Stalker of Motherhood

Clothes are a personal joy. I like to go thrift shopping, usually in person but sometimes, to distract myself, online. Just now on eBay I searched for, and up popped, my favorite item of clothing from when my kid was a baby. A top I wore to shreds. I stalked that top online like you’d stalk an ex. Then poof! I can just...have it.

How odd.

The blouse is cream and ecru satin with a pattern of yellow gingko leaves, a deep V neck, and a big floppy bow that ties at the point of the V. Somewhere in the house where I am sitting right now is a photo of me wearing it, holding my baby, laughing, in our old apartment. The baby is laughing too. An action shot, blurry; I’m nuzzling her neck.

Fervent

When my daughter came out as trans, at 14, there was no way I was going to reject her the way some parents I know reject their trans kids. (That is hard for me to conceive of, let alone type...reject your child?) My acceptance was total, unconditional. I never doubted myself and still don’t. About using her feminine pronouns, I was fervent. I might have misgendered Izzy a total of once in the five years that have passed since that afternoon she came out.

That is not a flex. Never accidentally misgendering my child is good, I mean—fine that my kid has not suffered that particular indignity on my account. But now I wonder why I was perfect at it, because that’s odd too.

Everyone I know with a trans kid, including my husband—a supportive, loving father—accidentally uses the wrong pronoun once in a while or went through a period of doing so. Coming to terms with your kid being genderqueer is not instantaneous. It’s a process. After all, you are in a transition too, moving into a fuller understanding, educating yourself, learning how to be the parent you want and need to be. Mistakes come with trying and with letting go of old ideas.

For some reason, I engaged a mental clampdown instead of going through the process of becoming mother to a trans child.

Cast off

If I made the mistake of misgendering my girl, I feared I would lose her. It’s not a rational fear. Izzy has not cast away her dad for accidentally saying “his” on occasion. Yes, she might be annoyed, even wounded. My husband hates when he does it. But Izzy gets through it, we get through it I mean. I’ll do better, says her dad. Not end of world. Ordinary family moment.

Ordinary, yet I did not permit myself that moment, or even a second, to get used to having a daughter and not a son. (Bearing in mind I never had a son, I had an understanding of Son that came with rigid gender template I grew up with.) I skipped my transition as a parent, toggled a mental and emotional switch over to Daughter and locked it.

In doing so, I lost my memory. I erased the motherhood tapes.

Tender

My memory of having daughter starts from when she is 13. Everything before that is blank. I remember nothing from early childhood, grade school, middle school. I sure can’t remember having a baby. I remember loving having a baby, but not the feeling of tossing and catching her in the dining room when I wore the golden gingko-leaf blouse.

Yet I vividly remember the blouse. The silky fabric, glass buttons, how the bow felt in my hands as I tied it.

Odd.

I used to not get parents who struggled when their kid came out or confessed to me “the pronouns are so hard.” If I’m honest, they made me mad. What was wrong with those parents? Pronouns hard? Pronouns are easy, the world is hard. Parents like us are lucky. Our kids trust us with tender information.

Your child is being honest with you, I thought but did not say, standing at the drinks table as another mom wept to me about her newly out trans kid at a party. Snap out of it, what’s wrong with you?

Maybe parents who can’t just “snap out of it” but instead have to go on a rocky journey of understanding don’t have giant gaps in their memory. Is that journey worth the risk of pain, erasure, indignity it can cause? Is memory worth the risk of injury? Unanswerable question. Old question. Very old.

I don’t want the blouse back, but if I could have the time it contains, I might grant myself an hour of the in-between. The transition to being the parent of a trans person that I didn’t go through. What would that feel like, I wonder.

—N.R.

Noa Rabinow is a regular contributor and editor at Gender Defiant.

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