The Good Mother Myth

JOY LADIN

hOW BAD A MOTHER AM I? So bad that my children call me Daddy.

I was born to be a bad mother. My bad-motherhood is literally written in my genes, in the form of the Y chromosome that waves its helplessly male arms in every cell of my body, waiting futilely to be replaced by the second X chromosome that would transform me from a male-to-female transsexual into a real woman.

During the fifteen years that I lived as a married heterosexual father, the name “Daddy” was an honorific, a public sign of my love for my children and my children’s love for me. But even then I felt like a bad mother. No matter how many miles I walked with babies or toddlers strapped to my chest, cradled in my arms, or swaying on my shoulders; no matter how many diapers I changed, meals I cooked, dishes I washed; and no matter how many hours I waited to pee after a long drive in order to meet the endless stream of pent-up childhood demands for food, play, and attention, I could never move the needle on the meter of Good Motherhood, because I wasn’t and never would be a mother.

It wasn’t my fault that I wasn’t a mother. I didn’t ask to be born male, and I never wanted the uterus-challenged body I inexplicably found myself inhabiting. But as my wife’s body, pregnancy books, and every mention of motherhood reminded me, my XY chromosomes rendered me incapable of either enduring the burdens or achieving the miracles of female reproduction. Menstruation, pregnancy, miscarriage, childbirth, nursing, the suffering they entail, and the courage they demand, were constitutionally beyond me.

But it wasn’t just biology that marked me as a bad mother. My maternal inadequacy was a social given whenever I mingled with mothers, which I often did when I took my small children to daycare, preschool, or playgrounds. When mothers were talking mom-to-mom, I couldn’t join in without disrupting the conversation, like a shaggy dog bounding up to be petted. Even in the egalitarian college-town venues in which I did pickups, drop offs, playdates, and parties, my biology was my social destiny: I might be recognized by mothers (the ultimate judges) as “a great dad,” but the top of the fatherhood scale fell well short of the lowest rung of true motherhood.

Being a dad among moms has its perks, of course. I was praised for even the smallest parental involvement: Look, he changes diapers! Wipes drool! Soothes screaming infants! No matter how equally my wife and I shared family chores, my wife’s mothering was constantly being measured against that of her peers, but no one judged me on the quality of our kids’ diets or the creativity of their birthday parties. Since the social as well as biological burden of good motherhood always fell squarely on her—despite her feminist critiques and commitments—my wife embraced the children’s clothing, feeding, and so on as her personal responsibilities. And since she had been raised female and I had been raised male, we both agreed that she was infinitely more capable than I was of handling aesthetics, details, and planning. Though I did much of the chopping, cooking, and cleaning up, she chose the meal recipes. Even when I dressed the kids, she laid out the clothes—and seemed authentically horrified on the rare occasions when I dared to put together an outfit. Though I did most of the grocery shopping (with children in tow), she assembled the lists I relied on—which meant that she planned all the meals and kept track of everyone’s needs and supplies. As the social standard of Good Mothering demanded, she took on the mental work of parenting, from noticing who needed a new toothbrush to evaluating school choices. Per the social definition of good fathering, I “helped,” spending hours discussing household concerns as our children multiplied. But we both believed that no matter how mentally capable I might be in my professional life, my father’s brain was simply not sharp enough, my grasp of my children’s needs simply not clear enough, for me to be entrusted with planning, scheduling, remembering, noticing.

Don’t get me wrong. I loved the aspects of parenting that fell to me. To this day, years after living apart from my children, my body aches to feel a small body squirming against it. Had I actually been a man, I probably would have been gratified when mothers, including mine, said I was “so good with the kids”— but this phrase, bestowed as a high compliment on fathers, would be an insult to any mother. A father who’s good with kids is considered a great father; a mother who’s good with kids is considered . . . a mother. And though I never envied my wife the interminable work of thinking about household concerns, the oft-repeated self-fulfilling prophecy of my male incapacity for it sealed my sense of maternal inadequacy.

But maternal inadequacy represented by being a “good dad” was nothing compared to the disaster that followed my transition to living as a woman. There’s no scale of parenting values in which gender transition is a plus—and most non-transexual onlookers consider it a sign of abject, irremediable failure. No matter what I did for or with my children, I was no longer in the running to be considered a good parent of either gender once I started presenting myself as a woman.

My children told me, frequently, that I could never be their mother because they already had one; my eight-year-old daughter shared her opinion that my transition made me a bad role model for my then-fourteen-year-old son. There was even a legal presumption that gender transition made me a bad parent: When my wife filed for divorce, I was subjected to a court investigation to determine if my transition made me a danger to my children. The lengthy psychologist’s report officially decided that though transition made me too self-absorbed to be a good parent, I wasn’t dangerous because I would do what my therapist told me to do. Though it was my ex who filed for divorce, and my ex who argued that I should have limited contact with my children, the law treated me as a father abandoning his family, a twist on the usual paternal selfishness and incontinence, though in my case it was wearing women’s clothing rather than having an affair or gambling that I was putting ahead of my children’s needs. Other than a few friends, my therapist, and my attorney, no one seemed to believe that I had delayed transition until it was the only alternative to suicide, and that I had endured years of anguish and isolation because I couldn’t bear to leave my children. Like most parents whose transition precipitates divorce, I lost physical custody and was entitled to see my children only three times a week.

Needless to say, at no point in this process was my ex’s quality as a parent in question, both because she wasn’t transsexual and because, as every court believes, children are better off with their mother. In fact, my transition increased my ex’s Good-Mother quotient. My ex was seen as a heroic single mother, bravely soldiering on after the devastating betrayal of their father, a man so feckless he literally wouldn’t keep his pants on for the sake of his children. No one knew that she rebuffed my efforts to continue to share the daily work of parenting, though for a while I insisted on vacuuming the house I no longer lived in. Even though my ex had initiated the divorce, everyone knew the breakup was my fault.

But I have never fought harder or suffered more for love of my children than after my new life as a woman won me the gold medal for maternal failure. Like many transsexuals, I felt as though I had been reborn: For the first time in almost fifty years, I walked the world as the person I knew myself to be. Like every newborn, I wanted my miraculous new self to be loved, held, cherished. But that, of course, wasn’t how my children saw it. To them, my new self wasn’t a miracle; it was a catastrophe that had destroyed their home, their lives, their world. Even today, when new relationships and lives have risen from the rubble, they wish that I—the real, female me—had never been born.

There’s nothing unusual about my children’s feelings. It’s easy for a noncustodial parent in an acrimonious divorce to become demonized, a safe repository for the rage all children feel when adults who should be caring for them inexplicably disrupt their lives. When the reason for such a divorce is gender transition, it’s hard for children to distinguish transition from divorce, their trans parent’s emergence into the light of day from the shattering of their home. No matter what I did when I was with them, I had utterly failed them as a parent. No matter how they begged, I wouldn’t go back to living as a man, or living with their real—they would say only—mother. No matter how they wept when I left, I still left. No matter how much they longed for me, I wasn’t there to murmur to them when they had trouble falling asleep, comfort their nightmares, kiss them awake in the morning.

Everything I knew and loved about being their parent had been stripped away; all that was left was showing up. Whenever I had a chance to see them, I did, erasing my fledgling female self by assuming once more the clothes and voice of a man. No matter how broken my heart felt, I gazed with love into their stony faces, gave hugs and kisses that weren’t returned, waited patiently for them to look at, talk to, and play with me. I sobbed every time I left them. I hated myself for not being with them, for failing to be able to be the man they mourned and missed, for surviving living apart from them.

I became an unnameable kind of parent, a parent defined wholly by negations: noncustodial, non-male, not a mother, no longer a father, not present enough, not invisible enough, not a danger but definitely not good in any way. No one knew what someone in my position should do or should be; all anyone could tell me, from friends to therapists and rabbis, was that no matter how angry my children were or how much I hurt, I had to be there for them, whenever and however I could. And so I was, day after day, year after year, while new forms of relationships and love grew around the gaping wounds of transition and divorce, which I know will always be there.

Even after five years of healing, I am still in some ways nameless. “Mama” is their mother, their very good mother, and I am—they aren’t quite sure. Usually they call me “Daddy” and “he,” but sometimes pronouns slip, and recently my older daughter told me that when I referred to myself as “father” in a card I wrote her, it felt wrong and strange. She didn’t know what other word to use, because our words and relationships with parents are so deeply enmeshed with gender, there is no name for what I am to her.

But my children know one thing for sure: No matter how I fail as a father or mother, I will love them utterly, and always.