OKAY. WEIRD.

The summer was a kind of bubble. The four of us operated in shock. Having waited, longed, so many months for Tracey to leave, I was surprised by how bad it managed to feel when it finally happened. Because it was summer, we could largely avoid people we didn’t know well, explanations. One day I ran into an acquaintance from synagogue in the grocery store.

“You must be feeling so relaxed now,” she said cheerfully. I can only imagine the look on my face from the uneasiness that suddenly crossed hers. “I just mean—now that your son’s bar mitzvah is behind you.” This was the only fact she knew about what was happening in our family.

“Yes,” I agreed, “very relaxed,” and hurried away.

We kept busy. I had operated as a single mother part-time for much of the previous thirteen years but was still surprised by how seamlessly I stepped into running the whole show full-time. I was available, emotionally and physically, to the kids all day, staying up late nights to complete freelance writing and editing jobs with a new level of fiscal urgency. I sent Bibi to two weeks of the least expensive day camp in our area, driving forty minutes there and forty back mornings and afternoons, and took all three kids to every community activity I could find. Adam, in the first throes of an interest in the law (remember his trial idea), attended a week of free police department camp. While there, he dropped Tracey’s half of his hyphenated last name for the first time, something he’s gone in and out of doing since.

In the middle of that summer, for the kids’ sakes and against my own inclinations, I agreed to go along for a weekend stay at the Cape Cod vacation home of one of the couples in the small Jewish group, or havurah, with which we’d been worshipping once a month on Friday evenings and on holidays for the past two years. As my marriage disintegrated, I’d felt increasingly invested in the havurah. Tracey rarely attended the gatherings. He disparaged the group as a whole and didn’t feel personally close to its members. Although they knew nothing of what was transpiring in our family, the havurah was very supportive around Adam’s bar mitzvah. I appreciated the members’ involvement more than I could tell them at the time. When Tracey moved out I thought that for me, and especially for the children, the continuity of being part of this group was going to be a key source of stability and spiritual sustenance through the rocky times ahead.

I hadn’t expected the Cape Cod weekend to turn into a marathon support group. Still, it came as a surprise when no one spoke the words How are you? How are the children? in my direction. Those of the group who were able to make it to the Cape traced wide margins around me. They threw themselves into summer sports and board games and the raucous group singing of funny songs about breakups. They laughed their heads off. I laughed my head off, too. They wanted me to so badly. I’ve said that in the months before Tracey moved out, I went around feeling as though my husband had just died and that it would be a breach of decorum to mention it. Now it seemed as if I had been anticipating this very weekend. Everyone knew what was going on. No one spoke of it. I wasn’t allowed to. I was a cheerful, compliant houseguest and never referred even indirectly to what was happening in my life.

On Sunday, the self-appointed group leader, a rabbi, called a meeting to discuss the need for fresh faces. The group, as she saw it, was being disrupted by changes (!) in the membership. She wanted new members, and she wanted them now. She had brought up the issue previously, and I’d indicated my discomfort with new people joining the group at this particular point in time. I hadn’t known before the weekend that this discussion would be part of the fun. I’d brought off good cheer for two days. Now it began to crack. By which I mean that I sat in the circle of deck chairs quietly sobbing. The meeting rolled on. So did my tears. Everyone pretended my grief wasn’t happening. Later on, I asked them how they could have ignored my sorrow.

“It was for your sake!” they protested. “We were giving you a break from your situation! We were letting you have a weekend to forget!”

What did they imagine I had forgotten, sobbing before them? Did they think I had a toothache?

Now (groaning permitted) I get to the hard part. A few weeks later, one of my children was diagnosed with a heart condition. There is no good moment to discover that your child’s health is threatened. Adjusting to single motherhood and a husband going around town in skirts, feeling economically insecure in the extreme and short on resources of all kinds—that was a bad moment. A moment for spiritual sustenance if ever there was one. The havurah members all knew that my child was undergoing tests. Knew that during a certain week I was awaiting test results from one minute to the next. I expected that some or all of them would call. E-mail, at least?

Sure enough, S, a medical professional, called on my cell phone one afternoon as I was getting out of my car in front of a friend’s home. (A friend who would ask about the test results and cry when I told her the news.) When she heard my voice, S became embarrassed. “Actually,” she said, “I meant to call Tracey. I guess I saved your number in my phone under his name.” Having called, she felt the need to chat for a moment. “So, what’s new?” S asked in the upbeat tenor of the Cape Cod weekend.

“Well,” I said, “I got those test results.”

“Oh, right,” she said. “So what were they?”

I told her.

She had nothing to say. She had meant, after all, to phone Tracey. She got off quickly.

None of the other members called. No e-mails. A couple of weeks later, it was my turn to host the group. I made an elaborate meal. I knew this would be my last occasion with the havurah. I decided to make it perfect. As each couple arrived, I braced myself for the too-little-too-late questions about my child’s health that I still, somehow, expected. No one asked.

I resigned from the havurah by e-mail not long after. Needless to say, no one tried to convince us not to go. The group’s abandonment in those first months as a single-parent household was a source of such pain and bitterness that it constituted a kind of trauma in itself, layering the primary loss as we struggled to go it alone. To this day, my children cringe when they run into any of its members.

*   *   *

That last evening with the havurah was representative of a rocky autumn. The children and I dreaded the looming New England winter. We were daunted by the school year with its many demands, not least of which was that the kids begin to cope in public as well as in private with our separation, Tracey’s gender-bending, and the notoriety it can bring.

While maintaining his sweet, goofy demeanor at home, Adam spent eighth grade wandering around classrooms during lessons in a daze, sometimes defacing the papers pinned to his teachers’ bulletin boards or lying on their desks. When I asked him why he had done these things, he looked at me with genuine astonishment. “Did I do that?” he asked. His behavior was so bizarrely disassociated, his personality so changed from the funny, polite, engaged boy he had been, that teachers thought he had become either mentally ill or a drug user. Neither. I had told his previous year’s guidance counselor about our family, but the information wasn’t passed on. Once unable even to speak the words aloud, I now became adept at bearing personal tidings to school personnel, as well as to pediatricians and therapists, all against Adam’s will. Of the three children, Adam has been the most reluctant to let people know about his father, particularly—no surprise—other teenage boys, but teachers and other adults as well. I respected Adam’s privacy, having been rather attached to my own. When Tracey decided to change our lives, privacy became a luxury our family often couldn’t afford.

We set up a visitation arrangement in which Tracey would pick up the kids a couple of times a week for a few hours. Though Adam generally refused to speak with Tracey on the phone, he was usually amenable to seeing him. What was troublesome was what happened during the visits themselves. I’ve heard a secondhand tale of evolving and variously expressed hostilities: bitter fights between the children of a kind I’ve never seen; knock-down-drag-outs between the children and Tracey. That first year, Adam often attacked Tracey physically. Obviously an expression of anger and aggression, this was also Adam’s way of trying to keep his dad a dad. Tracey still presented himself to the children in an androgynous style, gradually adding more feminine touches as the months went by. He was sickly, shrinking. Adam was spurting, taking on weight and inches and stretching into great big boyhood. He wanted to wrestle. He wanted to make Tracey wrestle. Tracey complained to me about Adam. He complained to Adam’s therapist. “Thanks to the hormones I’m taking, I’m losing muscle tone,” he reported, obviously taking a pride in lost muscle no woman I know would feel. “I’m afraid Adam is going to hurt me.” Recognizing Adam’s need for an alternative outlet, I signed him up for martial arts classes.

Adam liked to confide in me about some aspects of his emotional life (girls!), and I was surprised that he didn’t talk more about Tracey, his feelings about Tracey, during that first year of our separation. Didn’t cry, never fell apart. When, with a little encouragement, he did open up, I’d be astonished by his rage. Not that it was there, but that he could be so aware of it, so articulate about it, and yet so closemouthed day to day.

“Daddy,” he said one day, “is a female monster.”

“Daddy is no longer ‘there.’ He just pretends to be during our visits,” was his biting comment on another.

In his therapy that year he staged another trial, with Tracey the defendant and his therapist the judge; the point didn’t seem so much to be to determine guilt as to try to place court-ordered limitations on his female expression around Adam and his sisters, at a time when Tracey was pressuring them to see him fully “dressed.”

Still other days, Adam heart-tuggingly insisted, “Daddy is still a guy to me.”

In psychospeak, Adam is “parenticized.” Literally. By the time Tracey physically removed himself from our home, Adam had come to see himself as his sisters’ father. His sisters’ protector around Tracey. My protector in some way, too. I didn’t want him to carry this burden. I told him I could handle things. That I was in charge. I told him the girls weren’t his responsibility. It didn’t seem to matter much what I said. Adam saw how vulnerable, emotionally, socially, economically, Tracey’s unfolding new life left us. He experienced his sisters’ intense desire for his time and attention. He looked around and saw that he’d become the man of the house. The only one available.

Tracey amazed me that first November—we were barely on speaking terms—by asking if we wanted do Thanksgiving together. (That is, invite him for Thanksgiving. Tracey usually spends holidays with friends. This is the only one since moving out that he’s suggested being with the children. Maybe this was an occasion on which he had no other options.) After Lilly was asleep one night, I brought the suggestion to Adam and Bibi, who looked at me as if I’d taken leave of my senses. “No way,” they both said at once, a rare moment of unanimity. Then Adam made a leap entirely mysterious to me. “Although,” he said abruptly, as if it weren’t a non sequitur, “I do remember the nickname he used to call you. He doesn’t call you that anymore.”

Adam said the nickname, a term of endearment that dated from our freshman year of college. I couldn’t believe he knew it. Remembered it from what had to be more than two years before. I was floored. So much so that I did something I’ve managed to almost never do throughout these years: I teared up in front of them.

“Oh, I’m sorry,” Adam said quickly.

“It’s okay,” I told him.

And it was. The three of us hugged. Adam and Bibi comforted me. I comforted them. We embarked on a beautiful, wrenching conversation about sadness, theirs and mine. I felt as if I were glimpsing my son’s heart, big enough to carry grief for a lost father and for his parents’ lost love as well. He had been a silent witness, not only to the destruction of our marriage, but to the good things that had come before. The parents he’d once had.

*   *   *

At seven, Bibi already had a keen sense of the divided loyalties between Tracey and me. She and I have always been very close. Before he told Bibi about himself, Tracey said something distinctly ominous to me: “I’ve left Bibi to you—until now.” In the immediate aftermath of his revelations, Bibi and I were closer than ever, as she looked to me for stability, reassurance—in short, to remain her mother—in the bizarrely shifting landscape that had become home. Then quite suddenly she changed. During Tracey’s last weeks in our house, Bibi pulled away from me for the first time in her life. She and Tracey started spending a lot of time giggling and whispering secrets together like preteen girls. I tried to reach Bibi, careful not to push. To speak to her as if I weren’t frantic. I knew that she was anguished and bewildered and that she needed to negotiate a new relationship with her father that she could hang on to throughout the changes that lay ahead. I didn’t want her to feel she had to choose between us. By not pushing, I hoped she would see that she didn’t have to. Meanwhile I felt as if I were losing her.

She was remote throughout the summer, deflecting my attempts to make contact. In early September, with school about to resume, she began to thaw. We talked with excitement about the year she was embarking on, the old friends she would see. Always a very social being, she felt now an even more intense desire to be close to those friends. At the same time, she dreaded them finding out about Tracey. Would they tease her? Reject her outright? The idea of her peers seeing Tracey dressed as a woman, something she would not yet witness herself for a long time to come, was too appalling for her to contemplate rationally. We discussed strategies to mediate between her conflicting needs for privacy and friendship.

The week school was to begin, Tracey arrived one afternoon to pick up the children. Doing an abrupt about-face, Bibi became distraught and refused to go with him. She said she was afraid to go with him. I wasn’t sure what to make of it, but it was a beautiful late summer day, so I invited her to take a walk with me. We live in a very small town of thickly wooded hills, houses, a few remaining farms. No commerce, no sidewalks. I can see us side by side on the road around the bend from our house, loping uphill in a mix of sunlight and dense shade. I can see the glow over Bibi’s long light brown curls as she walked on my right nearest the shoulder, away from infrequent but fast-traveling trucks and cars. Out of harm’s way.

“What’s on your mind?” I said, offhand, expecting to be rebuffed once again. Not this time.

“When I go to Daddy’s he gives me his shoes and jewelry to try on. I do his hair. Sometimes we put on makeup.” In a spill of detail, Bibi poured out the story of the previous months.

She told me that when she and her brother and sister visited Tracey’s apartment, he set Adam and Lilly up in front of the television and took her into his bedroom. There he would open his closet and drawers and show her his wardrobe of feminine things. At this point, when the thought of seeing their father dressed as a woman was unthinkable to the children and still months in the future, he would hold up dresses and skirts in front of himself and ask Bibi to imagine how he would look in them. He gave her his high heels and jewelry to try on, had her play with his hair and makeup. Bibi reported that these activities, which she called dress-up games, had begun while he was still living in our home; there they had taken place in the bathroom, while I was out.

“When we play the dress-up games I feel like I want to,” Bibi told me. “Then afterwards it seems creepy. I feel dirty. I can’t believe I did it. Then the next time I go there it happens again. I feel like I’m under his spell!” Bibi burst into hysterical tears. “I feel ashamed,” she cried. “It’s my fault!”

“It is not your fault,” I said calmly. Those were the first words I spoke into Bibi’s torrent. I remember her look of disbelief when she heard them.

Under his spell. I was in shock. I knew my little girl to be precociously verbal, but even so her words added shock to shock.

These things had been happening, for a time in my own home. How could I not have known?

Bibi’s story had the ring of confession. A confession she had longed for and understood she was not allowed. “We call it our girly girls club,” Bibi told me of these sessions with Tracey. “We say we both want to be girly girls. Daddy didn’t say I couldn’t tell you, but I knew I wasn’t supposed to. I knew I was supposed to keep it a secret.”

Through her sobs, Bibi insisted on describing her secret activities with Tracey at great length that day, adding more bits and pieces in the days that followed. Her hysteria kept me calm. “You aren’t to blame,” I kept repeating. “You haven’t done anything wrong and nothing that’s happened is your fault.” She never seemed to believe me. But it was a relief to her, telling me her story. She returned often to the issue of exactly how she had known that the things she did with Tracey were to be kept secret. A few days after that first outpouring, she told me, “Daddy was counting on me being too ashamed to tell you.” And she returned often to the difference between the way she felt when she was alone with Tracey and the way their activities felt to her when she thought about them later. “He tempts me,” she said. “He puts me under his spell.”

I was still calm when I confronted Tracey. “Bibi says this stuff has been going on,” I told him, repeating her story.

“Yes.” He shrugged. “She likes to see my things. There’s nothing wrong with it. She could have told you about it at any time. These are normal activities with a same-sex parent,” he added.

Huh?

What he meant was, mothers typically spend hours playing dress-up with their seven-year-old daughters. Alone, in their bedrooms, while their other children watch television outside.

“I never shut the bedroom door,” he volunteered. It seemed that he had thought this point through in advance: if he could claim to have left the door open, he couldn’t have been up to anything he wouldn’t want to be walked in on. (Adam, it turned out, was very much aware that Tracey had private activities with Bibi. He understood that his own role was to keep four-year-old Lilly busy so that they would be left undisturbed. When Bibi began refusing to be alone with Tracey, Adam added to his other burdens the sense that it was his responsibility to protect both his sisters.) The other point Tracey insisted upon was that the dress-up sessions had taken place at Bibi’s insistence. His exact words were: “She asked for it. She could have stopped it at any time.”

Tracey never acknowledged that there was anything wrong with the dress-up games. But he told me, “If Bibi doesn’t want to do these things or if you don’t want us to do them, they’ll stop.” Bibi reported that he promised her they would stop as well.

But the very next time Bibi went along on a visit, she told me later that the moment they were in his car he began to talk about the lovely new things he had bought himself. “I’m dying to show you some new jewelry I have,” he gushed. “Why did he say that?” Bibi asked me in confusion. “I thought he wasn’t going to say those things anymore. He’s trying to tempt me to try on his things!”

No surprise that Bibi often refused to go with the other kids when Tracey came to see them at this time. “I don’t want to be alone with him.” One day she became distraught at the idea that he might attempt to play dress-up games with Lilly.

Once, very carefully, I asked Bibi, “Are you afraid that Daddy will try to force you to do something you don’t want to do?”

“He might make me try on his clothes.”

“Are you really afraid of that happening?” I asked her.

“I don’t think it will happen, but I’m afraid of it. He’ll get angry if I refuse to play dress-up.” According to both Bibi and Adam, Tracey frequently flew into rages, chiefly over their reluctance to see him or their (quite normal!) expressions of anger toward him. Bibi said she feared that he would hurt her. Again she said she didn’t think it would happen, but she feared it.

When Bibi did choose to go on a visit with Tracey, she would phone me continually, often in tears over their blowups. Tracey would tell the children it was his right to see them and threaten to make them come to his home even if they chose not to. When Bibi began resisting his hugs and kisses, he got angry at that. He said that it was his right to kiss her and that he would make her accept his affection whether she liked it or not. Of course it was me Tracey was actually enraged with. That didn’t make it any better. Rather the opposite. He knew that there was no better way to attack me than through the children. When he trashed me to the kids, Adam would jump to my defense, and a screaming match would erupt. Afterward Tracey, who had taken to writing me long and regular e-mail diatribes, would send a screed against what he saw as the kids’ lack of respect for him, demanding that I get their behavior in line.

Then suddenly, Tracey denied that the dress-up sessions with Bibi had ever happened. He denied that our earlier conversations, in which he had freely admitted everything, had happened as well. This happened one day while we were talking on the telephone. I recall holding the phone in one hand, feeling once again that I had entered a world in which none of the rules of life as I knew them applied. I expressed astonishment at this turnabout and repeated the things Bibi had told me, things Tracey and I had already discussed.

“Bibi,” Tracey said icily, “is a liar.”

Tracey frequently changed his story about a range of things and sometimes seemed to genuinely forget today what he’d said yesterday. Over the coming months, he would flip-flop more times than a dying trout, sometimes saying the dress-up games had never happened, other times claiming they were a normal same-sex activity that any female parent might engage in with her daughter.

Whether or not Tracey was admitting it, the dress-up continued. During that first year of our separation, not long after she turned eight, Bibi came home distressed one day about a makeup kit she and Tracey had purchased together, used at his place, and then agreed to keep hidden from me. Another day she was agitated because Tracey, who had promised to put off appearing in overtly feminine clothes with the children, showed her the blouse he was wearing under his sweatshirt. Telling me these things, Bibi would say she was frightened of Tracey’s anger and beg me not to say anything to him. Saying nothing, of course, wasn’t an option. That would only have encouraged him. So I’d tell him I knew what was going on, making Bibi even more vulnerable to his anger the next time she saw him and risking that if he frightened her enough, she might go back to shutting me out.

Following visits with Tracey, Bibi began to wake screaming in the night, describing nightmares about him. She’d stop eating or throw up in the middle of a meal. She began to have problems focusing in class.

That fall, Bibi asked Tracey not to come to her school. His response was to show up randomly at the beginning or end of the day. He told her to get used to it. He told her that as her parent it was his right to march into her classroom at any time, pull up a desk, and sit there through lessons. She grew preoccupied with watching for him, anticipating his arrival. She said she spent the entire bus ride fearing that he would be at school when she got there. Whenever the door of her classroom opened, she cringed, thinking it might be him. On top of her other fears, she began to worry that if he would show up like this when she had begged him not to, what would stop him from coming to school “dressed”?

“School,” Bibi lamented, “was my safe place. It was the one place where I didn’t think about what was going on at home.”

No longer. When I repeated this to Tracey, I expected him to be moved. To back down. Instead, it seemed to strengthen his resolve. Fortunately, the school administration vehemently disagreed that it was Tracey’s right to take up residence in her classroom. Seeing Bibi’s distress, the principal asked Tracey to stop appearing outside the building as well.

*   *   *

In the secret dress-up sessions, I understood that Tracey was offering Bibi a way to hold on to him, to enter into his newfound girlhood instead of losing him to it. The reality, of course, was that these activities only emphasized the loss of the man who had been her father. Like her brother, Bibi desperately wanted to keep that man alive. While Adam tried to get his dad to wrestle, Bibi began to flirt. In Tracey’s presence, she developed a manner that would have been dismaying to watch a girl of any age employ with her father and that was deeply disturbing in a seven- or eight-year-old.

One evening that winter, I went outside to replace a light bulb in the lamp at the bottom of our driveway while Tracey was visiting. From my vantage point, boots sunk in the deep snow that covered our sloping lawn, I looked up into the brightly lit living room at the back of Tracey’s head on the other side of the window. He was sitting on the sofa and Bibi stood before him as if onstage, giddily talking, laughing, gesturing. She couldn’t see me in the dark outside. From my side of the glass, I watched a little girl attempt to charm the middle-aged man she loved. But there was nothing straightforward or simple about any of her feelings, and as happened with Adam’s very different attempts to make his dad be a man, Bibi’s fits of flirting would often spin off into violence. She’d start kicking him, and he’d pick her up and put her in a bedroom. She’d phone me in hysterics. Until he stopped letting her phone me during visits.

All this happened during the first year of our separation, at a time when I hadn’t yet filed for divorce, didn’t have a lawyer or the money to retain one. Tracey and I had no formal separation agreement, and as he constantly reminded me, I had no authority to prevent him from seeing the children. I spoke to the local police about the possibility of a restraining order and was discouraged by what I heard. Tracey’s activities with Bibi fell into a gray zone. The law was not particularly inclined to enter that zone. At my wits’ end and certain I was failing her, I had no idea how to protect her, either.

To my therapist, the secret games were yet another instance of Tracey’s narcissism, his insistence that what was good for Tracey was good for everyone. Now it was left to Bibi to make sense of the dress-up sessions, the secrecy. The experience of being used by the father she had trusted, for his own ends. Bibi needed a therapist of her own.

I found one for her, actually the second therapist she was seeing after an earlier, unsuccessful try. In the first sessions, Bibi—who looked a couple of years older than her age and at eight was as tall as the petite psychologist—curled up in my lap, whispered what was on her mind, and told me what I was and wasn’t allowed to repeat. Then at some point she’d look at the therapist and come out with some clear, articulate zinger that would leave the woman floored. Speaking of gifts from Tracey, she commented matter-of-factly, “The things he gives me are like duck decoys, used to lure prey.” In another session she said, “Most kids wish their parents would get back together when they separate. I don’t. I wouldn’t feel comfortable living with Daddy again.”

Gradually I eased her into being alone with her therapist for part of each session. After a few months, in what was scheduled to be a fifty-minute visit but turned into two and a half hours, she edged up to the subject of the dress-up sessions with Tracey. Hoping to make it easier for her to talk, I suggested I wait outside. She agreed. We were the last appointment of the day. I sat in the deserted waiting room. The receptionists went home. The medical center emptied. Offices darkened and maintenance people with vacuum cleaners could be heard down the hall. Finally I was called back in.

“It’s okay,” the therapist reassured me, seeing the look on my face. At Bibi’s request, she started to tell me that they’d been working to understand Bibi’s feelings about the secret activities with Tracey. “Bibi feels that her girlhood has been violated,” she began.

But suddenly Bibi found her voice. I had never seen my daughter so angry before. “He told me I had to show him how to be a girl!” she spat. “He said he’d never gotten to be a girl, so he wanted to experience what it was like through me!”

*   *   *

When it comes to comic relief in our family, the blue ribbons go to Lilly. One day when she was five, she and I were alone in the car together. Lilly, in a typically chatty mood, related something she found odd: On an outing the previous day with her father, she’d seen him enter a ladies’ restroom. “He said he had a girl’s brain and a girl’s body,” Lilly told me.

Whereas once I might have driven my car off the road at this point, I now murmured neutrally, “Oh really?”

“Sometimes,” my daughter concluded, “I just have to say, ‘Okay. Weird.’”

Okay. Weird. If I had to sum up our lives in two words, I could do much worse.

At the time Lilly watched her father enter a ladies’ room, Tracey wasn’t wearing makeup or dresses in front of the kids. He had been feminizing his appearance since Lilly was two. She didn’t remember a father who wore a beard and men’s clothes. To Lilly his odd, androgynous look was just his look. To Lilly he was an average dad. Or rather I should say as far as I knew, this was her perspective. The biggest difference she talked about between Tracey and her friends’ dads was that, having left our home before she turned four, Tracey didn’t live with us. Before the Okay Weird phase began, she wasn’t terribly articulate about her feelings, beyond wondering aloud why her father had his own home. She exhibited her distress mostly in immature or regressive behavior (think potty training). Once when she came home from a morning at preschool expecting to grab some mommy and me time while the older kids were still out, she had a crying jag when I told her Tracey was coming to pick her up. But this wasn’t typical; I generally saw a happy child. Tracey saw something different. He reported that when she was with him she would often cry uncontrollably, then seemingly lose the ability to speak. He was sure that this behavior, which neither I nor her teachers witnessed, had a medical cause, and he wanted to speak to our pediatrician about it. The doctor laughed at the notion that Lilly’s problems were physical and said she would be happy to explain this to Tracey.

Over the years, Lilly has become more articulate about her feelings. When she was six she began to pontificate on the subject of having a dad who is a girl. She felt the need, often at inappropriate moments (whose idea of inappropriate?) and to inappropriate peers (ditto), to confess about Tracey. Typically she’d choose her moment while riding in a packed car or among a crowd gathered in the kitchen. She was fond of speaking to an audience that included but was not limited to the members of her family, preferably with her own and her older siblings’ friends in attendance. Heavy sighs would signal the lament. Then the announcement would begin, in a voice laden with pathos and the desire to instill guilt:

“My parents are divorced.” A deep intake of breath allowed everyone in the room to start paying attention. “Of course I’m very unhappy about it. They don’t live together—because they’re not married.” Dramatic pause before the kicker: “And there’s another thing.” Older brother and sister start to groan. “My dad’s a girl.”

Calling Tracey a girl, Lilly has adapted his terminology. In the past, anyone would have described Tracey as responsible, mature. Whether it reflects an awareness of or a desire for a regression of his own, he now prefers the words boy and girl to man and woman. He speaks of himself as having once been a boy and now being a girl. Thus Lilly asks him, “When are you going to go back to being a boy?” He tells her, “Never.” One morning Tracey brought her to school. Another child, overhearing Lilly speak to him, asked a teacher, “Why is she calling that woman Daddy?” Lilly explained, “My dad’s a girl.”

It is exceedingly difficult to know what Lilly really makes of all this, but it is fascinating, as well as heartrending, to watch her process the facts of our family. One morning she told me that she’d dreamed she’d married a boy she liked. He wore a white gown and she wore a tux. (She didn’t say tux. She said the white-and-black thing with the bow tie. She meant tux.) Bride and groom kissed. Lilly was giggly and silly on the subject of the clothing switch.

In first grade, her class was shown a film about the diverse makeup of families. For homework the kids were asked to produce two pairs of sentences and drawings, the first illustrating how their own families were similar to, the second how they were different from, a divorced lesbian couple featured in the film. I sat with her in the kitchen that afternoon and watched her write her “similar” statement: “My parents are divorced.” Then she said she wanted to draw a picture of her father and me kissing.

“I don’t think that’s a good choice since we don’t kiss,” I told her.

“It could be a picture of when you first met.”

I knew I should just let her draw the picture she wanted to draw, but I couldn’t bear the thought of it. “Do you think maybe you could draw a different picture?” I asked her gently.

“Okay,” she agreed amicably. “Then I’ll draw you walking away from each other.”

She didn’t discuss her “different” statement or image with me. She just wrote, “I don’t have two moms,” and drew a picture of me.

A few months later, she fell into a discussion with an adult friend about different kinds of families. Our friend pointed out that one of Lilly’s cronies has two mothers. Lilly asserted that she would never have two mothers. “Even if my dad marries his girlfriend,” she asserted, “she’ll never be my mother.” It so went without saying that Tracey would never be her mother that Lilly didn’t even think of it.

She thinks of other things. In another conversation with the same friend, she confided, “I want my dad to be a man and my parents to be married. But if I can’t have both, I want my dad to be a man or my parents to be married.” Enough’s enough, and a dad who is a girl and divorced parents is just too much.

Because Tracey told her the divorce was my idea—“Mama decided she didn’t want to be married to a woman”—Lilly went through a period of asking me, “Why don’t you want to be married to a woman?” She told me, “Some women are married to women.”

Once she reported that Tracey had told her about a child who was forced to choose between his trans and non-trans parents. She worried for days that she would similarly be forced to choose, as I told her over and over that she would not. Another time she told me how much it upset her when she saw a piece of mail addressed to her father as “Ms. Tracey.” “Fathers aren’t supposed to be Ms. or Miss!” she said.

After a visit to an Orthodox synagogue where women’s roles are heavily restricted, I overheard her on the phone with Tracey. “Why do you want to be a girl?” Lilly demanded. “We just went to a synagogue where women can’t even touch the Torah!” One day she urged her recalcitrant brother to do something she wanted him to do, saying, “Come on! Be a man!” On another occasion, observing a male friend, she said wistfully, “He’s a manly man.”

Despite the sadness, one of Lilly’s strengths is her adaptability. Her bounce. One night when I was putting her to bed, she told me that she might like to marry a certain male family friend when she grew up.

“That might not work out,” I suggested.

Lilly shrugged, plan B on the tip of her tongue. “Oh well,” she said. “If he doesn’t want to marry me, me and my best friend can just be gay.”