Wednesday Essay: Some Difficult Things to Know How to Do

Reading this column, you might think I have it all figured out.

It’s been about six years since JJ informed me they expected me to use “they/he” pronouns when speaking of them, and that they’d changed their name to JJ. At the time, I was fairly aghast. It had taken me months to invent the name I gave them at birth, to the extent it literally kept me up at night-- the act of conjuring it practically as difficult as the act of giving birth. I made their name everything mine wasn’t. I gave it the attention a poet gives to language. Alas. That name will never be uttered again.

If I were to share here what their name was, it would be deadnaming them. And I would only say it with a hush because, frankly, uttering it feels like bad ethics, or bad juju, or just plain wrong.  I might whisper it to you, but only if you are a close friend or the mom of a trans kid who gets it, who knows to forgive the lapse. My child has made it clear to me that it’s my duty to them to make sure their dead name is buried forever, never to appear again, not even in retrospect.

One of my first concerns when I learned of my child’s new name was, ridiculously, a Christmas stocking I started needlepointing for them when they were in the womb.

I ordered this stocking online without paying much attention to its measurements and was then horrified to discover it was large enough to encase a small child. It wasn’t that I’d deny my kid a large stocking—far from it, as I’m inclined to gift lavishly—it was that I was going to have to needlepoint the whole goddamned thing. If you know anything about needlepoint, you know it’s an excruciating process. A square inch can take an hour.

 I don’t know why I was so insistent on making this damned stocking; I’m not even Christian. I guess it was because I had one when I was a kid that my grandmother made for me, and I adored it. The one I stitched for JJ had an enormous lighthouse on it (no depictions of Santa or Christmassy stuff, thank you very much), along with their (dead)name. This stocking was elaborate and, once it was completed, quite breathtaking. It took four years to finish, if not more.

Perhaps because I wanted to distract myself from the fundamental shift that was occurring in my child’s psyche, I immediately became preoccupied by the problem of what to do with this stocking.

And so I joined a Facebook group called the “Needlepointers Society.” Essentially, I was looking for help on how I might change the name on the stocking.

The advice I received from my fellow stitchers was voluminous and, much of it, extremely clever. Some suggested I stich a separate cuff of sorts to attach to the top of the stocking where the name was displayed.

Then another member told me to put it away. He was, he explained in the comments, a gay man who was very happily married to his partner; he was quite elderly, resided in Manhattan, and was now looking back at his coming out through the lens of cherishing a life well-lived. He suggested I purchase a new stocking with my child’s new name as opposed to taking the trouble to stitch a new one.

The old stocking? “Keep it. You never know, they may treasure it in the years to come.”

I did exactly as this gentleman suggested and went a step further. I ordered an enormous stocking emblazoned with the colors of the trans flag, imprinted with “JJ” in large, swooping cursive across its front.

*. *. *

While driving yesterday, I had a memory of JJ as a toddler, and I realized that I did not deadname them in my head.

JJ had merged with the child who had at first seemed a separate entity to me. Perhaps it’s because JJ came out right around the time they hit adolescence; it often seemed to me that their child self was a little girl I lost, whereas their teen self, unrecognizable, was trans. I attribute that to the fact that most parents have a hard time recognizing their kids when they become teenagers.

But there was also the fact that children are so gendered in our culture that most of the memories I returned to were hard to parse from both the name and the gender JJ no longer identified with.

For example, JJ’s an amazing ice skater. They first learned at age 4 and then took lessons up till 11, when Covid closed the rink. But these memories involve skates with white boots and the glittery little numbers they wore for performances. I have pictures on my phone.

The fact that JJ hated these dresses and that I ignored their evident anguish at donning them is a discussion for another column.

One of the most difficult things for me to accommodate about JJ’s transness was their request I take down all pictures of them as an AFAB individual. This meant relinquishing numerous photos of them as a baby, a toddler, etc.

I had tons of photographs of JJ’s big baby head framed, huge grin with tiny teeth, earrings glinting in their respective lobes.  They would be taken down.

I took the pictures off Facebook.

When I realized this week that I had remembered JJ as their younger self, but that I thought of them as their nonbinary self, I recalled how JJ has, over the past few years, talked a lot about their memories of childhood.

JJ has such an incredible memory that they can talk about the experience of getting their ears pierced at six months by a nurse at the pediatrician’s office. They aren’t making it up. I was there! They’ve got the details down. It’s not a good memory, but it’s funny.

In other words, their childhood is intact, and the memory is good.

This evening I’m in my office at school, talking with a student I know well. MaryDanielle’s been following this column, she says.

I point out the irony that I have numerous pictures of JJ as an AFAB child hung on my office walls. Especially given that, I tell her, I am about to attend a PFLAG meeting via zoom in this room.

There are pictures of my incredibly toothy and goofy blonde girl child, some in which they wear awesome pink cowboy boots, on every wall.

The pictures hung here a long time because of Covid, and, as the office collected dust and no one ever entered it, there never seemed a need to alter the decor.

When I finally returned to this room, I let it become, over the years, a secret altar to the someone JJ once was, and was not.

I have accepted that JJ is no longer the little girl in these pictures.

But what I need to accept is the fact they never were.

This is hard for me.

“I need to take these pictures down, don’t I?” I ask MaryDanielle.

“Yeah,” she says, looking at me kind of hard, in a way that surprises me,

And so I do.

I gather the framed photos from the windowsill, the filing cabinet, the cluttered surface of the desk. I nearly miss one stuck to the side of a bookcase. I turn to MaryDanielle, framed pictures in hand, begging her, “Just look at the ADORABLENESS!”

MaryDanielle nods, unimpressed.

It is a harsh truth that our smiling children are special only to us.

I put the pictures in desk drawer, say good bye to dear MaryDanielle, and sit down to open my laptop and attend the PFLAG support meeting.

The zoom screen fills with many faces I know, some I don’t. We take turns introducing ourselves, stating what we have going on in our lives.

I tell them I’ve just taken down all of the pictures of JJ as a girl-child wearing dresses and pink cowboy boots.

I tell them I need to frame new pictures of JJ to put on these walls.

I tell them I am experiencing memories of JJ without misgendering or deadnaming them, in a most surprisingly fluid and natural manner, and that I never thought I would arrive at this moment.

*. *. *

That’s where I decided to end this essay last night.

But when I woke, I realized what I needed to do. One of the reasons I have a dearth of pictures of JJ is because they, like all teenagers, hate to have their picture taken. But when I looked on my phone, I discovered many pictures from the past years: pics from a trip to Los Angeles in which we rode through Hollywood Hills in an open van, laughing our asses off; pics of us reflected in the Bean in downtown Chicago; and my favorite picture of them looking off into the distance in a café, looking contemplative and scholarly. And grown up.

I sent these pictures to the nearest Walgreen’s. I have a busy afternoon, but I think I’ll be able to get them into the frames I hid in my desk drawer last night.

I decorate my office because I want my students to know me as a person. I don’t want them to see a cis het woman who talks about her trans kid but only has pictures of a toothy three year-old in pink on her office walls.

I am making this change today. As you can see, I am continually in the process of figuring out how to be the best parent to my trans kid. Which, I have learned, extends into being a better person to my students, who are also kids when you come right down to it. Through my relationships with them and JJ, I am reminded that love is an action.