Changing Seasons
A personal essay about my children
This week, I’m taking an aside from my novel “Departures,” to share something deeply personal because, now more than ever, maybe someone out there needs to hear it. If you don’t, that’s okay. You can skip this one.
I woke to the gift of a gentle rain this morning. For weeks upon weeks it’s been so dry and hot, the grass crunches underfoot and the withholding sky looms, a hazy, dirty blue. It’s not much rain, not enough, little more than a small sip but it’s enough to remind me that rain still exists.
Why am I talking about the weather? Because there is no better metaphor to express the overwhelming feeling of helplessness when the world you wake up to feels as though it’s betrayed you and you must wander through your days wondering if this new bitter and unfamiliar season is the last you’ll ever know. Nature has no rules and refuses to fit within the tidy cells of named days and months we impose. It blows right through them, floods them, scorches them to cinder, and acquiesces only once or twice in a season, giving a gentle snowfall on a Christmas Eve or a cloudless blue sky on the Fourth of July just to keep us believing in the illusion of control we require.
I am a man out of season and I have been wandering through this uncharted landscape for more than five years now, nearly enough time for most of the cells in my body to be replaced. I’m not a young, idealistic artist anymore. I’m not a scared new father anymore. I’m not a devoted husband anymore. And yet, strangely I still am all of those things, though my experience of them at fifty-four is different than it was at twenty-eight.
This morning, my daughter, A. sleeps under my roof and her presence here feels restorative. She will be twenty-four in a few days but in many ways she is a teenager, learning how to be herself in the world. Last night she had a first date and she was giddy with nervous excitement as she dressed to go see some band called Machine Girl. To be seen and loved by another is something she’s craved and been deprived of for too long. I was as anxious as she was. When she was a little boy, she was both defiant and demurring, absorbed and distracted. She was a contradiction. When she was a young man, she was sad and prone to deep isolation, hiding herself so far away that we nearly lost her. In college she found the courage to reckon with who she was and to allow herself to become herself. Seeing this process up close as we quarantined together was a gift to me.
Two nights back, my eldest, H. came to visit and the three of us went out for an expensive dinner, one that I wouldn’t have been able to afford just two months ago when I was coasting on fumes. I was unemployed for nearly two years which was a backhanded gift from my last employer. The time allowed me to step off the treadmill and resume the artistic walk I had abandoned at twenty-six when H. was born, another unexpected gift. The new job I have now is a bit of a soul-crusher, but it gives me the freedom to pay for dinner, pay off my children’s college loans, and keep my place. I’ve lived long enough to understand that seasons can’t last forever. If there is a constant, it’s change.
Just two months ago H. came out to me as trans. If you’re keeping score, yes, that’s two for two on the trans children front. H. is twenty-eight and like her younger sister, has struggled a great deal in this first quarter of her life though her struggle did not present in the same way. Where A. was hiding herself away, H. was out in the world, expressing her manhood in a very convincing way. Her performance fooled everyone, including herself. She was ramrod straight, taught as a bowstring, and full of anger. I think she also wanted to please me, wanted to pick up the legacy of my artistic aspiration that had to be shelved when she came into the world. She carried a lot on her capable shoulders, witnessing some horrifying fights between her mother and I as our marriage blew apart. She took care of her younger sibling. She was made to grow up to fast, to be responsible too early.
I would be lying if I said this has been easy adjustment for me. I’m human. I went through my phase of making it all about me. Did I perform the role of being a man so badly that both my children rejected it? How could it be that both of my children were born into the wrong bodies? Is this my fault? It was my genetic contribution that determined their sex after all. To say yes to any of these questions would be to deny the reality of what gender truly is. It’s a continuum, a spectrum like everything else in the natural world. Nature isn’t tidy or easily understood. While the elements that compose it cannot be created or destroyed, they are constantly changing state. Water turns to vapor and turns to ice before becoming water once again.
There is a violent opposition to the notion that gender spans beyond the tidy binary we impose and that violent opposition is now in power in the most powerful country in the world, the place where I was born and where my children call home. This group will tell you that my children are deviants or they’ve been brainwashed or possessed. They will say there is poison in the well. They will say that this is unprecedented, that men have always been men and women have always been scared. They will deny that our minds are a part of our bodies and our bodies are a part of our minds. Even as they speak of faith in an unseen God that can’t be proven, they will dismiss the identity of a person if that person doesn’t conform to the physical form they expect. Our minds are an expanding universe we will never truly understand. You cannot perform an autopsy of Mozart’s brain and discover what made him a musical genius. You cannot peek inside our gray matter and pluck out the part that makes us aspire to be who we are in the world. You cannot look inside my daughters’ brains and identify the part that is “male.” When we deny any human the right to follow the compass within themselves, we all lose that freedom.
The truth is that there have always been trans people in the world. The only difference now is that these people, thanks to the courageous acts of so many gender non-conforming people who came before have a way forward that doesn’t end in suicide or worse, a life imprisoned in a body and a lifestyle that denies who they are. Imagine for a moment if you did not feel safe to be who you are without persecution. If there is one idea that embodies our aspiration for America, it is that we allow each other the space to be who we are without fear. In the coming years, this idea will be tested.
Like all seasons, this one will last as long as it does and then it will pass into the next. We cannot bend it’s timing to our will. I cannot make the world safe for my children anymore than I can make it rain or snow. All I can really do to try to protect them is to share our story in hopes that, if you have a similar story, you will know you’re not alone and if you are one who seeks to harm my children, that maybe you will think twice because you will see that we are not so different from you.
Some Resources
I can think of no better resource to follow the political struggle for trans rights, than
’s reporting every week. I highly recommend subscribing to her newsletter so you can keep track of where we are in the struggle.
If the idea of trans people is new to you or scary to you or maybe just completely foreign, I encourage you to watch this funny and moving documentary that Will Ferrell made with his long time friend, Harper.
If you enjoy fiction of all kinds and want to experience a variety of excellent new voices from the queer community, I highly recommend checking out this directory on Substack that is curated by my friend, the talented writer,
.
Finally, I’ll share a post I wrote last year that features a song that is really a love letter to my daughter A.
Songcraft: How She's Supposed to Be
Catch & Release paid subscribers get access to my audio narration and bonus content like a behind-the-scenes video for this post.
Such an important post. Thank you for laying bare your personal story so we can reflect and see ourselves in it. A dear friend of mine just discovered he’s omni-sexual (yes, I had to look it up) and while he still is in the throes of understanding it and identifying as male, he’s also teaching me about how short-sighted our binary gender divisions are, citing there’s upwards of 38 biological markers and variations within the male-female spectrum. We are far from binary, and up until 2006 it was actually legal for physicians to assign gender at birth when there may’ve been confusion. I applaud your daughters for their ability to listen deeply to and trust their inner voices. The more they can be true to themselves, the more will follow and celebrate the infinite ways consciousness expresses itself on this earth. May our country and her people realize we are stronger, more resilient and beautiful because of our differences. ❤️
So important to be said. The concept of who we are must be accepted and talked about. And add this that the election causes us to despair for empathy. Stated and needed to be stated.
I add this: As Trump’s inauguration looms, as his threats to create detention camps loom, as prison stocks rise, as he plans to deport thousands from our nation, separating parents from their children looms,
Let us hear Friedrich Gustav Emil Martin Niemöller (14 January 1892 – 6 March 1984), German theologian and Lutheran pastor, whose words appear on the U.S. Holocaust Memorial:
"First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out – because I was not a socialist. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out – because I was not a trade unionist. Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out – because I was not a Jew. Then they came for me – and there was no one left to speak for me."
We must speak out to save democracy and condemn inhumanity.