Read Stuck in the Middle With You: A Memoir of Parenting in Three Genders for Free Online Page B

Before the clock struck eight, I would have long since exhausted every possible means within my imagination of passing the time. It’s no wonder parents suspend their children in bouncy-wouncy harnesses from door frames or lock them into swings. I remember on a least one occasion reading Zach the entire JCPenney catalog, in part because I hoped it would lull him to sleep, and in part because I was just plain out of ideas.
    On another occasion, I told Zach to go hide in the house somewhere, and slowly counted down from a hundred before “seeking” him. When I reached the “ready or not here I come” moment, I closed my eyes, just in order to get a few blessed seconds of sleep. After ten minutes, I felt a small hand tugging on my shirt, and I opened my eyes to see my son’s hopeful, excited face. “Come on, Daddy,” he’d say. “Let’s do it again.”
    Okay, Zach. One hundred! Ninety-nine! Ninety-eight! …
    And so the days passed, hurtling and dragging. Each minute seemed like hours and hours. But then the years passed by like days.
    A T THAT TIME I worked in the English department at Colby College with a number of other teachers who also had young children. There was an eccentric medievalist named Russell Potter who had had four children with his wife one after the other, producing babies just like Khrushchev had once sworn the USSR would produce nuclear bombs: “like we are making sausages in a sausage factory.” There was a Victorianist named David Suchoff with two girls in elementary school, and a Shakespearean named Laurie Osborne who had a boy and a girl. We used to have lunch together, all these teachers and I, and we’d talk about the joyful misery of our lives. None of these people had been among my closest friends when they first arrived at Colby, but the shared experience of parenthood had immediately promoted all of them to the inner circle, in the same way that you might wind up forever bonded to someone you shared a room with at the burn ward. (In a similar fashion, people who’d been my bosom companions sinceadolescence—who had not had children—slowly fell out of the rotation, and while my love for them remained undiminished, we found less and less common ground to talk about as the days drew on. I could sense what they were feeling about me—that I had become another one of those young parents unable to talk about anything other than diapers and roseola. I’d become, in spite of myself, one of the zombies. Don’t fight it. It’s good. They’re smarter than we are .
    During this time the professors and I frequently talked about the advantages and the disadvantages of having children close together. Deirdre and I were already talking about Science Experiment Number Two. Was it better, I asked, to have two kids close together—what some of my friends called “Irish twins”? Or was it better to spread them out, waiting two or three or four years between Entings?
    The Potters recommended having them all at once, of course. That way “they could all be friends.” Which was funny, considering the way the Potter kids were always threatening to kill each other. The Osbornes, on the other hand, said it was prudent to wait. You had to think ahead to things like college. If you waited four years between the pregnancies, you wouldn’t wind up having to pay two college tuitions at the same time.
    It was hard to make sense of this advice. My sister and I were a little more than a year apart, and we hadn’t been friends until we were each in our teens and realized that we had a common enemy in our parents. Before that, though, my sister had spent a fair amount of time pounding my head into the cement floor of the basement. On another happy occasion, I remember she had laid me down on my back, pried open my mouth with her fingers, and poured the entire sugar bowl down my throat.
    I turned to David Suchoff and asked him for his opinion. Suchoff just shrugged. “What can I tell you, Boylan,” he