Stuck in the Middle With You: A Memoir of Parenting in Three Genders (6 page)

I did not. Mostly, what I felt—besides sleepy—was incredibly lucky. The baby was healthy, and Deedie recovered from the trauma of birth
fairly swiftly. If there were times when my sense of myself as female was slowly returning to me, I dismissed these thoughts by reminding myself that I had now made a promise, both to Deedie as well as to this newly minted son, and that it was up to me to stand between the ones I loved and the turmoil of the world. If that meant that there were times I felt a little disembodied, or haunted by some sort of cosmic melancholy, well, that was just too bad. There were all sorts of burdens to carry in the world, and if this one was mine there was more than a little solace in knowing how lucky I was nonetheless, how lucky we all were.

I thought now and again of that character in
Slaughterhouse-Five
, the guy who kept saying,
You think this is bad? This is nothing. There’s a lot worse than this
.

Anyway, it wasn’t maternity that I had yearned for. It was a sense of womanhood. Does that make me a hypocrite or a halfwit, to admit that I had dreamed of a woman’s body, and a woman’s life, and even the incredible gift of parenthood, without having any particular desire for pregnancy and menstrual cycles and breast-feeding? I am nervous about admitting this, for fear of suggesting that my quest for identity was opportunistic. Surely it does seem more than a little facile to want all of the perks of womanhood without having to experience the drawbacks—the tedium of a period, the endless come-ons from boys, the swelling dreariness of pregnancy, which, the sisterhood notwithstanding, most women will tell you gets more than a little old after a while. I am fairly certain that admitting this exposes me as a fundamentally shallow person, someone who talks the talk but won’t walk the walk.

And yet, I’ll say—with more than a little defensiveness—surely a woman cannot be defined solely as a person who has borne children, or who has a menstrual cycle, or who has nursed a child. As the years have gone on, I’ve come to accept that
womanhood
—like
manhood
—is a strangely flexible term. I’ve met “genetic” women who have a Y chromosome, who have a condition called androgen insensitivity syndrome that makes their bodies unable to absorb the information that that Y chromosome contains. I’ve met women who were born without a uterus; I’ve met women who have exactly zero interest in babies or
children, or, for that matter, Brad Pitt. All of these women, however, are unmistakably women, and were anyone to suggest otherwise it would seem ridiculous.

And so I hope that if there is room in the wide spectrum of women’s experience for all of these different lives, surely there is room in it—somewhere—for me.

That is, until I remember my Irish grandmother—“Gammie”—watching some television show with transsexuals on it, possibly
Donahue
, or
The Dinah Shore Show
. This was back in the seventies. “Oh for God’s sake,” she said, sucking on her Kent filter king, “those people aren’t women.”

“They’re not?” I said. She, of course, had no idea that I was a woman just like the ones she was dismissing.

“Of course not,” she said.

“They have breasts,” I pointed out. “They have—you know. Vaginas.”

She shot me a look. Ladies of her generation didn’t say
vagina
or vote for Democrats.

“That’s not what makes someone a woman,” she said authoritatively.

“Really?” I asked. “What does make someone a woman then?”

Gammie took a long drag on her cigarette, then blew all the smoke into the air.

“Suffering,” she said.

W
HEN
Z
ACH WAS
about six months old, I met my former student Veronica Gerhardf in a Portland bar called Gritty McDuff’s one Friday afternoon. She’d spent the years since graduation working in Vice President Gore’s office. But she was ready for a change, she said.

“Seriously?” I replied. “Because if you want you could come back to Maine and work as our nanny. That would be awesome.”

Veronica lifted her pint and drained it. Then she put the glass down on the bar. “Okay,” she said.

F
EMINIST SCHOLAR
Sara Ruddick, a pioneer in the field of motherhood studies, writes that mothering is about nurture and protection—her trinity is “preservation, growth, and social acceptability.” To Ruddick, motherhood focuses on the ways moms protect their children from the world even as they slowly move them into it. More interesting—to me at least—is her suggestion that it’s not a job limited to women. According to Ruddick, men, too, are capable of “mothering,” when they act to shield and educate their young.

This makes plenty of sense. Still, if someone had shared this theory with me when I was a father—and I identified as a feminist even then—it would surely have hurt my feelings. At the heart of this theory seems to be an assumption that caring for children is something women do. If you’re a man and you’re trying to nurture and protect your kids, it seems to me as if you’re being called an honorary woman.

There are lots of men who don’t feel that expressing love makes them honorary women. One would think it makes them fathers.

Of the two of us, Deedie was more protective of our son, more conservative, more worried that he was going to, for instance, poke his eyes out with that thing. Whereas I was more likely to show my son—just to pick an example at random—how to put spray cheese on the dog’s head. Was it the experience of having carried Zach in her womb for nine months that made her more cautious than I? Was the fecklessness of my fatherhood the direct consequence of not having had the physical experience of labor? I have my doubts about this, although it’s also true that I don’t think I ever worried about anyone poking his eyes out with that thing when I was a dad, and I never cautioned Zach, upon finding him cross-eyed, that they might stick that way.

On the whole, I think, I was more liberal when it came to encouraging Zach to take risks, or to do something out of the sheer goofiness of it. I pause here to remember Jerry Garcia’s actual advice to his daughters, and I quote: “Hey! You guys should do more drugs!”

But any sweeping insights about what fathers do, as opposed to mothers, seems to me fundamentally bound not only by issues of gender, but by issues of class as well. I don’t think it’d be too radical to suggest that mothers and fathers of the American upper middle class
may well have more in common with each other than any father from this group does with a blue-collar dad. But even this observation may be suspect. I know plenty of blue-collar dads who are all about the spray cheese.

It doesn’t take too long to see that any particular father’s or mother’s parenting strategy is a complex set of behaviors resulting not only from gender and class but from the individual web of history and character, and—above all—the agreements, spoken and unspoken, at the center of their relationship with their partner.

Sue Shellenbarger, writing in the
Wall Street Journal
, says that father figures “tend to challenge crying or whining children to use words to express themselves. Men are more likely to startle their offspring, making faces or sneaking up on them to play.” And while “the average behavioral differences between large samples of moms and dads are small, in statistical terms,” fathers spend about 6 percent more time in play with their children than mothers do.

I have found this to be sort of true, both in the hetero parents I know as well as the same-sex ones. In some ways, it’s only common sense—even among families with two moms, or two dads, there’s usually one parent who’s more rambunctious than the other.

That said, goofiness—a kind of joyful foolishness—still feels to me like one of the more dependably gendered character traits that I know. There are plenty of funny women in my life; it was Deedie’s levity of spirit that surely attracted me to her in the first place. But it is only with a man that I could imagine hanging a giant stuffed rabbit from a tree with a noose and taping a sign to it that read,
HERE IS A LETTUCE-RUSTLIN’ CARROT-THIEVIN’ NO GOOD SON OF A BITCH
, as I did on one memorable occasion with the cartoonist Timothy Kreider. This occurred at the end of a very long day, one that had in fact begun with our taking a giant stuffed dog, attaching a cinder block on a rope to its leg, and throwing it off a bridge. Afterward, in our fake mobster voices, we allowed as how “Mr. Whiskers sleeps with the fishes.”

I don’t do stuff like that anymore, although there are plenty of times my boys wish that I would. Is this because hanging stuffed animals from trees is an inherently masculine activity? Or is it because that
was a long time ago, when I had considerably more time on my hands? Have I grown less ridiculous over time because womanhood feels less absurd to me than manhood? Or is it that, now that I’m in my fifties, the whole wide world just seems a lot less funny?

When I was seventeen, my friend Zero and I once drove a car through Atlantic City, New Jersey, throwing hot pancakes at people through the Volkswagen’s open window.

It would be nice, I suppose, to do that sort of thing again, to take on the character of “rear bombardier” and fling those cakes like Frisbees out at the citizens of the unknown world. But I can already hear the voice of reason interceding. Oh, Jenny, says the voice. That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard of. Throwing hot pancakes, at total strangers. What if you get syrup on people? You could wreck someone’s clothes! You could get arrested! It would wind up in the papers:
PROFESSOR, AUTHOR, JAILED FOR ASSAULT WITH BREAKFAST ITEMS
.

“I THOUGHT IT WOULD BE FUNNY,” SAYS SEX-CHANGE SCRIBE
.

O
NE AFTERNOON IN
late spring, Zach and I lay around on the kitchen floor, building towers out of blocks and knocking them to the ground again. I’m not sure how this came about, but somehow I had a can of whipped cream that I was squirting into the dog’s mouth. Zach was laughing so hard he fell over. Falling over struck him as even funnier. I righted him again and squirted some more whipped cream into Lucy’s mouth. She lapped it off her lips with her big pink tongue as Zachary laughed and laughed and fell over once more. It seems as if we spent the better part of a day doing this, although more likely it was just a few minutes. I remember how remarkable I found the sound of my son’s laughter. Somehow children arrive on the planet knowing how to suck on a breast, knowing how to crawl, and knowing how to laugh. They know how to laugh before they know how to talk, as if joy itself is a more important survival skill than language.

The power was out that day. Living in a place as remote as Belgrade Lakes, having the electricity go out now and again wasn’t all that
unusual. But with a baby, it surely complicated my life. For instance, I couldn’t heat up the breast milk Deedie had expressed and left in the refrigerator. I couldn’t play music or turn on
Sesame Street
or warm up Zach’s lunch. Maybe that’s why we were on the floor playing with the can of whipped cream and the dog: It was desperation wrought from powerlessness.

The child and I laughed our heads off while the dog looked on with suspicion and contempt. Sunlight streamed through the window and reflected off our wooden floors. You people, said the dog. Imbeciles. The wind blew through a set of chimes that hung down outside the kitchen.

Then Zach looked at me with a curious, knowing expression. He hadn’t spoken yet, at least not with words, but it seemed as if he had something he wanted to say.

“Hey, Zachary,” I said. “Can you talk?”

The child smiled mischievously.

“Hi, Daddy,” he said.

W
HEN YOU
’
RE A
father of a very small child, right in the heart of that experience, time passes with the speed of a glacier. Now, in retrospect, those years appear to have passed in a heartbeat. This strikes me as the fundamental irony of fatherhood—the odd disconnect between the speed of time passing and the speed of time remembered. Sitting here in the twenty-first century, with my boys now on the verge of college, the days of toddlerhood seem to have vanished in an instant, to have disappeared—as Captain Beefheart once noted—“like breath on a mirror.” But back then, time had never seemed so slow. If, at seven
A.M
. for instance, I had read a book to Zachary, gotten out the Duplo blocks afterward, made and fed him his morning meal of rice cereal and apple juice, hauled out the easel and the watercolor set for a little creative time, then read him another book, and after that bundled him into the stroller and wheeled him along the dirt roads of my town, and then returned to the house and made him a snack, and finally settled
onto the couch together to read another book—after all of this, were I to glance up at the kitchen clock I would note that exactly fifteen minutes had passed. Before the clock struck eight, I would have long since exhausted every possible means within my imagination of passing the time. It’s no wonder parents suspend their children in bouncy-wouncy harnesses from door frames or lock them into swings. I remember on a least one occasion reading Zach the entire JCPenney catalog, in part because I hoped it would lull him to sleep, and in part because I was just plain out of ideas.