Stuck in the Middle With You: A Memoir of Parenting in Three Genders (13 page)

TE:
My friends resented her much more than I did, or do. She would tell the kids, “I still love your father.” She wanted to have this kind of open, polyamorous thing where she could just sort of float in and out.

JFB:
So it was like what? Divorce with benefits?

TE:
Yeah. But everything I’ve read suggests that children of divorce do just as well as any other kids if the parents don’t fight each other. So
I said, “I’m not going to fight. I’m not going to tell them their mom is crazy.”

JFB:
Later, after you did divorce, you entered a vulnerable, painful, hopeful period when you were mourning that loss, but also trying to find a new relationship.

TE:
It was really tragic. I cried a lot. When it got better, I was looking like an African chief. Or a Mormon polygamist. I had all these different facets of women around my life.

JFB:
And all of them were trouble.

TE:
Yeah, because I made a lot of terrible mistakes. Making mistakes when you’re single is different than when you make them when you’re a parent.

JFB:
Was it like there were like two Treys? There was the one who was the hound, looking for these beautiful women that you could make love to? And the other Trey who was trying to protect your children, was trying to be a good dad?

TE:
It wasn’t like being a hound. It was more like I really wanted to be in love again. I didn’t just want to get laid indiscriminately. I idealized my old family, my old nuclear family. I was looking for someone to put in that piece.

Often, if the women I was meeting had children before, I didn’t date them because I was really specific—and really opinionated—about how I raise kids. I thought bringing a woman into our family with her own kids and her own parenting style would be too much.

There was a woman I liked, before meeting Amanda, that was really nice. I think part of my appeal to her was that I was real authoritative with her boy. He was a little troubled, maybe ADHD or something, and about the same age as my son. I didn’t know if I wanted to raise a family with that boy in the house with my perfect son and daughter.

What I really wanted was someone to come in and be the nanny. Someone who would just do what I say in terms of raising children.

In the end, none of that worked. And now, years later, I’m remarried to a woman, Amanda, who had her own very young child. So all the stuff I ran away from, I realize now it didn’t make any sense.

Now that I’m married again, and I’m a stepfather with a five-year-old, it’s hard for her to say, “Dad.” She’ll say, “Trey,” and kicks me and fights with me all the time. She won’t say, “I love you.”

JFB:
Did you feel like you had to win her over? You won her mother, but now you have to win over the daughter as well?

TE:
Yeah. I keep trying that. And when she plays hard to get it makes me try harder. It makes her kick me more and be meaner to me.

Then, when I pull back, she climbs up in my lap and hugs me. I should realize that I’ve already won her over.

JFB:
You have a son, Chet, and a daughter, Ava, from your first marriage. One of the things that you wonder in
Bedtime Stories
is “How can a woman compete for the oceanic love I feel for my two soft miniatures?”

And I would think that that’s kind of the central problem for a dad who is also dating. You’re looking for a particular romantic love at a time when to some degree, your heart’s already full.

TE:
There was a woman I dated—a countess!—who wanted to be the center of attention. She wanted a man that would just do anything for her. And I would do a lot of things for her. But I also had to do things for my children.

There’s such a difference between the sexual romantic love and the unconditional love for your kids. There’s no sense, especially after you’ve been divorced, that you can divorce your kids.

JFB:
Although lots of men do something like that. I was talking to Richard Russo about his father, and at a certain point, he was just gone. He told Rick, “I never really cared about you at all. The track was there.” I think lots of men divorce their kids.

TE:
That was not a possibility for me. Being chained to them forever, in some ways, means you just accept them in sickness and in health, until death do you part, in a way that marriage really isn’t.

JFB:
There’s a moment early in your memoir when Chet calls you “Mommy Daddy.” And it was a moment that, of course, made me think. You were Daddy, but you were Mommy too? How did your role change when you became a single father?

TE:
It did, and it didn’t. As a relatively modern and progressive
dad, it wasn’t just that I was the car seat and my ex-wife was the breast-feeding. I was changing diapers and massaging and bathing and a lot of stuff that men a generation ago didn’t do.

We were very conscious about these gender roles. But it also was an excuse for my ex-wife to do less work, frankly. Before she left I was doing sixty percent; eventually I ended up doing ninety percent.

JFB:
When you were dating, did women find the fact that you were this caring, awesome father a turn-on? Or was it, “Oh, he’s got kids. Forget it.”

TE:
There’s a thing called mommy porn. I used to—

JFB:
What did you call it?

TE:
Mommy porn.

JFB:
Which is?

TE:
You know, when they see a guy holding a kid in a Snugli or something. Or, like, a guy with a drill that was going to do all this stuff around the house.

JFB:
Did it ever work the other way? Was there some kind of racist condescension where people would say, “Oh, good for you for staying with them,” as if it was just assumed, well, of course, the expected thing would be to leave? You write that African-American men of your generation “are better known for their absence than their presence.”

TE:
Chris Rock has this line: “Hey, I take care of my kids.” But you’re
supposed
to take care of your kids. What do you want? A cookie? There are such low expectations for black fathers. On Mother’s Day, I used to walk down the street, just me and the two kids, and people would look at me and say, “Hey, happy Mother’s Day.” I would get that a lot.

Sometimes, I dated women in their thirties. And some of them were like, “You’ve got an instant family. You’re a good dad. Let’s get married.” Just like boom. “I’ll take care of your kids.” They were sick of the younger guys who hadn’t settled down yet. Other women I dated had their own kids. They wanted to blend families in ways I wasn’t ready for.

Then I met Amanda, and I just thought she was fantastic. And she had this very young child. And just the way we all came together was really nice.

JFB:
If you knew, when you were a young man, that this is the thing that you would find, that this life is the one you’d be given—do you think you’d have been happy? Or did it take the experience of living your life before you knew that this is what would make you full?

TE:
I think that there are many different paths that I could have taken that would lead me to happiness. I love being a parent. But I also see friends without kids, who kayak together and travel the world together. They have a very different kind of best-friend, sexual adventurous relationship together.

If I hadn’t had kids, that wouldn’t be a terrible way to live either. You know, I think that you get what you get, and it keeps changing. What I have now is magnificent. It’s wonderful, but I don’t think it’s the only way that would have gotten me to this place.

JFB:
When you think of the best moments of being a dad, what comes to mind?

TE:
Having a kid under each arm watching TV. You know, or even just waking up in the morning, in the bed, and having both of them crawl into the bed and snuggle. Having them under my arm.

I like feeling protective of them. It makes me feel like a red-tailed hawk, and there’s two baby hawks under my wing in the rain.

AUGUSTEN BURROUGHS

Courtesy of Augusten Burroughs

We break free, but just because we leave our parents doesn’t mean they leave us
.

Augusten Burroughs
is the author of, among other works,
Running with Scissors
, a memoir about his relationship with his mother, and
A Wolf at the Table
, about his father. On the twenty-seventh of July 2011, we sat on a rooftop at Eighty-first and Columbus in New York City, talking about parents and insanity. Just across the street, fifteen floors below us, was the sphere of the Hayden Planetarium, surrounded by moons and planets. As we talked, the temperature rose into the nineties. By the end of our conversation we felt like a pair of melted candles.

J
ENNIFER
F
INNEY
B
OYLAN:
For those who came in late, could you describe a little bit what your experience was of your mother and of your father?

A
UGUSTEN
B
URROUGHS:
My parents met when they were young. They had an unhappy marriage. My father was an alcoholic whose disease progressed rapidly after their first child was born. My mother was—it’s sort of a long complicated story—

JFB:
You can say that again.

AB:
She’d always wanted to be an artist and was now married with a young son. Seven years after they had that young son, I was born. My
mother was bipolar, but it was not diagnosed back then. My father was a very heavy drinker. It was a very verbally combative household. My mother had a degree in the arts, had an MFA. My father was a professor of philosophy at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. My brother was, for most of my childhood, out of the house.

They sought the help of a psychiatrist to save their marriage. He was a very untraditional psychiatrist, but it didn’t work and they divorced. My mother became closer and closer to this psychiatrist, whose practice was, again, absolutely out of the norm. He would eventually lose his license to practice medicine. My mother would have psychotic breaks every year, in the fall, usually. At a certain point, she just could not raise me. You know, I was like, thirteen. So she sent me to live with this psychiatrist and his family. He had a large family of biological children. Not all of them lived at home, but [he had] long-term psychiatric patients [living there too]. The house was always filled with people, and it was very busy. I grew up in that environment, and the doctor believed that when you were thirteen, you became an adult, free to make all your own choices. So it was a life with very little supervision, and it was a life with a lot of chaos.

JFB:
In your memoir
Running with Scissors
, I feel a lot of readers responded to the unlikely combination of your tragic circumstances as well as a kind of comic response, a sense of the absurd, to that experience.

AB:
At the time it seemed so hideous that it had to be funny. I mean, there were definitely lots of comical stuff that went on, but it was all sort of set within some pretty awful stuff. The thing about terrible circumstances, when you’re in them, is that they’re not survivable if you focus on just how bad they are, for one thing.… There was just so much of it that it was ridiculous.

JFB:
So in
Running with Scissors
, it seems like you were able to make some measure of peace through humor. Whereas with
A Wolf at the Table
, the story you wrote about your father, it seemed much more raw and more angry, as if the emotions were still very volatile. Is that a fair observation?

AB:
Oh, no, they were very different.
A Wolf at the Table
is a much
angrier and more unresolved book. [When I was very young] I had not yet developed the defense mechanism of perspective, and being able to look at my circumstances with humor, which is like a life raft.