of sensitivity and wisdom, which we decidedly are not. As with a lot of families, there are times when I wonder what holds us all together, and the creeping fear I have that I have failed my wife and children in so many ways sometimes still gnaws at me.
I wonder what our lives would be like if I had kept my true self hidden, and who we would all be by now.
When another friend of ours came out as lesbian in her fifties, thus upending her own marriage to her husband of twenty years, I had a brittle argument with a conservative friend of mine. He suggested that you essentially give up the right to put your own happiness foremost once you have children, that once you open that door your only job is to ensure that your sons’ and daughters’ lives are complete. If you’re unhappy because you can’t express your sexuality, said he, that’s a shame. But the time to have made that choice has passed.
I took a different position, unsurprisingly, arguing with him that children get all kinds of messages from parents, and the message sent by a mother or father who exudes misery and loss is not necessarily an improvement over a parent who makes a radical decision to fulfill the needs of her own heart. I am not against the idea of duty as a virtue, but I wonder at what point duty becomes indistinguishable from repression. Life, I suggested to my friend, should be about more than the glum fulfillment of promises made before you knew exactly what it was you were promising, or to whom.
If I seemed, to our friends, like the woman who had taken the most wildly progressive stance possible toward gender, sex, and marriage, I nevertheless wondered whether I nursed a private conservatism in my heart, especially when it came to child rearing. I boasted, in print and in person, of my sons’ accomplishments, holding these up, perhaps, as proof that I was not such a terrible person after all. Look at my boys, I found myself implying as I celebrated their relationships with girls, the grades they earned, the plays they starred in, the colleges to which they were admitted. Surely having me as a parent hadn’t harmed them after all, despite what no small number of people said, both behind my back and directly to my face. I don’t care what you do, Jennifer, the well-wishers said. It’s those boys I feel sorry for. Who’s going to teach them to be men? Who’s going to guide their moral character—you?
To these critics I would often say that I had taught my children exactly what I had hoped: to be kind; to celebrate the imagination; to stand up for the underdog; to be themselves. If being a man meant knowing how to throw a fastball or how to change the oil on your car, well, then all right: in that sense I had failed. But my hope—and Deedie’s, too—was that manhood meant something a little bit more than this.
In having a father who became a woman, I told people, it was my hope that I had taught my sons how to be better men.
It was a nice line. But in time, I began to wonder if it was true. Was I really guiding my sons to be their own best selves? Or did I think of them as nether versions of me, as a kind of cosmic do-over? Surely, in Zach and Sean, these two fine souls, I had finally found a way to get the boy thing right. If I had failed as a man—and it was hard to argue against this, what with the vagina—there was still one last chance, in them, to succeed. And my idea of success, I sometimes found myself thinking, was defined in shockingly traditional and normative terms. I pictured them with jobs, with wives, with a kind of societal respectability that seemed to belong more to my own father’s vision of the world than my own. Surely, if anyone had accused me of this kind of thinking, I’d have denied it. They’re not here to be me, I’d have said testily. They’re here to be themselves. But sometimes, I suspected, a less generous sense of the world lurked not so deeply in my heart.
I remembered trying to defend my own sense of self, when I explained to my father that with my Wesleyan degree I was going to move to New York and