Free Stuck in the Middle With You: A Memoir of Parenting in Three Genders by Jennifer Finney Boylan

sanding windowsills and building walls with a sledgehammer and a chisel. At the same time, his hobby was raising orchids in a greenhouse that he and my mother built off the kitchen.
    There were times I couldn’t figure him out—he spent all morning swinging a sledgehammer around, making walls out of fieldstone, and then in the afternoon would meticulously divide a phalaenopsis and water his flowers with a misting wand. Still, if there were masculine and feminine things about my father, he never seemed at war with himself about it; he seemed, above all, a man at peace.
    I was not a man at peace, I thought as I floated on my raft from the kitchen to the porch. I was restless and uncertain. A will-o’-the-wisp, a flibbertigibbet, a clown. Still, I know a lot of men who meet that description, and it’s that very quality in them that I suspect is responsible for their inventiveness and their charm.
    I had been lucky in having Dick Boylan for a father. As a dad myself, I wasn’t going to be anything like him. But in his kindness and his humor, his curiosity and his love, he taught me everything I knew about being a man.
    And from whom, I wondered, had he learned this? He’d lost hisfather when he was still a child. Just as my own children, in years to come, would lose theirs.
    O N THE BEACH in Florida, Seannie was hunting for jellyfish. Before us was the Point Ybel lighthouse. “Do you miss him?” asked Zach. “Grampapa?”
    I watched as another woman my age loped toward us in her shorts and running bra. This one looked so much like a female version of me that I had to stare. She had the same blond hair, the little wire-rimmed glasses, the birdlike nose. I wondered whether the father of this stranger loved his daughter.
    The woman reached out to touch the lighthouse with her fingertips. Then she turned around and ran back in the direction from which she’d come.
    I nodded. “Yes,” I said, although my voice had fallen to a whisper. “I miss him.”
    Sean came running toward us. He had something in his hand, something globular and dead and tentacled.
    “Yellyfish,” he said. He dropped it in the sand.
    “Hey, Baby Sean,” said Zach. “Watch!” He leaned over and squeezed my nose. “Honk,” I said sadly.
    Baby Sean thought this was the most wondrous thing he had ever seen. He looked at me, and then his brother, and then at me again.
    “Can Baby Sean honk your nose, Daddy?” said Zach.
    I nodded. I really didn’t see what difference it could possibly make now.
    Sean reached out tentatively and clasped my nose. I felt his tiny fingers encircling my nostrils.
    “Honk,” I said. “Honk. Honk. Honk.”
    O N THE WAY back to the condo, Zach read the end of the book to his brother. The sun was shining all around us now, burning off the mist. I was still thinking of that woman I’d seen. If I’d been her, instead ofmyself, what would my life have been like? How was it possible, at this point, to imagine a life for me that did not include Zach, and Sean, and Deedie?
    “What happens,” Zach explained, “is that in the end of the story, the very hungry caterpillar turns into a butterfly. He builds a little house, and climbs inside it, and then he changes.”
    “Then?” said Baby Sean. “Then?”
    “Then nothing, Baby Sean,” said Zach. “He changes, and becomes a butterfly. And has to fly away.”



RICHARD RUSSO

    © Elena Seibert
I didn’t care about you at all .
There was a poker game to go to .
The track was there .
     
    Richard Russo —known to his friends as Rick—is the author of seven novels, including Empire Falls , which won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. He and I shared an office at Colby College in the early 1990s, when we were both professors of creative writing there. The friendship quickly grew to include Rick’s wife, Barb, and their two daughters, Emily and Kate; in our will, the Russos are appointed the legal guardians of Zach and Sean, should anything happen to Deedie and me. Our