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

toward home.
    When we got there, we found my old friend Zero making macaroni and cheese. He’d opened up the convertible couch on the first floor for Deedie to sleep in; the cesarean she’d endured had made climbing stairs unpleasant.
    “Look, Deedie,” said Zero. “I made you a whelping box.”
    Deedie laughed, but she was weak. Zachary started to cry. Before she even had her coat off, Deedie was on the couch, propped up by pillows, the baby at her breast. We turned on the television. The 1994 Winter Olympics were on—there was some whole scandal about one skater’s boyfriend clubbing another skater with a steel pipe. The name of the boyfriend was Gillooly.
    Zero looked at Deedie and then at me. “So,” he said. “How does it feel to be a daddy?”

    A CTUALLY, WHAT IT felt like most of the time was tired. Of the many conflicting emotions that define early parenthood, probably nothing is as all-encompassing as that sense of exhaustion. For a couple who had always enjoyed slow mornings and late nights, the biggest transition—at first, anyway—turned out not to be going from nonparents to parents, but going from sleepers to nonsleepers. The baby was up. The baby was down. Sometimes, when the baby was down, we’d start to worry. Had he been fed? Was he wet? Sometimes we’d wake him up when he was asleep, although now, years later, I can’t for the life of me imagine why we thought this was a good idea. The house was full of baby monitors, amplifying the breathing of the small creature in the upstairs nursery. As he slept, Deedie and I would nod off in our chairs or on the couch, or at our desks, until the first sound of discontent. Then it was like living in a firehouse with the alarm going off and all of the firemen sliding down the pole and leaping into their boots. If this happened during the night I’d be the one to drop into the nursery and fetch my sobbing heir, and bring him to Deedie. Then the boy would—as the saying goes—muckle on.
    Hours later, sometimes well past dawn, I’d wake up to find all three of us curled up in the bed together. Zachary lay on his back, snoozing contentedly; Deedie lay on her side, her leaking breasts falling abundantly onto the pillows, a blanket encircling us. I would reach over softly and put my arm around my wife and son. Protecting us, I believed, from whatever the world might hold.
    W AS I JEALOUS , you ask, of Deedie’s superhuman powers, now that she was a mother? As someone who had always identified as female—up until the moment I fell in love with her—did I feel left out, now that my love had experienced what may well be the defining moment in a woman’s life? Did I feel like Pete Best, you wonder, after the Beatles became the Beatles? Or like Art Garfunkel, perhaps, after Paul Simon released Graceland ?
    I did not. Mostly, what I felt—besides sleepy—was incredibly lucky. The baby was healthy, and Deedie recovered from the trauma of birthfairly 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