crew circled around our dinner table, capturing us for posterity as if recording a glimpse of the elusive giant squid in its murky and rarefied depths. When my second memoir, I’m Looking Through You, came out, Deedie joined me on Oprah. When my third one, Stuck in the Middle with You, was published, the two of us plus Zach appeared on the Today show. “I live in a normal family,” he told the interviewer. “I can’t think of a way life could be better.”
An online newspaper ran the shocking headline SON OF TRANSGENDER AUTHOR SAYS “I LIVE IN A NORMAL FAMILY.”
People from around the world wrote me letters. Some of them asked for help I was unqualified to provide. Other people suggested I was crazy. “You must have been mole-assed as a child,” one helpful reader observed. The most heartbreaking message came from a woman in Nebraska, who wrote, “The weirdest thing about you, Jenny Boylan, is that you seem almost like a person somebody could know.”
Yeah, almost.
One winter, I heard from a woman who said that she was getting an urgent message from the land of the dead for me. Would I like to hear it?
I disregarded this note and went out cross-country skiing. It was a cold day, and all the blowing snow had made deep drifts in some places, odd barren plains in others. From the top of the hill I looked out over the valley and there saw Great Pond in the distance. Ice shacks covered the lake, and a couple of snowmobilers were racing across the glittering surface.
I stood by a tree out in the midst of the course, breathing in the cold, clean air, feeling my heart beat in my chest, the wind on my cheeks.
And I thought, What is this world? What is this life?
Ranger just glanced up at me with an expression that said, You really think it’s such a mystery? You don’t think the answer is obvious?
He wagged.
A couple of days later the woman wrote me again, saying she’d gotten the message again, that it was from my father, and that it was urgent.
So I wrote back and said, Fine. Whatever. Put him through.
The next day I got the following:
Jenny, I did not abandon you. I ask now only that you move forward with peace in your heart. Do not take it upon your shoulders to save the world.
I am patient. I am kind. I am exploring a realm that is magnificent in every way. It is glorious to behold and yet there are no words to describe.
Sweetest one, you have clearly stepped into your own. You must understand solidly that you are loved. Know this.
I read this with exactly the skepticism you’d expect, if a person you did not know claimed to be channeling messages from the beyond. I’ll also note that it doesn’t sound a thing like my father, either, a man without a New Age bone in his body. Most damning of all, it contained none of his signature phrases: You bet! and Why not?
And yet, for all that, as I read this message, tears welled up in my eyes and rolled down my cheeks.
I wonder, sometimes, if my own father thought of me the way I thought of my sons—as a reflection of himself. It’s not something we’re proud of, but it’s still true: we sometimes think of our children the way Lord Voldemort thought of horcruxes—beings into which we pour our own souls, in hopes that some version of us will survive into the world, even beyond the moment our own candle is snuffed out.
Was that still true? Was there still something of my father in me? What was it I had passed on to my sons? I hoped that whatever I had given them was the better part of my nature and not the opposite.
I strapped on my skis and put on my iPod and once again headed out into the snows of Belgrade Lakes. Ranger came with me. It was another perfect winter day, not as cold as the one before.
I looked out at the frozen lakes. Ranger chased the wind, then stood frozen at the edge of a cliff, staring up at the bright sky above him. A bird flew from the arms of a tree and headed toward the horizon.
* * *
We went from a one-dog household to two in 2006, after we adopted Indigo. And, in just the way that you come to see your firstborn more clearly after you have