EMILY PRATT SLATIN

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She/Her/Hers Lesbian

Retired Career Fire and EMS Lieutenant-Specialist, Writer, and Master Photographer, living in Vermont.

Makayla Asked Me The Question

I arrived home yesterday, gave Amelia a hug, then went to sleep for twelve hours. She left this morning on a two night trip to Williamsville, New York. In the end, the only thing that really changed in our marriage was our geography.

Makayla called me a few days ago because she was having boyfriend problems and asked if she and Diesel could come stay at Mom's house for a few days. I told her yes. She drove down from Watertown and met me at The Bel.

The Belvedere Inn is on Academy Street in Stamford. Somewhere along the way, a few hundred feet of Academy Street became capable of containing entirely different periods of my life at the same time. Mom's house is where I grew up. The Bel belongs mostly to the present though my personal history of the place seems to flood my mind every time I visit.

At some point, Makayla asked me the question I had told her to ask when she was old enough to understand the answer.

What was my childhood really like? Then she asked what my career was really like.

When Makayla was little, she used to ask questions about both. Sometimes the telephone would ring, and I would glance at the telephone to see that it was dispatch on the caller ID. I would answer it, then suddenly I had to leave. I would run out of the house, get into my car, drive like hell to the station, and disappear into whatever emergency had happened somewhere else.

Eventually, I would return smelling like diesel, smoke, sweat, dirt, or whatever else the day had attached to me. Sometimes I came home exhausted. Sometimes I came home unusually quiet. Occasionally I came home covered in enough soot that no explanation was really necessary as to what general category of problem had occupied my evening.

Makayla would always ask what happened. And I told her that someday, when she was old enough to understand, she could ask me again. I said essentially the same thing about my childhood. It was something that would have to wait until she was older.

At the time, this seemed like an excellent solution. Children remain children just long enough that adults can convince themselves there will always be more time before the complicated conversations become necessary. Then suddenly the child is twenty-six, has driven down from Watertown with a dog, and somehow despite the years, remembers the promise.

Before answering, I asked Makayla what she remembered about her childhood.

Not much before twelve, apparently.

I started mentioning things that I was certain she would remember. Places we went. Things we did. Ordinary moments from our shared history that had remained perfectly clear in my own mind for decades. She listened, thought about it, then told me she simply did not remember most of them.

That broke my heart.

Thankfully, I somehow still have photographs of many of those moments. Not all of them. That's impossible.

Ordinary things have an unfortunate habit of becoming important after nobody can photograph them anymore. Children become adults and forget that they once walked around wearing fire boots that almost reached their waist.

Makayla does not remember wearing my fire boots. I do. There is no loneliness quite like remembering something nobody else remembers.

So I told her what I could.

My father was an asshole. Mom was cool. The only thing that really mattered to Mom was whether I was happy. Before mom died she told me that she had stopped the doctors from doing surgery to change my genitalia because I was very outspoken about how surgery would have made me very sad.

I was born and raised in New York City. I attended Friends Seminary from kindergarten through third grade. Then we moved to Stamford, New York, and I attended Stamford Central School from third through seventh grade before getting kicked out. I spent eighth grade at Cooperstown Central School, which required my parents to drive me approximately an hour each way every day. It was absolute fucking hell.

Grades nine through twelve were spent at boarding school. At the time, I was the only girl at that all-boys boarding school.

Doctors had labeled me female at birth. Dad fought to have that designation changed and failed. At some point around twelve, Dad informed me that I was now his son. Religion was part of his evidence. I disagreed and told him I was a girl regardless of what he said or believed. This did not go over well.

He started taking me to doctors and asking why his "son" was developing as a girl. He would point out that I had a penis and therefore, according to him, this was proof that I was his son. Then, without apparently noticing the contradiction, he would complain that I was physically developing as female and demand to know why.

One doctor suggested that perhaps I was not getting enough exercise.

This was ridiculous. I spent almost my entire childhood outside. I wandered through the woods, climbed things, rode bicycles, swam, worked odd weekend jobs around farms, and routinely disappeared outdoors for long periods of time because outside was often considerably easier than inside my house. Lack of outdoor activity was not the problem.

Dad somehow neglected to mention during many of these appointments that my birth certificate at the time still listed me as a hermaphrodite. That might have been useful information.

Makayla asked what the doctors wanted to do.

I told her they had their own ideas, opinions, and suggestions. There were discussions about what should happen to my genitalia, often conducted with the confidence people acquire when the body being discussed belongs to someone else. I put up such a massive goddamn fuss about the entire thing that Mom eventually said nothing was going to happen until I was old enough to decide for myself what I wanted.

The truth is that I never wanted anything done to me. Aside from receiving a few doses of testosterone during childhood, nothing was. Aside from a typical male circumcision, no surgery of any kind ever occurred.

Later in life, there was one time when I was willing to discuss surgical possibilities. Somehow, being willing to talk about something theoretical was immediately interpreted as permission to fast-track me toward a surgery I did not even desire.

I told the doctor to fuck off and left the office. The discussion was never brought up again.

When I was sixteen, I was finally told the truth about what the doctors had discovered after I was born. During the month after my birth, they had performed numerous tests. Everything came back female, down to my XX chromosomes. I still had male-looking genitalia, and at the time nobody knew exactly why. I told that I was genetically female. I would likely continue developing accordingly. I was told that I had male genitalia that looked "typical". They didn't know why. I suppose it wasn't of any consequence that they were confused. I was fucking goddamn thrilled. Fuck yeah, I thought in my head.

I had spent years insisting that I was a girl while adults repeatedly tried to explain to me that I was somehow mistaken about the person whose body I was actually living inside. My father had tried religion. Schools had tried paperwork. Doctors had tried theories. Authority had repeatedly been presented as though it were interchangeable with reality. My female friends saw me simply as a natural girl with a dick.

By sixteen, he had somehow convinced himself that I was pursuing a sex change. My gender identity and mannerisms had apparently disappointed him to the point that he dismissed me almost entirely. That was around the last time my father and I ever really talked.

Later in his life, he would call and ask me to drive him to medical appointments. I agreed only because Mom had previously asked me to help and I had already scheduled the time off from work.

Dad died when I was thirty-three. Mom died last October. I was forty-six. There is something strange about sitting a few doors from the house where most of those things happened and explaining them to someone who knew the adult version of me but had never been given the complete story.

I told her about boarding school. During my senior year, when I was eighteen, I was raped by another student. I reported it. I was told it had not happened because nobody witnessed it. Bullshit.

I told Makayla that rape was unfortunately not an entirely new category of experience for me. I had been molested during childhood. Nobody believed me then, either.

There is a point in life where repeatedly being told that something you personally experienced did not happen stops making you question yourself and starts making you question everybody else.

Principals everywhere hated me.

I ran away after I turned eighteen. I hitchhiked when necessary. I worked odd jobs in addition to whatever regular work I had because I needed enough money to continue existing. For a short period, I worked as a commercial electrician.

In 1998, I started my EMT training in Buffalo.

At the time, I had a friend living in Tonawanda who had graduated from my boarding school the year before. On weekends, he would sometimes "sign me out" using a fake ID showing that he was twenty-one.

The school accepted this. This was the same person who had attended the school for several years and had literally graduated the previous year at approximately eighteen years old. His yearbook photo was hung on the wall behind him in the main building as being part of last years graduating class. He still looked almost exactly the same, aside from his clothing choices.

Apparently, nobody noticed that he had aged several years in a matter of months.

Eventually, I entered emergency services. I remained there for twenty-two years. I became a firefighter, then I became a paramedic. I was then assigned to specialized rescue. Eventually, I was promoted to lieutenant and became brass.

Makayla knew that version of me in the way children know the careers of adults around them. She knew the uniform, the boots, the fire truck that once picked her up from an underage party, the radios, the sudden departures, and the fact that sometimes I came home looking like whatever had happened at work was probably better left unspoken.

She saw Rescue Girl. She did not know what Rescue Girl actually saw. I intentionally kept it that way for years.

There was nothing useful in making a child carry the things I had seen simply because I carried them. If something terrible happened at work, Makayla did not need to be kept awake all night thinking about what I experienced when I came through the door. Angie and I helped raise her and often had Makayla during the summer vacation from school, and at almost every single holiday. During the time she was with us, she needed both me and Angie to be home.

I told her that pediatric calls eventually became especially difficult because every time she crossed a milestone in her childhood, somewhere in my memory there was another kid who did not.

There was an eight-year-old child who was murdered. A twelve-year-old who died from suicide. A college-age kid who drowned as my crew and I watched helplessly. There were others that after those experiences blended into the background.

Eventually, ages stopped being numbers. They became reference points. Makayla was twelve. Then Makayla was sixteen. Makayla became old enough to drive. Makayla became college age. Now Makayla is 26 and we still have the same friendship and relationship as we have had her entire life.

Every time she reached some ordinary stage of growing up, somewhere in the back of my mind was someone from work who never got there. That pattern eventually destroyed me.

When Makayla was young, there were times I came home from a pediatric call and immediately checked on her. There were other times when she was spending the night at our house where I would wake up screaming and tell Angie that there was an emergency at the house. There was never an emergency. Things there remained stable and peaceful whenever Makayla was around. She did not know why I had flashbacks. Most of the time I never told her.

There was one shooting call where I asked Angie to leave a change of clothes for me in the detached garage before I got home. Someone had shot the members of their immediate family. The entire family was wiped out in a single night. The mother died in my care on the way to the hospital.

I knew it was inevitable. If she managed to survive long enough for us to reach the trauma center, she might have had only a few hours. Knowing the outcome does not suspend the obligation to keep working toward a different one.

We transported her. I did my best, knowing full well it was a waste of resources trying to delay the inevitable. She died halfway to the hospital.

When I got home, I went into the garage. I took off my uniform, put it into a plastic bag, and threw it outside in the garbage. I changed into clean clothes.

Then I went inside. I checked on Makayla. I hugged Angie. I told her it had been a bad call. Then I went down beside the creek that ran through the back of the property and sat there alone. I tried to make sense of what I had seen. There was no explanation I could rationally form.

Years later, I learned to accept that not everything contains an explanation waiting to be discovered. Some things simply happen.

Emergencies produce brutal clarity. They also reveal how much normal life depends upon the luxury of pretending consequences are negotiable.

Most of normal life gives people time to bargain with reality. Maybe tomorrow. Maybe later. Maybe there is another way—a different approach, or perhaps maybe we can try something else. Maybe someone else will handle it. Maybe the problem will become less inconvenient if everyone ignores it long enough.

Emergencies remove most of those options. A condition deteriorates whether everyone has finished discussing the plan.

Early in my career, when I was a new medic, I responded to a severe personal injury automobile accident involving two best friends who had been traveling in the same car.

They were both gravely injured. They were also close enough that each begged and pleaded with me to take the other person first. I had very limited resources. One helicopter for one patient. Ground transportation would take too long to even consider being viable. I could not take both.

One patient could be removed and transported much faster than the other. Time being the great equalizer became the deciding factor. I knew that keeping a critically injured patient on scene too long could become its own form of harm. The patients did not, and I didn't have the time to explain it to them.

I apologized to them and said that I am taking them and that I'm sorry but there is absolutely nothing that can be done.

The two friends said their last goodbyes. Then I took the patient I could get off scene first. That patient spent months in the hospital but survived. Years later, on the anniversary of the crash, that same person I helped rescue died by suicide.

I have spent a lot of time thinking about what it means to save someone. The word makes the entire thing sound more permanent than it truly is.

At work, saving someone sometimes meant keeping them alive long enough to reach the hospital long enough to get a signature on your form before the patient is declared dead. Sometimes it meant getting them out of a wrecked car before their car caught fire. Sometimes it meant keeping someone alive long enough to give them a chance at life.

It never meant I acquired ownership of what happened afterward.

When I became brass, there were times when I felt as though I was playing god. I finally broke down and told Makayla that.

I have noticed that the people who crave authority are often the least prepared to carry it.

There were times when I was faced with judgment calls involving who could be saved, who was already dead, who was going to be chosen to die on scene, where limited resources needed to go, and what could still reasonably be done.

The person in command still had to make a decision. In the latter years of my career, that person was oftentimes me.

Responsibility and control are not the same thing. You may be responsible for the response without controlling the circumstances. Leadership begins there—in the narrow space between what has happened and what can still be done.

The best decisions are not always good decisions. Sometimes they are merely the least damaging options available to someone who has been given insufficient time, incomplete information, and no permission to be wrong.

There was a house fire around Christmas one year. A family was trapped inside. The house was fully involved. There was no viable way in or out. There was no chance of survival, and I knew full well that anyone I sent in would immediately become trapped.

I could hear them screaming. I was the one in command. I still hear the screaming from time to time, decades after. There are some calls for service where additional fireground action only creates additional victims.

If we applied water into those conditions, the people inside could have been steamed to death. Even if, somehow, we had been able to remove them from the residence, the extent of the burn trauma meant they would have lived in agony for hours or days before inevitably dying. There was no rescue available. There was only the possibility of making their deaths worse through action.

I gave the order to withhold water until the screaming stopped. I was the one who gave that order. A family burned to death inside their home during the Christmas holidays. I think about that call each and every single day of my life. I told Makayla about it. Not the details, just a basic overview.

I was worried that telling her would change the way she saw me. She still saw me as a hero. I am not sure I have ever been entirely comfortable with that word. Heroes make considerably more sense from outside the emergency.

From inside, there are ruined uniforms, burned coffee, delayed meals, insufficient staffing, bad information, exhaustion, paperwork, people shouting, people freezing, people doing something stupid at precisely the wrong time, radios stepping on one another, and somebody eventually having to decide what happens next.

There are successful calls that nobody remembers. Then there are terrible calls nobody forgets.

There are decisions that look obvious years later to people who had the advantage of not being there when the decision had to be made.

Rank was never valor. It was responsibility. It was liability. But most of all, it was trust.

Sometimes it was being the person everyone looked toward when no answer available deserved to be called good.

I have questioned my faith in god because of things I experienced in my life. I have also questioned my faith in humanity.

Work did not help. There are things people do to one another that resist every reassuring explanation I have ever heard. There are people who believe everything happens for a reason. I have never understood why this is supposed to be comforting. I do not believe everything happens for a reason.

I believe things happen because people make decisions, systems fail, bodies fail, buildings burn, cars crash, physics remains indifferent, human beings hurt one another, timing becomes terrible, and sometimes there simply is not enough of whatever would have been needed to produce a different outcome.

Meaning may come later, but it is not the same thing as cause. To say that something eventually taught me something does not mean it happened for the purpose of teaching me about life.

Humanity has never been simple enough to either worship or dismiss completely. Some of the kindest people I have ever known were damaged. Some of the cruelest people I have ever known had impressive résumés.

I have become deeply suspicious of anyone who introduces themselves by listing their accomplishments. Eventually everyone runs out of adjectives. Character is what remains.

Makayla listened to all of this. At some point, I started crying. She hugged me and asked what was wrong.

"Nothing," I said.

Nothing was wrong. I was looking at a twenty-six-year-old woman I had known for her entire life since she was a toddler and realizing that I had never managed to explain what her presence had meant to me.

I told her that helping raise her had enriched my life in ways I would probably never be capable of fully explaining. Then I told her how fucking proud I was of her.

Makayla told me that coming from me, those words carried enormous weight. Then she said nobody had ever told her that before. I do not know how someone reaches twenty-six years old without ever hearing that someone is proud of her.

I also realized immediately that I had apparently been part of the problem. I had always assumed she knew. Love is especially vulnerable to this mistake.

We assume the other person understands the sentence inside all of those little things that are expected from family in American society. Sometimes they do. Sometimes the sentence still needs to be said. Sometimes it needs to be repeated.

I wish I had said it sooner.

Regret is not always proof that someone did something wrong. Sometimes it is simply the awareness that something good should have happened earlier.

I told Makayla that I was worried the truth about my childhood and the reality of my career might change her opinion of me. It didn't—she still thought I was a hero.

That surprised me more far than it should have. I spent much of my life being useful. I was raised in a time and place where useful people were expected to remain useful regardless of personal cost. Problems were repaired, shifts were covered, calls were answered, and private distress was postponed until the work was finished. This produced capable people, though not always healthy ones.

By sixteen, I was essentially on my own. As soon as I got my first apartment with Angie, I became largely responsible for whatever was happening there as well.

On the way home from Stamford, I stopped in Middleburgh to see Angie.

Angie had left some things at Mom's house. She and Amelia had gotten into an argument, and Amelia and I had told Angie that she was no longer welcome there. She had claimed to Amelia that I had been unfaithful during our relationship. That was untrue. She apologized and we talked about it and decided to let it go.

Then life continued, because life always does.