TRANSPARENT

What do you call a mom or dad you can see through? A transparent!

—Bubblegum wrapper riddle that disturbed my eight-year-old

Last night Adam said that he likes our friend Michael because Michael is “solid,” that he trusts me because I’m solid too, like Michael and himself. “Daddy,” he said, “is not solid.” To which his sister immediately added, “No, Daddy’s transparent.” Adam readily agreed and they moved on, in complete understanding of each other, leaving me sort of stunned.

—Journal entry

It was the kind of gritty gray winter afternoon when it seems that there is nothing beautiful in New England. Tracey had taken our youngest child out while the older kids were at school. I was planning to take Lilly to an appointment with her doctor later in the afternoon, and I called Tracey on his mobile phone to confirm that he would have her home on time.

“Where are you now?” I asked. It was a routine question, and I expected Tracey to answer in kind.

But what he said was, “I won’t tell you.”

“What?”

“No, I’m not going to tell you where we are. I have the right to take my children anywhere I please.”

Suddenly vague, hovering fears—that he would use the children to get at me, that he would endanger or run off with them—took on solid shape. Cold with fear, gripping the phone tightly in my hand, I insisted Tracey tell me his and Lilly’s whereabouts. Getting no results, I begged, “Please tell me where you are. Where you have her.”

Again he refused. “If I tell you,” he said, “you’ll just come and make a scene.”

Me? Make a scene? The woman he accurately accused of an obsessive concern with privacy and keeping family secrets? This should have been funny, but I wasn’t laughing. I was trembling. Though Tracey’s recent talk about his rights as a parent—he no longer wanted to think of himself as my children’s father—had troubled me, nothing like this had ever happened. I tried to imagine the sort of place they could be that he thought would trigger a scene. Victoria’s Secret?

“Tell me where you have my baby,” I pleaded. “I won’t come there, wherever it is.” I thought if I could convey my distress, I might manage to connect with him; with the old him, anyway. Like a hostage trying to connect with a madman holding a gun to her head.

In the end, after what felt like an impossibly long standoff, he grudgingly relented. “We’re at the library,” he told me. The library. Five minutes from our home. Of course, he could have been lying. But I felt at once that they really were at the library. This wasn’t about hiding a particular location. It was about power. The power to separate me from my three-year-old, something he could not do so easily with my older children, to make me beg even to know where she was. Of course, I wanted to race to the library and reassure myself. I knew I couldn’t. Tracey might claim to fear that I would make a scene, but if I showed up having said I wouldn’t, he was sure to make one. I pictured a Solomonic battle over my child, and I wouldn’t subject her to it. “I’m taking her to the doctor appointment,” he said. “If you want to come, too, I’ll see you there.”

I arrived at the medical offices a few minutes early. Tracey and Lilly weren’t there yet. Unable to keep still in the waiting room, I walked out to the front doors. I paced the lobby. In a state of mounting anxiety, I watched the time for the appointment come and go. Should I call the police? When should I call the police? As he kept reminding me, he had every right to be with our children. By the time they finally walked through the door, I was on the verge of all-out panic. “Can’t you imagine how this frightened me?” I asked him. I tried to reach him, to get him to empathize with my fear. I tried that afternoon, before the appointment and after. I tried many times in the days and weeks to come. I returned to this trauma over and over in an attempt to make him understand. He never did.

More than anything else that had happened up to that time, this incident blew away the same-person-different-package party line. Tracey was not the same person. Not the person I knew. The story of that afternoon became a kind of litmus test when repeated to others. It was the incident the therapist we saw together grudgingly admitted should never have happened. To my friends it was a dramatic illustration of the potential danger posed by an emotionally unstable father (transsexual or not) willing to use his children to wield power over an estranged wife. When Tracey came out to our Jewish community a few months later, I shared this story with some of its members who were determined to take his part. It silenced them. They were visibly shocked although they didn’t come out and say so. They couldn’t justify Tracey’s behavior, but they wouldn’t condemn it, either. They couldn’t even offer me sympathy. To do so would have been to suggest that a man who dressed in women’s clothes could do something ill advised. In the Valley of the Politically Correct, this is not possible.

*   *   *

Life in a war zone is rough on the noncombatants, too. All may be fair in love and war, but children have a way of suffering the fallout from both. Our deteriorating relationship took its toll on the children who lived with us, witnessed the fighting, felt the tensions even when nothing was said.

Nothing was said because I had no words with which to say it. Because I didn’t want it said. For a long time I took it for granted that Tracey wouldn’t want it said, either—wouldn’t want our children to know that he was changing into someone who wasn’t going to be their father. Wasn’t going to live in their home. I cohabited with him long after I had accepted that our marriage was over to extend the illusion of an intact home for our children. I begged him not to take the children to the playground sporting an obvious bra under his polo shirt, not to return from a few days’ absence accenting his men’s clothes with necklaces and high heels. Over and over I begged him to let them have one more day of seeing themselves as part of a secure family that would go on forever. I thought he would want this for them, too. As with so much else, I was wrong. He was eager to share his news.

“When the children look at me, they don’t see the real me,” he lamented.

“Young children never really see their parents,” I tried to explain. “They see their own needs and desires and the extent to which they are or aren’t being satisfied. They don’t care about seeing the real you!”

But Tracey was way past discussing what was realistic, much less good for children.

I had grown up with a mother and father who were unhappy with each other, united by a shared conviction that neither had anywhere else to go. I created my own family confident that my children would witness something very different. I had once thought my children lucky to have parents who loved and kissed and touched and teased each other in their sight, who thought well of each other, and who worked out conflicts to everyone’s advantage. As much as I dreaded exploding their world with the news that we were breaking up, and why, I also began to hate the thought that my children would think that what we had now was a marriage.

Of course, it was naïve to think that not telling them meant they were being spared, that they didn’t know—something, at any rate, enough to feel baffled and frightened. Signs of stress along the lines of Lilly’s “guy-woman” worries were leaking out all over. Like lots of kids, they adjusted without direct comment to their father’s relocation from marital bed to living room sofa. To a home that crackled with discontent, to parents who didn’t look each other in the eye and never appeared together in public. Never touched. Unlike most kids, mine also had to adjust to the changes in Tracey’s appearance and voice, his chronic unwellness, the stashes of women’s clothes, clearly not mine, filling the house. My eldest began to blurt out bizarre remarks about gender—that is, remarks that might have been bizarre if their source wasn’t clear. My middle child developed eating and sleep disorders. Even more pressing than the signs of stress, things were emerging that made me worry about Tracey’s judgment.

He had dressed up with Lilly. He had sent photographs of the children to someone he’d “met” online. Now he told me that the pressure to appear male—what he termed “in boy mode”—was so painful that it made him light-headed and dizzy and that he sometimes briefly passed out. “I blacked out for a second on the way home today,” he reported matter-of-factly one afternoon. “The car went off the road and I regained consciousness and came to an immediate stop. No one was hurt, everything was fine, but a lot of people saw it happen and ran over to see if we were okay.”

“But maybe you shouldn’t be driving the kids. Maybe it isn’t safe for you to drive at all.”

“Of course it’s safe! You’re so prejudiced you think children aren’t safe with transsexuals!” Tracey was enraged. “No one thinks the way you do. I tell you this and you attack me! I’m only even mentioning it because the kids might tell you.”

Then Tracey began to talk about his rights, a subject dear to his heart to this day. “I have the right to drive my children!” he asserted.

If I had to boil down my relationship to parenting to a single word, that word would be responsibility. Tracey’s is rights. Some days Tracey said he had as much right to our children as I did; other days he said all the rights were his. He had no intention of giving up any of his rights, including the right to drive them around (conscious or unconscious!). He was never going to move out of our family home, and if I didn’t like what he was doing, I was welcome to go—provided I left him the children (he eventually changed his mind about this detail, influenced by Michael and by the realization that his freedom of gender expression would be entirely unfettered on his own). When he was out with the children, I dreaded a car accident. After the day he wouldn’t tell me that he and Lilly were at the library, I feared that he might take all three children and run away. According to Tracey, and by report his therapist, my apprehensions just reflected a loopy bias against the transgendered. In any case, the status quo could no longer be maintained. Even I had to admit it.

Finally, eighteen-plus months after Tracey’s original June revelation, we sat the older children down one at a time and served up the double whammies—Tracey, our marriage. We started with Adam, twelve, deep in preparation for his bar mitzvah, the ritual that would mark his passage to Jewish manhood. There was practically no literature available to us about the children of people who change gender and nothing useful to the parents breaking the news. What we could find we’d read, so Tracey and I had both come upon the information that our son’s age and developmental stage—preteen, budding adolescence—were precisely the worst possible to receive this information about a same-sex parent. But Tracey was excited about sharing his news with Adam and didn’t want me present to spoil it. I refused to be cut out of the picture. My own therapist and the therapist we’d found for Adam some months before in anticipation of this event backed me up, and even Tracey’s therapist apparently advised him that this was a battle he wouldn’t win. After weeks of wrangling over it, he finally accepted that I was going to be there, like it or not. I did agree not to say much in this initial conversation, to let him present his case his way.

We went together into Adam’s bedroom one January evening. I thought at the time that I should write down the date, the date that my son’s childhood came to an end, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. “Come into the living room and sit down with us,” we told him. “We want to talk with you.”

He looked at us warily. “Are you mad at me about something?” A heartbreakingly childish question.

“No, no,” we assured him. We settled stiffly on either side of him on the living room sofa.

“I know you’ve noticed some changes in me lately,” Tracey began.

“No,” Adam said quickly. “I haven’t noticed anything.”

“Well,” Tracey said, “there have been some changes.”

We were convinced that Adam already knew. Knew but didn’t know what he knew. It had been more than six months since the conversation in which he’d asked our friend Michael if Michael had ever heard that “sometimes a man feels like a woman.” Much more recently, during an improvisational theater performance at school, he had uttered an odd, hostile remark about another player’s gender identity that had caused a sharp intake of breath across the auditorium.

“I’ve shaved off my beard,” Tracey pointed out. “I’ve been letting my hair grow out. The reason I’m doing these things is probably going to sound funny to you. You see, for a long time I’ve felt like I’m really a girl inside.”

Tracey told Adam that though his body was male he felt as if he was really female—a girl, as he said—and that the alterations to his appearance were part of a process of preparing to live as the opposite gender. Tracey explained at some length—his feelings, his plans. He was excited and happy. Telling Adam was the realization of a dream, and it was hard to cut it short. With one statement he addressed feelings that Adam, a male child on the cusp of puberty who explicitly thought of his father as his role model, might be supposed to have. “Even though I’m not going to be a man anymore,” he told Adam, “being a boy and a man is still part of my experience. I’ll always have that.” To me, it was as if my son’s father were telling him: I’m vacating the job of being your father, but I’ll still be available for consultation. When I recall this now, four and a half years later, my grief at that moment wells up as if it could still engulf me.

As for Adam’s emotions, he expressed none. Not directly. He said almost nothing, asking just two questions after Tracey had talked for a long time. Evidently struggling to place the changes his father spoke of in the context of our family, he looked at me in confusion. “Will you be changing, too?” he asked.

“No,” I told him firmly. “I’m going to stay exactly the same. You can count on it.”

Adam’s face registered the reassurance and at the same time the question it raised, the one he wouldn’t ask in this conversation: What, then, did Tracey’s “change” mean for our marriage? The second question he did ask, with a look of utter exhaustion, was, “Could we please stop talking about this now?”

*   *   *

When we told Bibi, some two months later, we sat on either side of her on the living room sofa, just as we had with Adam. Bibi, who was then seven, recalls this vividly. She says that her favorite thing in the world was to be hugged and cuddled by both Tracey and me at the same time. She says she thinks of this moment as the last time we ever did that. Though in fact she realizes that we didn’t hug her together on this occasion. We wouldn’t have gotten that close to each other.

Bibi also recalls a night some two years earlier when we were tucking her in together at bedtime. A school friend’s parents had just separated and Bibi was shaken by this introduction of uncertainty into her emotional world. “Promise me that you guys will never get divorced,” she insisted.

“We promise,” we both said without hesitation. Blithely certain—at least I was blithely certain; if Tracey’s story is to be believed, it’s hard to see where his certainty was coming from—that this was a promise we would have no trouble keeping. Now, two years later, while Adam was perhaps subliminally aware of his father’s steps to feminize, his sister was tuned in to the tension between us. Directly and indirectly, she had been expressing fears about our fighting; about our marriage.

Tracey told Bibi that he knew she had been worried lately that something was going on in our family and that she was right. Something was going on. Then he said the same words he’d said to Adam: “I feel like a girl inside.”

Bibi giggled.

“It does sound funny, doesn’t it?” Tracey agreed. “You’ve noticed that I’ve been changing some things about the way I look,” he went on. “Like shaving off my beard.”

“Oh, yes, I’ve noticed.”

“There are going to be more changes. I’m going to change all kinds of things about my appearance so that I can live outside the way I feel inside.”

“Really?” Bibi was surprised, but in contrast with Adam’s stunned silence, she was also amused. It was as if her father were announcing an elaborate role-playing game and she was curious to hear all about it. Then she remembered the worry that had been nagging at her for weeks, if not months. “But what does this have to do with you guys fighting lately?” she asked innocently.

“Well,” I said gently, “Daddy doesn’t want to be a man anymore. He doesn’t want to be my husband.”

Bibi stopped laughing. To this day she describes this, quite accurately, as the moment we broke our promise to her that we would never split up.

*   *   *

In those two initial conversations Tracey offered assurances, said he knew Adam and Bibi might have many different feelings about what he was doing—anger, fear, pain—and expressing them all would be fine. In the weeks that followed, the children did have a range of feelings—anger, fear, pain—and went about expressing them all with punches and kicks and a noticeable lack of subtlety. Tracey was stunned. He had been so sure the children would share his joy. Fortunately, he knew whom to blame for their distress. Long before, he’d told me that a father’s gender-bending didn’t trouble children unless their mothers conveyed that there was something wrong with it: it was always the mother’s fault. Sound familiar? Mothers have been blamed for everything under the sun. Though Tracey presented his argument as psychological opinion, my therapist scoffed and my common sense told me it was hooey. Tracey was going to do what he wanted to do. Why couldn’t he simply own up to the effect on his children?

The kids’ right to free expression turned out to be as revocable as our marriage vows. One Saturday morning a few weeks after Adam and Bibi were both in the know about what was going on, Tracey walked into the kitchen and announced, “I want to have a family conference.”

The children and I were in the middle of a pleasant and relaxed breakfast, but suddenly the meal was no longer palatable. We abandoned our plates and followed Tracey into the living room.

“I can’t believe the way I’m being treated by this family,” Tracey seethed. “I’m sick! I’m very, very sick, and instead of supporting me you’re all angry. You’re abusing me! You should be accepting that whatever I do is what I need to do to treat my condition. Anything else is the moral equivalent to denying chemotherapy to a cancer patient.”

I was astonished. Until now I had thought that Tracey would be reluctant to risk alienating the children. That he would conceal his anger at me, not widen its scope to include them. That he would keep to himself his view that he was critically ill. How much did the children get out of his statement? Bibi, not much. She kept out of the conversation and slipped off to her room as soon as she could. Lilly, nothing. She ran around the living room with her toys, watching our faces, knowing only that the nice Shabbat mood we’d been enjoying was at an end and no one wanted to play. Adam, too much. His father was angry. For the first time, but not, alas, the last, he knew the experience of being pulled in two directions by competing loyalties, to his father and to me. During the “conference,” which went on for hours, he came up with a procedure to resolve our family conflicts. “Let’s have a trial!” He brought out a little videocamera someone had given him and asked Tracey and me to state our cases: testimony. I didn’t want my son to film me listing grievances. Tracey did. When Tracey talked to Adam’s camera, I heard for the first time the statement about our marriage that he would later make in a different context to me: “For me divorce has always been an option.” It was also the first time he uttered a question he would repeat many times in future. “Why,” he asked with pathos and bewilderment, “aren’t you celebrating the new life that is unfolding for me?”

*   *   *

My children’s experience of Tracey’s transformation and the breakup of our marriage is hands down the ugliest and most painful aspect of this story. It is when I confront what my children have gone through that I find it hardest to forgive Tracey. Not just for deciding to do what he’s done, but for many smaller decisions about how to do it along the way. For his refusal to admit responsibility for his actions’ impact on the children’s lives. I have no hesitation about my responsibility: I blame myself for my children’s anguish. When the ground our family stood on started quaking, keeping our children away from the fault lines turned out to be a lot harder than I had ever imagined.

Adam’s bar mitzvah took place the very day he turned thirteen. Some thirteen-year-olds look like children when they wrap themselves in a tallith, a prayer shawl, for the first time, climb the steps to the bimah, the raised platform from which the Torah scroll is read, and assume the starring role in this peculiarly American Jewish coming-of-age drama. A year before, Adam had been singing a part for a boy soprano in a local composer’s opera. In the months before his thirteenth birthday, his voice plummeted. He grew several inches, facial hair appeared. He was informed that a few weeks after this celebration of his Jewish manhood, his father would move out of our home and stop calling himself a man. Adam didn’t look or sound like a child that spring day. He did the things bar and bat mitzvah kids do, chanting from the Torah and delivering a talk he had written. Somewhat unusually, he and I led the entire service together, something neither of us had ever done before. We practiced for weeks. The hours we spent singing together during that last hellish stretch of cohabitation with Tracey kept me sane. They gave me joy. The only joy I had known for a very long time.

Tracey played no role in the day, just as he had played no role in handling the many details of preparing for it. He told me he was furious that he would not be attending his son’s bar mitzvah in a dress. He said the lack of a dress would likely cause him to take ill or faint during the service, and he threatened to make a scene in the synagogue. Despite everything, I was astounded that Tracey didn’t feel he owed Adam better. He said this day was as much about him—Tracey—as it was about Adam. I thought the day was about God, Torah, and several thousand years of Jewish history, and Adam’s embrace of all three. The Tracey of the past would have agreed with me. In the end, for our last public occasion as a family, Tracey was a silent, ghostly presence. The rabbi and some of the friends who came that day knew what was going on. Other friends, Tracey’s mother, our Jewish community, did not. Because we had stopped going out together or doing things as a family so long before, a few of my friends had never met Tracey and couldn’t believe that I was married, could ever have been married, to this person. People who’d known him in the past and hadn’t seen him for a while were shocked by his pale withdrawal. Some thought, not incorrectly, that he was dying.

*   *   *

It was a Tracey reborn who loaded up his car and said good-bye to his children a month later. This Tracey was upbeat and energetic, eager to set off on his new life adventure. He had rented a room in a house in another town, and we’d vaguely agreed that he would visit with the children several afternoons a week during the summer. I sat at my computer, trying to keep my eyes and my mind on the dull editing job before me, crying unobtrusively. The children ran manically in and out of the house, confused. Their father moving out was a bad thing, right? But he looked so happy! A moment after we thought he’d gone, he burst back into the house.

“Come out, quick!” he urged. “Come see what’s happening! This is amazing!”

I followed the kids out the door and down the driveway to see the fascinating thing happening behind the car Tracey was about to drive away from our lives in. A midsize snake was swallowing a large live frog whole. The children were horrified. I thought I was going to be sick. Tracey was gleeful. The snake and the frog were like characters out of a folktale: evil swallowing good. Was this really the symbol of him leaving them that he wanted the children to carry into the rest of their lives?

It was. A year later, I would overhear him remind them that it was the first anniversary of his moving out. “Remember the snake swallowing the frog?” he gushed. As if a rainbow had appeared in the sky.