Stuck in the Middle With You: A Memoir of Parenting in Three Genders (7 page)

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.

A
T 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.”

T
HE 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 family’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.”

T
HIRTY-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?”

W
E 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?

But then, this is one of the fundamental contradictions of parenthood—the unending necessity to teach your children lessons that you yourself still have not learned.

Y
EARS LATER
, it finally occurred to me to watch
Brideshead Revisited
again. I couldn’t remember why we’d never finished it. I put the tape in the machine and hit play. The film picked up right where I’d stopped it on a snowy night long ago.

A young man’s hand reached out and picked a plover’s egg from a bowl and raised it into the air.

Charles Ryder looked at his new friend Sebastian, with whom he was already in love:
He was magically beautiful
, Charles says,
with that epicene quality which in extreme youth sings aloud for love. And withers at the first cold wind
.

I opened my eyes
. The game was afoot. I gazed around the dark hotel room, immediately sensing a situation in progress. Deedie drowsed to my left, her chest softly rising and falling. Through the screen door that led to the balcony I could hear the ocean crashing on the beach.

A voice cut through the darkness. “What now?” it said. “What now!”

Through the murk I could just make out Zachary’s silhouette. He got up on his feet, and his head peeked over the edge of the portable playpen. I checked the clock. Four
A.M
.

Oh God please no
, I thought.
Sweet weeping Jesus
.

One of Zach’s legs went up and over the rail, followed a moment later by the other. There was a clunk as he hit the floor. Then he stood again. “What now?” he asked. “What now!”

Then he began to run around the condo. The little feet pattered against the floor. As he ran, Zach shouted, “I’m awake! I’m awake! I’m awake!”

We were on vacation. Sanibel, Florida. Sean wiggled in his crib. He sat up, took a look around, and began to weep.

“Waah,” he said. “Waah. Waah. Waah.”

“I’m awake! I’m awake! I’m awake!”

Deedie opened one eye. I understood in a glance. “Go get ’em, Daddy. It’s your turn.”

“Waah, waah, waah.”

I
PUSHED THE STROLLER
down the beach. The sun had not yet risen. The breeze blew in off the ocean and whipped my hair around. I was wearing blue jeans and a white T-shirt, a battered sweatshirt that said
WESLEYAN
.

Zach sat in the front of the double stroller, holding a juice box. He pointed out a group of sleeping seagulls. “Birds are dreaming,” he said.

Sean had fallen asleep again, bottle in his mouth. I remembered what this was like. Something similar had happened to me a couple of times during my sophomore year of college.

At two years old, we no longer had to give Sean a syringe of digitalis twice a day. Although he was still a pale, thin thing, like an orphaned waif in Dickens, he was partial to a good bottle. He was one of those hair-of-the-dog boys.

The stroller wasn’t really made for the beach. The rubber wheels sank into the soft sand. In a compartment between the wheels was a backpack full of all the things I’d need in case of an emergency. Extra diapers. Wipes. Baby bibs. Vitamin D ointment. Band-Aids. Baby rice. Juice boxes. Crayons. Books by Eric Carle and Dr. Seuss. Cheese sticks. In the event of a nuclear emergency, the boys and I could probably hold out for days.

Zach and Sean and I rolled by the dark ocean, our wheels crushing the shards of clamshells and conches, slipping on slicks of seaweed and the egg sacs of sea creatures. There was no one else for miles, it seemed. The hotels and condos and beach houses to my right were virtually all dark, except for an occasional blue glow coming from a high room in which a television had been left on. I pictured a dad like me, passed out in a big chair, a child in his lap, the television screen crackling with snow. But then, the era when stations shut down for the night, after playing the national anthem, had come to an end right around the same time my sons were born, hadn’t it? Time was passing. I’d been a college student, then I was a married man, and now I was a father. I still didn’t quite feel lifelike though. The ocean roared all around.