereas Grenadine and Ethan Senior were a paragon of all we revere: a heterosexual married couple, a dad serving his country in the war overseas. By almost anyone’s measure, Deedie and I are the dangerous outliers, and Grenadine and her husband Mr. and Mrs. Normal. Even though Deedie and I love each other beyond all understanding, and Grenadine’s fondest hope was that her husband would be murdered by insurgents.

Sometimes I don’t understand the world at all, is my conclusion.

“I don’t have a husband right now,” I said to Grenadine. I was satisfied by the ambiguity of this, although it had to be admitted that this too was kind of a lie—since it implied that I’d once had one, or that a day would come when I might.

Down on the floor below us, Ethan hollered as he charged toward Chandler for the match point. The enormous creature bearing down upon the tiny, frightened boy was terrible to behold. Chandler dropped his sword again and raised his hands toward his mask. Ethan wonked him on the chest, and the electronic touch detector—which was automatically scoring the event—registered the hit. Ethan had vanquished Chandler. They took off their masks and shook hands.

“Atta boy, Chandler,” shouted his dad. “Way to show character!”

Grenadine rolled her eyes. “Character,” she muttered sadly, as if this were something she had heard about once.

Ethan searched the stands and saw his mother there, and then he nodded at her. He had a crew cut and an ingrown smirk.

My own son patted Chandler on the back. Looking down at my boy, I had a strange, nostalgic feeling—wishing that, when I’d been a guy, I’d had half the character now exhibited by my own near-grown son. It’s common enough, I guess, a thought such as this, demented
though it may be. We look to our children as a kind of cosmic mulligan, our own best hope for a second chance. There were plenty of times I had looked at my son Zach as a better version of me, man-wise. He had the same goofy sense of humor, the same habit of wearing his heart right out there on his sleeve where anyone could crush it, the same buoyant hope that somehow love would prevail over all.

If I had failed as a man—and even those people who loved me most would have to admit this, what with the vagina and everything—then maybe Zach was a last chance to get it right. The man that I had once been clearly lived in him, although this time around we seemed to have been spared the melancholic lunacy.

On the other hand, I knew full well that thinking in this way was a surefire path to frustration. Children are here to live their own lives, not ours, and any parent who looks to her son to right the wrongs of her own past probably ought to get out of the parenting business entirely.

“I’m sorry I said that,” said the tiny Grenadine. “About my husband. You must think I’m a basket case.”

“Of course not,” I said. “I knew you didn’t mean it.”

“But I did mean it,” she said, after a pause.

“Seriously?”

“He’s just not a nice guy,” she said. “The army changed him.”

I shrugged. “People change,” I said. Coming from me, this was an understatement.

Something throbbed in my left breast. It wasn’t sentiment. An odd, pulsing pain had been lurking in me for a month or two. I’d been doing a self-exam in a shower in a hotel in New York back in December when I’d first found the lump. Incredibly, I’d tried to pretend it wasn’t there for the first month or so. But every time I felt for it to see if it was still there, I found it, larger. A mammogram was scheduled for the next day, the morning after the fencing tournament.

I’d begun to do some of the math in my head. Having seen my own father, and then my sister-in-law, slain by cancer, suffering through the chemo and the radiation, and the surgery, only to die agonizing deaths, I’d already decided, if it was cancer I wasn’t doing any of that. I’d just go to the zoo and jump into the lions’ cage instead.

It wasn’t that I didn’t love my life—the opposite, in fact. As someone who’d lived a full life as a man, then survived the perilous transition and then lived another ten euphoric years as a woman, I had plenty of things to be grateful for. Quite frankly, I couldn’t imagine anyone’s having had such a lucky life as my own, in spite of all the tears my condition—and the effects that it had had on others—had engendered. I’d been married for almost twenty-five years to a woman I adored, and who still adored me. I’d had what felt—at times—like the best job in the world, teaching English at Colby. I’d written a bestselling book, been a guest of Oprah Winfrey, even been imitated on
Saturday Night Live
by Will Forte, who, according to some people, did a better impression of me than I did.

I had two brilliant and resilient sons, each of them with amazing and fabulous hair.

Quite frankly, there wasn’t a whole lot left on my to-do list. Other than sit back in wonder and see what happens next.

“I hate that,” said Grenadine softly. “I hate it, that people change.”

I
WAS A FATHER
for six years, a mother for ten, and for a time in between I was both, or neither, like some parental version of the schnoodle, or the cockapoo. Of course, as parents go, I was a rather feminine father; for that matter I suppose I’m a masculine mother. When I was their father I showed my boys how to make a good tomato sauce, how to fold a napkin, how to iron a dress shirt; as their mother I’ve shown them how to split wood with a maul. Whether this means I’ve had one parenting style or two, I am not entirely certain. I can assure you I am not a perfect parent and will be glad to review the long list of my mistakes. But in dealing with a parent who subverts a lot of expectations about gender, I hope my sons have learned to be more flexible and openhearted than many of their peers with traditionally gendered parents.

I would like to think that this has been a gift to them and not a curse. It is my hope that having a father who became a woman has made my two remarkable boys, in turn, into better men.

Zach learned to shave when he was two years old, by watching me.
He says that this is one of his primary memories of me as a man—the morning ritual of the razor and the hot steam from the basin. Zach stood upon a stool so that he could see his face in the bathroom mirror. I used to coat his young, pink cheeks with Gillette Foamy, and then give him a razor with the protective shield still on the blade. As I shaved my face, Zach would shave his. He’d mimic the contortions I’d make with my face in order to keep my skin taut. And he’d shave his own face in the same order I shaved mine—cheeks first, then the neck, then the chin, mustache last.

We stood there before the mirror, the two of us. I wiped the steam away from the top half of the mirror so I could see myself; Zach wiped a smaller hole away for himself at the bottom. Our expressions were so serious as we shaved, as men’s faces always are as they undertake this business, as if we are not shaving, but staring out across the bridge of our intergalactic star destroyers.

Afterward, we’d towel down our faces, removing the residual froth and smacking our smooth cheeks lightly with an air of manly satisfaction. “There,” he’d say. “I’m clean as a whistle!”

Where he got that phrase I can’t tell you. He didn’t get it from me.

That Christmas, Deedie bought Zach his own pretend shaving kit, complete with a plastic razor. When he opened this gift, though, he immediately burst into tears. “What?” said Deedie, discouraged that what had seemed like the perfect gift had gone so wrong.

“I don’t want a baby razor,” Zach wept, looking at me for backup. “I want a real one!”

Twelve years later, when Zach began to shave for real, he did it with an electric razor, one of those contraptions with the “floating heads.” I didn’t show him how to do it, although I tried. But he stopped me as he headed into the bathroom, and said, “Maddy. I got it from here.” A moment later, the door closed, and I sat down in the kitchen and listened to the faint buzzing sound coming through the wall.

I didn’t learn how to shave from my father either. Which turns out, I think, not to be so strange. One of the things about manhood I learned from my father is that it’s a solitary experience, a land of silences and understatements, a place where a lot of important things
have to be learned alone. Whereas womanhood, a lot of the time, is a thing you get to share.

I remember going for a bra fitting once and the saleswoman just waltzing right into my changing room in the midst of things to “check the fit.” When she entered the room I was flabbergasted. I wasn’t prepared for anyone to barge in while—what’s the phrase?—my cups runneth over. But in seeing my astonishment, the saleswoman just laughed. Oh, honey, please, she said. We’re all women here.

“How was it?” I asked Zach when he emerged from the bathroom, stroking his face. I was all set to have a big conversation about the experience. Shaving for the first time! A huge rite of passage! Do you remember, my sweet boy, when you were two, and we used to stand before the mirror together, staring through the clouds of steam? I imagined the two of us sitting down for a moment, in order to take the measure of our rapidly passing lives.

“It was fine,” said Zach, with a hint of annoyance in his voice. I recognized that tone. It said, it was what it was and it wasn’t all that interesting, and do we have to talk about it as if it was? Not everything in the world, my son was trying to tell me, is worthy of analysis and sentimentality.

“Okay,” I said, trying not to be hurt. Zach shook his head and bent down next to me.

“Really,” he said. “It was fine.” He gave me a hug, to make up for his silence, and I hugged him back, and my cheek brushed against his.

Smooth
.

“I
DON
’
T KNOW
,” Grenadine was saying as we waited for the next round of competition to start. “I don’t think everybody has to stay the same forever. I just don’t see why I have to stay stuck, when he’s not who I married.”

This was, of course, the question that obsessed me. The previous week, Deedie and I had sat in the audience at Kents Hill’s theater and watched as our younger son Sean stepped into a spotlight and recited sonnet 116.

Let me not to the marriage of true minds

Admit impediments. Love is not love

Which alters when it alteration finds
,

Or bends with the remover to remove:

O no! it is an ever-fixed mark
,

That looks on tempests and is never shaken;

It is the star to every wandering bark
,

Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken
.

Sitting there in the audience, I admit that tears had rolled down my cheeks. For one thing, surely no other family had found alteration as had ours, nor any wife been so ever-fixed in her adoration for the one she loved as Deedie had been for me. For another, Sean looked so grown-up on the stage, his wild hair lit by stage lights.

Deedie saw me wipe away the tears. “Dear God,” she muttered. “Here we go again.”

“How did your husband change?” I asked Grenadine, and thought,
I should be charging for this
.

“He’s so angry all the time. He comes home all wound up from the war. Then he won’t talk about it. He broods and broods. Then he signs up again. While Ethan and I keep on getting older without him.”

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“How am I supposed to show Ethan how to be a man?” she asked. “How am I supposed to teach him that?”

“You can teach him right from wrong,” I said. “You can teach him how to be kind.”

Grenadine looked at me as if I were from another planet, as if learning how to be kind wasn’t the thing she was worrying about.

“I’m just afraid that Ethan is going to wind up like his father,” said Grenadine.

“Like him how?”

“Like, he’s going to leave me. And I’ll never see him again.” She laughed bitterly. “The less his father is around,” she said, “the more Ethan winds up like him.”

“There are all kinds of men in the world,” I said to Grenadine. “You can teach Ethan to be different.”

The referee was talking to Zach on the mat below us. Zach had put down
The Lord of the Rings
and was now twisting his long hair behind him and lowering his helmet over his head.

Grenadine turned to me as if I were her last friend on earth. “How?” she said.

Below us, Ethan stepped onto the
piste
. Of course it was Ethan Zach would be facing next. In one corner, a goofy young hippie with his heart on his sleeve; in the other, the young marine, with his deadly flèche and heartrending scream.

Grenadine said it again, more urgently this time: “How?”

It was a good question.

Our sons faced each other and bowed. “En garde,” said the ref, and then the young men drew their swords.

*
This name, along with some other identifying information, has been changed.