Stuck in the Middle With You: A Memoir of Parenting in Three Genders (39 page)

We skidded into the ditch. From the woods, a coyote paused and looked back at us. I saw the wildness in its eyes.

“Good driving,” I said. “Excellent reactions.”

Zach started the car again and got us out of the ditch. We started up the hill again. “I told you that you could trust me,” he said.

A few months before this, he’d been admitted to Vassar College, early decision. I loved telling people my son was going to be “a Vassar Man.”

In April he’d been cast in the school’s musical,
The Wizard of Oz
, as the Cowardly Lion. The director had his actors talk about their characters. “What’s the most important thing in the world for the Cowardly Lion?” he’d asked Zach. My son did not hesitate with his answer. “His tail,” he said.

Deedie and I had sat in the dark theater, watching our child sing and dance.
Put ’em up, put ’em up
. At the end of the third act, he bid farewell to Dorothy.
I would never have found my courage
, he said,
if it wasn’t for you
.

One Saturday he went to the barber and cut off all his long hair; he gave it to an organization, called Locks for Love, that makes wigs for cancer patients.

Then he fell in love with the girl who played the talking apple tree in Oz. Her name was Hana, and she came from the Czech Republic, a land where the word for
beloved
is
amado
. They went to the prom together.

Hey
, she had asked,
how would you like it if someone came along and picked something off of you?

Seannie was in South Africa. He’d been accepted as an exchange student for the last third of his sophomore year at a school in Cape Town called Bishops Diocesan College. A month earlier we’d taken him to Logan airport and loaded the fifteen-year-old on the plane.

“Please, please, please be careful, Seannie,” Deedie had said.

Sean gave her that sly grin. “I got it,” he said, and then walked off toward Africa without his mothers. What did he do in South Africa, by way of being careful? He went bungee jumping, and skydiving, and rock climbing, and shark-cage diving.

Now the sun was sinking toward the ridge to my right. The long shining mirror of Long Pond was visible in the valley. Silence hung in the air between us, and not for the first time. My sons were leaving me, going out into the broad world.

“Zach,” I said at last, “if you really, really want to milk the poison from deadly snakes in Australia—if that’s your dream—I’ll support you.”

“Thank you,” he said, and rubbed my shoulder. “This means a lot to me.”

“I’ll always support you, and your dreams,” I said. “Even if your dreams … are stupid.”

My throat closed up. The tears rolled down.

Of course, if it was the stupidity of dreams we were considering, I was one to talk. I mean, please. I thought of the hours I’d spent at Zach’s age, lying in bed, staring at the ceiling, imagining a world a lot farther away than Australia.

We pulled up at the violin teacher’s house, right at the top of Buttermilk Hill. The pastures of her farm were all around us, and beyond that the mountains and the lakes. Her husband’s single-engine plane sat at the edge of a long field. A wind sock dangled from a pole just beyond a field of tomatoes and cabbages.

From the cabin came the sound of skirling mandolins and fiddles.

My son looked at me, incredulous. “You’re crying now?” he said. “About me getting bitten by an imaginary snake? In Australia? In the future? You’re actually crying?”

“A little.”

I wiped the tears away and we got out of the car. The sun was almost gone now, sinking behind the mountains.

We walked toward the cabin. The music grew louder. His teacher was playing a reel. “Farewell to Erin.”

In the twilight it was hard for me to see the stairs. I paused at the bottom step, unsteady on my old legs, uncertain.

My son turned to me. He took me by the arm. “Come on, Mom,” Zach said. “I got you.”

SAME MONKEYS, DIFFERENT BARREL—

Joyce Ravid

[A Conversation with Jennifer and Deirdre Boylan]

BY ANNA QUINDLEN

Jennifer Finney Boylan’s
account of her transition from male to female,
She’s Not There: A Life in Two Genders
, has become a touchstone not only for people who are transgender but for all those interested in exploring what it means to be male and female. As James, Boylan published several critically acclaimed novels; as Jenny, she has also written
I’m Looking Through You: Growing Up Haunted
and the Falcon Quinn series for young readers.

Constant throughout it all has been Boylan’s work as a professor at Colby College in Maine and Deirdre Finney Boylan, known as Deedie, the woman Jim married in 1988 and the mother of their two sons, Zach and Sean. In 2003 Anna Quindlen wrote in a
Newsweek
column about the acuity and humor of
She’s Not There
, beginning a relationship with the Boylans that resulted, one summer afternoon, in this conversation about motherhood, marriage, and masculinity. In the spirit of Jenny Boylan’s writing, there was extraordinary honesty on the part of both partners, and lots of laughs. Below, an edited version.

A
NNA
Q
UINDLEN:
Deedie, I actually want to open the conversation with you. It’s been more than a decade since the pivotal events of
She’s Not There
. I think most readers would have two questions: How have your boys’ reactions changed as they’ve matured, and what has your journey been like?

D
EEDIE
F
INNEY
B
OYLAN
: I think in some ways it’s easier to talk about the boys, obviously. Over time, I think the boys continue to see Jenny as the parent that they’ve always loved. Because they were so young during transition, the youngest one doesn’t really have clear memories of Jenny as a male, of Maddy as Daddy. We have pictures, and we talk about things. I think they still continue, in the way that most teenagers do, to have very, very little interest in talking about their parents to their peers, in terms of “Why do you have two women parents?” Zachary wears his heart on his sleeve and Sean is an enigma to us most of the time. But, you know, if you say to them, “Do you ever wish our family was just like other families?” I think they don’t necessarily understand the question. And then they’ll say, “Well, it’d be nice if we didn’t have to explain things to people,” but it doesn’t worry them. I don’t think they worry about bringing a new friend over to the house. I don’t think they worry about what the neighbors will say, or what will peers say.

J
ENNIFER
F
INNEY
B
OYLAN
: I hope that having me as a parent, having us as parents, has made them more accepting of people who are different. More openhearted. It’s hard to imagine what our lives would be like otherwise.

AQ:
You pose the question “Do you ever wish our family was more like other families?” But in most ways that matter, isn’t your family just like other families?

JFB:
Yeah, I think mostly that is totally true. I don’t know, sometimes I think what makes us different is the fact that we … um …

AQ:
Are still married? [
Laughs
]

JFB:
Of the dozen or so people that we knew in the mideighties when people were coupling up and getting married, I think we might be the only couple that’s still together. [
Laughs
] My friends from high school, my friends from college. I do sarcastically say sometimes that if more husbands became women, more couples would stay together.

DFB:
But I think that goes back to what my greatest fear was at the time of transition, that I didn’t think I wanted to be married to a woman. I was afraid that this was the end of our marriage, and our family.

JFB:
Can you say confidently that you do want to be married to a woman?

AQ:
Well, the point in the book is she wants to be married to you.

DFB:
Yes. Although my first visceral reaction, was, “Thank God we have two houses.”

AQ:
But the other visceral reaction that comes through loud and clear in
She’s Not There
is a sense of a loss of control. That you basically have no say in this. Did you lose that feeling of helplessness after a while?

DFB:
Yes, I did lose that feeling after a while. But, especially at the heart of transition, when things were changing very, very fast, I felt like I was on a train, and if I stayed on the train I might be ripped off, and if I jumped off, I’d be killed. I was hanging on for dear life and just had to wait and see what happened. I didn’t have any control. And it had nothing to do with me. What I did get to decide is that I still do want to be married to Jenny. We do still love each other and we have a life together which is rich and rewarding. Our family is very close and very happy and very successful, and everybody appears to be doing what they want to do. As you know, with teenagers sometimes it’s hard to tell [
laughs
], but the boys are thriving, our lives are rich and rewarding. We live where we want to live and we do what we want to do, and we’re doing it together as a family. And that’s not something that I feel trapped in, it’s something at this point that I totally embrace and am happy with. At first I didn’t know if I could be sustained in whatever new incarnation of our life was going to evolve. And I think the thing that is most surprising is perhaps how little has really changed, in the foundation of our relationship, in the foundation of our family and the way we operate. It seemed like that was being dynamited at a certain point, but in fact, those sorts of connections and values and beliefs and shared things are still the same.

JFB:
Also, within the context of a good family, as a father, I think I was playful and loving. I was around a lot. As I went through transition, I don’t think they ever felt the fundamental building blocks of the family were being torn apart. The transition may have seemed like a superficial difference to them.

AQ:
And the two of you already had what sounds like a pretty egalitarian marriage.

DFB:
I think it was fairly egalitarian. We joke that our division of labor is that when I cook Jenny cleans, and when Jenny cooks
Jenny
cleans. That’s remained true. Jenny does the dishes.

JFB:
Deedie does the laundry, I’m sorry to say. To me it’s not the laundry, it’s the folding. Dear God, the folding! And also, I know I never do the folding right. You turn to me and say, “Oh, that’s not how you fold that!”

DFB:
That’s true. [
Laughs
] Again, we do the same things we always did. I do most of the grocery shopping. I do most of the cooking. But Jenny has things she loves to cook and cooks every week. Jenny makes pizza on Fridays.