“Chief”—it’s a nickname that only I use for my son Ian; I haven’t a clue whether he finds it endearing or annoying. Years ago, during his brief time as a Boy Scout, we joined a throng of other eager men and boys in a father-son sleepover on board the US Coast Guard Cutter Taney, then and now permanently moored in Baltimore Harbor. This large and historic ship had seen service at Pearl Harbor and the Pacific in World War II and later off the coast of Vietnam, and he and I explored every square inch of it. Retired sailors volunteered to oversee the boys’ activities, and at one point they gathered all the boys together to engage them in a mock fire-fighting drill. Using selection criteria that only they knew, they sought out one boy to be in charge as the honorary Chief Petty Officer. They selected Ian; I beamed with pride! He stepped right into the role, had the “fire” extinguished in no time and the fire hoses promptly back on their spools in shipshape fashion. While he was tasked with no further official duties as Chief, everyone on board greeted him with this title for the remainder of the weekend. And for me, forever after.
Whenever I reflect back on such brief if special times shared in the lives of my son and daughter, I confront a challenge. How does a trans-gender woman who has fathered two children find a way to peace and wholeness in her new parenting role? My best path to peace is to see my two children continue to grow and flourish, yet I’ve not found any way to set aside the burden of having fundamentally failed both of them as a father, and the reality that our society has no room (and no name) for a transgender quasi-mom. While it secretly delights me when people refer to me as my children’s “mom” (or at least as one of their two moms), I know that I came to that title artificially and by a side door. There’s no way in which I can ever really earn it. I also still retain a strong but now unsettling sensibility about the centrality and importance of the fathering role, and the obligation that all fathers ought to do all within their power to honor the trust that their children place in them—that their dad will always be there for them, loving them in the irreplaceable way of fathers.
This dad isn’t there for them, at least not as a dad.
I take some small comfort in knowing that I did all within my power to own my fathering role, but in the end I had to set it aside and create a new relationship, forged from love, but outside the lexicon of traditional parenting. I’m a loving female parent who really has no socially recognized formal role to occupy. There is no “Trans-Mother’s Day” to celebrate, which spares my children from buying Hallmark cards but also means a missed opportunity for an important social tradition for all of us to enjoy. There isn’t yet any reservoir of shared cultural icons within that trans-parent role to draw upon, and it’s always far easier for my children to let their peers simply default to the inaccurate perception that they have two (divorced) moms from a previous same-sex relationship. If their birth mother and I were both lesbians that would be a sustainable fiction to carry forward, but that isn’t our story—even if sometimes it’s simply too much trouble to take any step to correct such common misperceptions. There’s no avoiding the reality that my children have a biological father who is now a woman, and that absence of a father leaves a yawning gap in their lives that I’m powerless to fill. It’s a burden we’ll all shoulder, but hopefully not one that we’ll allow to define or defeat us.
The memory of first hoisting that burden remains poignant. Without a doubt, coming out to my children about my transgender status was the single hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life; to this day it still haunts me. Christine supported me throughout the ordeal, even though the loss to her was profound and the insecurity about what lay ahead for us both as parents was nearly unbearable. Still, she lovingly understood the higher obligation of standing together as parents, jointly and wholly committed to the children’s wellbeing. To her everlasting credit, she never used the plight of our children to blame me for my “choice”—the tragic legacy of so many couples with children when one parent transitions gender.
Together, she and I did all that we could to prepare for that coming-out moment in 2007, when Ian was twelve and Audrey was but seven. We’d researched and asked advice, discussed this deep into many nights, role-played how we would speak to the kids, and anticipated what their respective responses might be. A trusted counselor had advised us that three messages must be conveyed: that my transgender status was not their fault, that it wasn’t contagious (so they weren’t going to “catch it”), and that both Christine and I would still always be there for them. The memory of the actual coming-out conversation is far too tender and too private to relate in any detail, except to say that the message was delivered as lovingly as possible, the children both sitting there on our old couch by the large window in what was then our home in University Park, Maryland. Audrey, sitting sweetly with her eyes fixed on me through her adorable, red-framed, oval glasses with the diamond hearts at each corner, was simply too young and lacked the emotional tools to tackle such a message. She defaulted to trusting in our love, and seemed to have persuaded herself on the spot that it would all be okay, somehow.
Audrey’s constancy and trust at that tender age was captured in a beautiful letter that she wrote to me soon thereafter when she and her brother had settled on a family name they had invented for me, “Maddy” (a conjugation of Mother and Daddy), which they use to this day. Her words spoke deeply of an empathy that belied her tender years, easily eclipsing her errors in spelling and capitalization:
to maddy. Dear mom, I am very proud of your change in becomeing a bautiful Lovely woman. I am glad you are who you realy are inside now that you are a woman. I sense that you are very sad that you could not have been a girl your hole life. Love, Audrey.
I count her words, misspellings and all, as a treasure beyond price. As she grows into a young woman better able to interrogate this complexity, she will continue to wrestle to make sense of this coming-out and what it means in her life. I’ve no illusion that it will ever be an entirely painless inquiry, and I now know that I can never be a genuine “mom” to her. Where that leaves me, or her, I do not know.
For my son Ian, who was five years older on that coming-out day, the challenge was then far more immediate. Although mostly composed on that day, he sat stunned and speechless. Only later that evening as I put him to bed, as I always did, came the tears. With his large aquarium softly filling his bedroom with its gurgling and bubbling, just one request came through those tears as he snuggled into the safety of his blanket, his plush toy Mr. Tiger under his arm. It was a simple request, and one that any reasonable and caring parent would have unquestioningly supported: Could I not just wait until he had grown up to adulthood? In what was a remarkable tribute to his compassion, love, and early wisdom, he was able to hear me say “No.” I struggled through my own tears to explain that I had probably waited much too long already and that remaining “Dad” in my male embodiment was more than I could sustain. I stated it as an undeniable truth, and he somehow knew that everything depended on his acceptance of that declaration. The larger truth that would define his future in no small way was only beginning to crystallize; his old dad was beginning a long but inevitable farewell due to a terminal condition that no parental intervention could resolve. Parents are supposed to make all unpleasantness go away for their children, yet at some point every child learns the fallacy of that assumption. My son’s only compensation would be the replacement of that lost father with a similarly steadfast but now female parent—a second “mom” in a way that society has yet to label, and perhaps never will. As Chloe the quasi-mom, I try my best to carry forward in a different form as much of the history, love, and unwavering parental commitment as I can, as had always characterized our relationship. It’s a story still being written in our hearts, and no doubt it will continue to be a fascinating but bumpy one.