Stuck in the Middle With You: A Memoir of Parenting in Three Genders Read Online Free PDF Page A

said, trying to remember the details of the dilation process from our Lamaze class. It was all a jumble.
    “You come back tomorrow,” said the nurse. “You got a long way to go still.”
    What could I do, except stand up and push Deedie’s wheelchair back toward the exit? We felt a little embarrassed, Deirdre and I, like a pair of travelers who’d shown up at the airport a day early. As we drove back through the snow, back through Waterville and Oakland and Belgrade, she looked out the window.
    The world was silent and still.
    When we got home, Lucy was waiting for us. She wasn’t surprised we’d come home without a baby. She made no effort to hide her contempt. You, she said to me. You spent your twenties walking around Baltimore in a dress. And now you think you’re going to be a father? The dog shook her head. Unbelievable.
    Deedie settled herself into a rocking chair in our bedroom. Oncethis chair had belonged to her own mother. Now Deedie sat in it, rocking back and forth, reading a book as her labor progressed.
    “I’ll stay up with you,” I said.
    “It’s okay, Jim,” she said. “You should get your sleep.”
    “If you don’t get to sleep,” I said, “I don’t get to sleep.”
    Deedie smiled gently. “That’s nice,” she said.
    I walked toward the bathroom. On my way there I peeked into the room I had prepared as a nursery. In January I had stripped off the wallpaper in the spare bedroom, painted the walls, built the crib, even assembled the little airplane mobile that dangled from the ceiling. The room was silent, and I tried to imagine the life that would soon fill it, that would soon transform our lives. It was hard to get my mind around.
    I came back to the bedroom and got in bed, propped myself up with pillows. Unbelievably, I was reading a book by Robert Bly at the time, Iron John . A lot of the men I knew were reading it. It was very popular. It was Bly’s theory that men were an “experimental species.” Me, I thought the whole thing was kind of half-crazy, but then that didn’t make it untrue. From time to time I looked over at my wife. Her hand was on her belly, and she was looking out the window at the falling snow, illuminated by a light that shone on our back porch.
    Hours later, when I woke up with Iron John still open beside me on the bed, I found Deedie in the same position, as if she had not moved in all that time. She didn’t look like my wife, though; while I slept she seemed to have transformed into something celestial and otherworldly. One hand lay on her belly, the place where Zachary waited for us both. Deedie looked out at the snow, and then over at me, and then out at the world again, beautiful, gentle, eternal. The sun was rising in the meadow behind our house, casting dim light upon the unknown world.
    T HERE WAS AN EPIDURAL , a cesarean. I stood by Deedie’s side as the operation proceeded, gazing upon the innards of my dear. Fallopian tubes! Ovaries! The uterus! Adipose tissue! I stroked Deedie’s hair,observed the freckles on her nose. There was a slice with a scalpel, and there was Zach, wearing the same expression he wears now when he has to do precalculus.
    He thought the world over, compared it to the place he had been. Then he began to weep.
    Deedie, hearing the sound of her newborn, said, “That’s amazing.”
    They had me clip the umbilical, a wholly symbolic act, since they’d already snipped it themselves.
    The nurses cleaned up the boy and brought him over to his mother. Deedie held Zach in her arms. She looked at him, then she looked at me.
    “Oh my goodness,” she said. “Look at what we’ve gone and done. Just look.”
    L ATER, WE COULDN ’ T believe they just let us leave the hospital with the baby. We walked past the nurses’ station as if we were getting away with something, as if we’d pulled off a bank job. We went out to the Jeep and locked the car seat containing the newborn in its bracket. Then we started up the car and drove