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

negative side, [what] I came to realize—and it’s only become crystal clear in the last few years when I’ve thought about it more—was that my father was also really afraid of me. When he did turn up, it was almost always with someone else. He’d have a friend of his, or if he picked me up, we would go to New York City maybe and catch a Giants football game or a Yankees game, but it was always with my uncle Chuck, and they’d always meet a couple of other guys there. Later on, when I got to be a little older, we’d go someplace where he could always count on knowing people when he arrived. So even then the burden of what slender parenting he was doing he could share with a half a dozen other drunks.
    I always thought when I was younger that it was just disinterest, and I didn’t recognize it as fear until much later. Or inadequacy.
    JFB: What was he afraid of? Was it that you were the ghost of responsibility? That he shirked?
    RR: Yeah! Or feelings of inadequacy from just not doing your job. If you don’t do your job ninety-nine percent of the time, you’re not going to have a really strong feeling of competence that other onepercent of the time. And I was not an easy kid, in the sense that I think he thought of me as someone who as soon as he got home would be reporting back.
    JFB: You were your mother’s spy.
    RR: Her instructions to him whenever I left the house with him was always just a series of don’ts. I always had a sense of him as a very dangerous man, which, of course, at times he was. There were times when you did not want to be standing next to my father. Because something would come flying at him and it wouldn’t hit him, it’d hit you.
    So it made me an alert child, but it also made me a vigilant child. When I was with him, I was always trying to figure out his absence. Always trying to figure out if he was the man that my mother portrayed for me. So he must have seen me as a kid that was always taking notes. Always disapproving. And I always had the sense that by the time he dropped me off again at my grandfather’s house that he had just about as much of me as he could stand.
    The powerful and positive things I learned from my father had an awful lot to do with work. Because he did such hard physical work and he played so hard. I would watch him when we were working road construction together in the summers. I would watch him, absolutely slack-jawed at how hard that man could work. And he was then in his fifties and he could outwork and outdrink everybody. I mean, he would limp in the first couple of hours in the morning, but once he burned off the alcohol he was simply amazing. The amount of what I could only consider punishment that man could endure. And when he began to get older and have some physical illness and injuries that just come from a life of hard work, his ability to manage pain left me just amazed. And also, as he became ill—the first barb of lung cancer, then he went into remission for a while, and then he went into a second bout of lung cancer—he had an ability to absorb not only physical pain but psychological pain, of just knowing what was happening to him, and going through those radiation treatments without ever complaining, without ever showing any … he had to be afraid, but he never showed the slightest weakness. At all.
    JFB: So do you think you got that as a son, a certain fearlessness, a certain dedication to work? As your friend, I’ve rarely seen you afraid, and when I have, you’ve been afraid for other people. I’ve seen you afraid for me, I’ve seen you afraid for Deedie when I was midtransition. I saw you afraid for our son Sean when he was born. But I’ve never seen you afraid for yourself.
    RR: Well, I am a person who puts one foot in front of the other. I’m never afraid of something not working. I’m not afraid of failure in the traditional sense, because it’s just not part of the way I go about things. In the sense that I have seen other