I Want to Tell You

It was about five years ago, on a crisp weeknight in late September, when I saw you, the girl I was losing.

I spotted you leaning against a pillar under the Washington Square arch, in men’s clothes, and with a bigger frame. You were stocky, and your face seemed wider. You’d gained weight, and your straight blond hair was dyed blue and cut short, like a Marine.

We had plans to hear a talk at The New School. Two well-known queer people, a screenwriter and a comedian, were discussing the cultural tidal waves of gender and identity. I thought it would interest you, and I could finally see you after weeks of you taking the space you said you needed. I kissed you hello, and we walked to the tiny French restaurant with the blue awning on the corner of Fifth and West 9th,  one of our favorites.    

It had been a few weeks since I’d seen the new photos on social media, the new profile picture, the new pronouns. That night, I startled in bed, heart beating hard, sweating, struggling to breathe. One of my panic attacks. I checked, and it was about 3 am. I’d been crying in my sleep.

I remember yelling at God that night. How could you take her from me? How could you do it?

Your stepfather heard me and whispered that, hey, no one had died. But he cradled my wet and swollen face, held me close, and lulled me back to sleep.

I couldn’t tell you any of this at the restaurant, of course, so we chatted over roast chicken and green beans about your songwriting, how you were forming a band, working the day job at a Brooklyn restaurant, and looking for a new apartment.

Trying to make it as a musician and singer would be hard, you knew that. But you were young, and had plenty of time to change your mind, we both agreed. Figuring out who you are, you want to be, is a great thing to do in your 20s, I had said.

 I paid the check, and we made our way to the auditorium. My eyes filled as we walked up Fifth, past the flute player, the pretzel vendor, and the incoherent homeless man, squat in the middle of the bike path, begging for change. I feared my eyes and their inconvenient pools, my tight, aching jaw would betray me and reveal my sadness. The least you could do is get me through this. Help me look happy.

Back then, I wanted to be like those celebrity parents who announce their child’s transition with unquestioning pride and awe. Or those couples who chirp and smile and tell the masses watching the morning shows of the family’s amazing journey. But you were my only child, the daughter I had dreamed of for decades, the baby that would fill the dark and murky emptiness where love and caring and support should have been and make it possible for me to give what I had been denied.

I first started wanting you when I was 18, if you can believe that. I somehow knew you were in my future. I would love you, protect you, and teach you all I knew about resilience and the richness and complexity of womanhood. I would devote my life to nurturing your connection to the power of the feminine and the gift of self-regard. I sometimes thought about what I would feel if you were a boy. Love, sure. But disappointment. I would  try again or adopt. Nothing would stop me. My girl was waiting for me.

 When I was 39, you arrived, and when I looked at you in your crib, or that little chair adorned with tiny bluebirds, I knew that only God could have made someone so beautiful. So miraculous.

May she be strong, healthy, and happy. May I give her all she deserves.

Then, I would shut my eyes and shudder. Please, don’t take her away from me.

We arrived at the auditorium early. We settled in and you asked how I was doing, how was work. Familiar terrain. And then, a pause. Holding on to nothing but the air around me, I told you I had seen your Instagram profile, I’d seen the neutral pronouns. As the audience slowly snaked into the theater, you turned to me and quietly explained that you never felt comfortable as a girl. Never wanted to wear girl’s clothes. Hated dresses, anything feminine. Got in trouble in kindergarten, when you tore off your shirt during recess, like the boys. When your teacher told you it wasn’t ladylike. When you knew you were different. Didn’t I remember, you asked.

Yes, I did. I remembered. Even when you started asking for girl’s clothes as a preteen, you would enter the store as if lost, gazing at the racks, looking stunned.  You would hesitate, then dive in headlong, wrenching a dress, a blouse, a pair of pants, as if in a hurry to get someplace else. In the fitting room, you would face the mirror and stare, searching, confused, as if  seeing a stranger, when you were expecting to see someone you knew. I would watch you, and tell you over and over how beautiful you looked.  But my spine would stiffen, and a chill would blanket my chest. A desperation, a recognition that the ground under me would not hold.

And now, the fissures between what you were told and what you knew had blossomed into the realization that you did not want to be seen as a girl at all. You were not a she. You never had been. You were building a new life. You were happy, and finally able to be yourself.

I said wow and yes and how wonderful. I had read enough to know that it was all I could say. Bloggers, activists and all those sanguine celebrities and morning show parents had made it clear. You must greet these announcements with joy and celebration. There is no room for grief.

We hugged, and I was grateful that our embrace shielded you from any hint of my pain. I caught my breath just as the seeds of self-awareness began to germinate.  That my relentless desire for you, for a daughter, had been a dark hollow, a trap, crawling with weighted expectations and mother-daughter tropes, borne of my own deprivations.  

Let’s listen, you said, when the creatives took the stage to discuss intersectionality, fluidity, authenticity and awakening --  all of the topics I had read about on the blogs. I willed my brain to listen and learn. But like it or not, I was taking on water, drowning in that auditorium of young people giddy with the freedom to transform in a youthful city where I too had danced and stumbled, conformed and broke free, and wrestled with all of the parts of me, and where I knew that I no longer belonged.

With the Q&A over and houselights up, we funneled our way to the crowded lobby. The atrium was filled with people wanting pictures and autographs, yet we found ourselves in a surprisingly quiet corner, tucked behind a stairwell. You picked up where you had left off, chattering about your new friends, your trip that past weekend to the Hudson Valley, your need for a better guitar.  

I don’t think you could tell, but I was staring at you, searching for a piece of her still there.

I’ve been busy since that night, reading more, listening more, to transgender and non-binary people, some my age, who sympathize with the impact of cultural eruption, of not knowing quite what has hit you. Who get that the change is monumental, even if our children have been living with who they are since the day they were born.  They describe the irrepressible joy, the relief, of finally moving through the world as you are. And I see, as they speak, your smile, brighter, bigger now. Your eyes no longer clouded and lost.

And so, it’s gotten easier. Famous young people use gender neutral pronouns, they dress fluidly, and like you, they make decisions around surgeries and hormones. Some change their names. I’m trying to prepare myself, should you decide that you will too.

 I joined and abandoned so many online support groups over the years it’s hard to count. Secret Facebook groups for parents of trans and gender expansive kids, organizations where parents talk breathlessly over Zoom about the wonder of their child and their transformation. About how they wouldn’t have it any other way.

I marvel at their clarity, their self-possession, devoid of any ambiguity. I  decide that the map of their histories isn’t gutted with chasms of rejection and idealized fantasies of familial warmth and loving mother-daughter bonds, or that they have other kids and the parental expectations diffuse, and that’s why it’s easier for them.

Oddly, the group that helped me the most was one for Evangelical Christians wrestling with the tenets of their faith but determined to love their LGBTQ child fully, without reservation or condition.  The parents in these groups did not demand resolution. I could be complicated, messy, and replete with contradictions: a progressive, loving and cheerful mother who falls apart with grief and bewilderment, all in the space of an afternoon. A parent rooted in reality yet longing for a life that would not be. A mother whose love for her child was incalculable, yet who was unable to fully embrace a seismic change, a complete upheaval of their child’s identity, and their own.  A mother who had a daughter, and now does not.    

I would like to tell you that after five years my sadness has evaporated, but it still hovers. I can see your ocean blue eyes, your soft round face, your steely intensity, and hear your high lilt, your playful laugh. I see you skip along the beach in your yellow sundress, search my closet for sandals, dissect another episode of The Handmaid’s Tale over text, and ask me more about feminism and sexism and growing up in the exhilarated maelstrom of the Second Wave. They’re memories frozen in time; I know. They still take my breath away.

But there’s been progress. My sadness has slowly become my friend, opening layers of softness, empathy, and grace that I didn’t know were there. It is my thread to the losses and disappointments that break us all, eventually, but that connect us in our humanness.   

I will forever love you, exactly as you are. But I will forever miss her. A torrent of change can rend the thread worn, the hidebound, the destructive and delusional. It can scatter the fantasies that offer comfort even as they blind us to the richness of a new tapestry. But change cannot rewrite my history; it cannot cancel the permanent etchings on my heart.  

Someday, I want to tell you all of this with the same honesty you

showed me that night in the auditorium, when you told me who you are. When you trusted me to hear and to keep loving. I want to say to you that love and sadness can sit side by side, and if you let them, they’ll work together to crack your heart open as wide as it will go.

-Patricia Garrison

Patricia Garrison is a personal essay writer and journalist who has found the joy of writing for herself in retirement after many years doing so for corporations and executives. She focuses on issues of aging, health and wellness, and the validity of older women’s voices. Her work has recently appeared in Next Avenue.