Stuck in the Middle With You: A Memoir of Parenting in Three Genders (37 page)

VG:
Well, she died when Fletcher was about one. So she saw me through my pregnancy. She was there on the day Fletcher was born.

JFB:
Did you think about Penelope when Fletcher came into your life or did that shadow disappear?

VG:
Well, when I first got pregnant with Fletcher, we had to talk about if we were going to do a larger-scale testing, if we were going to go for more tests earlier. Although the issue with Penelope was not genetic and there was no indication that we would ever have any difficulty again, it’s more about they wanted to know what we wanted based on our comfort level.

So I had to make a decision early on. Was I going to worry the whole time? If I started I wasn’t going to stop. I could worry about the testing. I could worry about the pregnancy and then the labor and what could go wrong. Then I could worry about will he sleep through the night or do we have to worry about SIDS or dear God, how do I ever put him on a school bus? How do I ever let him go off to college?

So, I remember making a conscious decision: Now I start thinking
with faith. I’m going to do all the smart things. I’m going to get the right tests that I need to get, but I’m not going to go overboard. I’m not going to make a habit of worrying.

So from then it was like, okay, this is a new pregnancy. This is all new. Everything’s fine. It was like a mantra and a discipline I had to keep. It was hard.

JFB:
Veronica, I’ve heard some couples that I know who have lost children say that it was a thing that just ended up dooming their relationship. The couple just couldn’t survive that sorrow. So you had that happen to you, but then you got the great blessing and gift of Fletcher. You and Ray separated six years after that. Do you think that the loss of the baby in any way is connected to that marriage not surviving?

VG:
Yes, because Ray was incredibly supportive and caring and he’s a very conscientious person. So when he saw that I was hurting he was very respectful and deferred to me. So he was taking his cues from me, which was not exactly in our best interest.

He waited for me to come around. I wound up feeling unwanted because here’s the man with the male libido and he doesn’t have an inherent desire for me. So it was demoralizing and lonely.

JFB:
Did you feel that he didn’t have the desire for you because of what had happened with the child?

VG:
No, I don’t think it was true that he actually didn’t desire me. That was just how it came across.

The real problem was when my mother died. Then I realized what a keystone she had been, even in my marriage.

I was in the shower I think the day after she died and I was shampooing my hair. I allowed myself to just cry for fifteen minutes in the shower first off every day. I stood there and I thought, My marriage could really be in trouble now without my mother.

It was like the shining golden center of my heart was gone. I didn’t even have me to replace it with.

I had to grow up and figure out who I was and be much more self-determined.

JFB:
Do you think you’ve found that now all these years later?

VG:
Yeah, definitely. I’m autonomous to a fault. I really used to look to my mom for a sense of judgment. When I had a decision to make I always considered what she would think.

So what I had to learn very quickly was, hey, there was only me. There is no one else in the world who can live my life for me. There’s no one whose judgment I will substitute for my own.

JFB:
Do you think of yourself as having two children? Do you think of Penelope as your daughter that died? Or do you feel that you have one child?

VG:
Fletcher is an only child. When I think about her at all, she would have been ten years old, I remember, Well, no, she would not have. She was very badly disabled and compromised genetically. She was never going to have a life.

I think it’s very different for parents who lose a healthy living child because they can imagine that child growing older and I never could. I never imagined that she was going to live beyond the next moment—maybe a day.

Sometimes I’m sad that I never had a daughter to raise, but I feel a lot of joy with having my boy. He brings me happiness that I didn’t know I could have with someone who’s so different from me.

JFB:
What do you think you know about children now that you didn’t know when you were our nanny?

VG:
Well, I know that I don’t have to love being a mother, which I sometimes don’t. It’s hard. It’s really hard work and it’s painful. Sometimes it’s aggravating. But I always know when I go to bed that I will love him again when I see him in the morning.

I guess what I’ve learned is that it’s okay to be conflicted about it. It’s okay to not love the pain and the fear and the stress and the anger.

I’m still human.

I’m a mother, but I’m still myself.

*
The names of all the individuals in this interview have been changed, at the subject’s request.

SUSAN MINOT

©
Hugh Foote

It was a Monday morning and there had been an ice storm the night before. It was in January. The Boston-to-Maine railroad line goes along the coast there just below our driveway. Usually there was a little ding, ding, ding, ding, ding at the crossing with an arm coming down.… That morning [my mother] was on her way to an exercise class. There’s a big barn blocking the view of where the train would be coming from. So you couldn’t see it
.

Susan Minot
is the second of a group of seven siblings and the mother of a ten-year-old daughter, Ava. She is the author of the novel
Monkeys
, as well as the collection
Lust and Other Stories
. Minot lives in a high-ceilinged apartment in the West Village when she is not on North Haven island in Maine. As we spoke, Minot sat on a couch mending a hole in a long black jacket with a needle and thread. She said the fringe was made of monkey fur.

J
ENNIFER
F
INNEY
B
OYLAN
: What’s the difference in age between your youngest sibling and your oldest?

S
USAN
M
INOT
: Well, the first six of us are within nine years of each other, and that’s including the seventh baby, Ellen, who died. Then there was a six-year gap and my youngest sister. So I think it’s fifteen years between the oldest and the youngest.

JFB:
So what effect does coming from such a large family have on a child? How did it change who you are?

SM:
I think it’s too many children for two parents to cover. People say, “Oh, it must have been great. So many children in the family, it must have been fun.” You’d say, “Well, yes. I’m close to my siblings.”
But I think large families may fall short in helping a child’s development, if attention from a parent is of primary importance. I mean in our family we can count on our hands the number of times that any of us were ever alone with one parent, much less two. I mean, I can’t even picture me ever being alone with both my parents.

JFB:
Ever?

SM:
Except randomly out on the lawn standing beside both of them.

JFB:
Did that make you question their love in any way?

SM:
Not at the time. I was one of a group, and that’s how our parents were with us. At a certain point, children start parenting each other. We had each other.

I think as a daughter I definitely defined myself in terms of my sisters—we were the three oldest—probably a lot more than I did in terms of my brothers. It’s as if the boys—there were three of them too—were another unit down.

My older sister is different than I am. The characteristics that she had of being responsible, looking out into the world to sort of piece things together, made me not, I think, develop so much those characteristics. I felt, “Well, that’s being taken care of here.” So it allowed me to be a little more dreamy, which I was inclined to be anyway. She would always be the first reconnaissance person to head out into the world and she was very good at reporting back to us what was going on. So I could indulge maybe a little more in my fantasy world.

JFB:
Were the rules different for different siblings depending on who they were and how old they were?

SM:
Not really, because there were so many of us. There was no talking back. We were always marshaled and told to be quiet. Now I see why. Six young kids must have just been a madhouse.

JFB:
I think it is kind of like having your own private army.

SM:
Yeah.

JFB:
What was your father like?

SM:
He was quite idiosyncratic. He didn’t appear to need to reveal himself. He had a wry sense of humor and was smart but not particularly intellectual. He was a very good athlete and kind of a—well, not
a cynic, but he would say things like, “I never met a man I liked. I only like women.”

Then he married this woman full of joie de vivre. I think she loved him and she was happy to be married to him and she loved having lots of children. Since she took care of everything, he could kind of check out a bit. I think there was a little melancholy thing in him, again, that he would never really acknowledge.

He had his shop where he liked to make things out of wood. He’d build boats and he’d build houses.

You were allowed to go down there in the basement with the rocks coming out of the floor and you could build stuff if you wanted. He wasn’t overly precious about it. The cans of paint would be crusted over. It was fun playing down there, a place for creating things.

JFB:
And then, right in the heart of this, your mother is killed in this terrible way.

SM:
Sudden accident, yes.

JFB:
She’s in a car that was hit by a train?

SM:
It was a Monday morning and there had been an ice storm the night before. It was in January. The Boston-to-Maine railroad line goes along the coast there just below our driveway. Usually there was a little ding, ding, ding, ding, ding at the crossing with an arm coming down. We were always told to stop at the railroad tracks when we were on our bikes, even if the signals weren’t flashing.

That morning she was on her way to an exercise class. There’s a big barn blocking the view of where the train would be coming from. So you couldn’t see it. If her windows were up and she had the music on, she wouldn’t have heard anything. The train hit her car right smack as she was crossing the tracks like a bull’s-eye. The timing wasn’t three seconds before or three seconds after. She was killed instantly. My youngest sister was seven.

For my father, it was as if the curtain sort of rose and here were seven children suddenly looking at him, the one parent left. He was a good man, but he had never learned how full-fledgedly to embrace a child.

JFB:
So did he learn that on the fly? Or it just kind of—he was never going to learn now? Was it too late?

SM:
I think he did learn from my mother, watching her. His own mother had a lot of fortitude.

There was actually a very funny moment right after my mother’s funeral. You laugh, you cry, you don’t even know where you are. We were all in the kitchen and no one had been sleeping for days and it was maybe the third, fourth day after she died.

There was a pause in the conversation and everyone was kind of looking at Dad. He said, “Well, I suppose we could all go our separate ways.”

Everyone laughed really hard. That was his humor. Nothing would ever be surprising now. In a way he was also saying, “This is how out of my depth I am.”

JFB:
I’m thinking about the differences between fathers and mothers. And here’s a father who has left most of the command center to Mom who suddenly is the single parent of seven.