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

said, “whatever you do, no matter what choice you make, you will suffer.”
    T HE PHONE RANG EARLY . I could tell it was trouble just from the sound of it. It was Deedie, and she was weeping. “Something’s wrong withSean,” she said. He’d just been born the night before. “They’re mede-vacing him off to Portland.”
    “What?” I said. “What’s wrong with him?”
    “It’s his heart,” she said.
    By the time I got to the hospital, Sean was already gone. They’d bundled him up, his tiny body surrounded by tubes and wires, and rushed him to the Maine Medical Center, leaving Deedie weeping and bereft in the maternity ward. She’d had another cesarean, a spinal headache, mastitis, a failed epidural, and a head cold. And after all of that, her son had been taken away in an ambulance.
    Her doctor was there, an obstetrician somewhat lacking in bedside manner. “Is he going to be all right?” I asked. “Doctor? Is he?”
    She shrugged. “I don’t know,” said the doc. “His heart is out of control. If we can’t get his pulse down … your son might not make it.”
    “Jim,” said Deedie. She couldn’t leave her room. “Go to him. Please. Someone should be with him if …”
    I drove to Portland. My friend Rick Russo was waiting for me at the hospital; he’d flown back from some book tour he’d been on (for Nobody’s Fool , I think) to help us through whatever terrible time was now beginning. I was led through the infant ICU to an incubation chamber, kind of like the device you’d use to hatch chicken eggs in elementary school. There, wrapped in every imaginable wire, was Sean Finney Boylan, age: one day. His heart rate was 250 beats a minute. Doctors and nurses surrounded him. As I entered the ICU they all looked over at me with grave expressions.
    I emerged from the room a little later. As I took off my mask and sterile gloves, Rick gave me an agonized look. He had two daughters of his own. “What’s going on, Jim? Is he going to be all right?”
    “I don’t know,” I said to my friend. “I don’t know.”
    A WEEK LATER we came through the door holding the baby. They’d discharged us after a week of trauma, a week in which the doctors thought they had Sean’s heart rate under control, only to find it skyrocketing again. He’d been born with a condition called supraventriculartachycardia, which more or less consisted of an extra nerve between his heart and his brain that caused that connection to short-circuit. One night, after his pulse hit the roof again, I had held the child in my arms looking into his tiny face, as the tears rolled down my cheeks. I thought to myself, There is never going to come a time in my life when I’m not worried about this child. I’m going to spend the rest of my life in constant fear I’m going to lose him .
    His accelerated heartbeat made sweat course down his week-old temples. “Seannie,” I whispered. “Please. Stay with us. Don’t go away. You’re just getting started.”
    When I was a newborn, I too had suffered a trauma at birth. I’d been born three months premature, which in the 1950s—like now—meant that the odds were against me. My mother had been discharged from the hospital without me, and she went back to my family’s small row home in Upper Darby, Pennsylvania, to wonder what was happening to her child. Every day after work, my father took the trolley to Sixty-ninth Street in Philadelphia, and walked to the hospital and stared down into an incubator at his unwell son.
    One day, his mother—Gammie—had asked him if she should visit me in the hospital too.
    “I don’t think so,” said my father. “He’s not much.”
    T HIRTY-SEVEN YEARS LATER , when Deedie and I came through the door holding our son, we got a different reaction. Zachary and his aunt Katie—Deedie’s sister—had decorated the house to celebrate Sean’s arrival and rescue. There were signs that said, GOOD JOB SEAN ! And CONGRATULATIONS MOM AND DAD !
    Zach,