Becoming Donald: Grief and hope in a modern family
As Pride Month begins, a mother and her transgender son recount his transition in alternating chapters of their collaborative memoir, At the Broken Places
MARY COLLINS
“I am transgender,” my teenaged daughter, J., says, her green eyes squinting with anxiety. “Trans?” I ask. “What’s that?” I am still thinking about mundane things, like the dirty dishes on the counter. We sit at my favourite place in the house, the round kitchen table by a window with lacy curtains, where I drink tea and read my newspaper every morning.
“Trans, Mom. I am a man trapped in a woman’s body.”
The summer day’s simmering breath coming through the screen suddenly feels like a panting animal. “What?”
My first fully modern loss. It does not feel the same as when my father died when I was age 14.
It does not feel the same as when the love of my life left me when I was in my 20s. In that moment at the kitchen table, I experienced a loss only made possible by our current culture, which allows — even empowers — a teenager to take steroids and have “top surgery” (trans speak for a double mastectomy) all before age 20 so his gender can match his person.
When J. legally changed her name to Donald and insisted we use male pronouns to refer to him, I resisted for a short time, but eventually gave up on “she,” “her,” and the entire idea that I have a daughter at all.
But when I said I thought Donald was moving too fast with his physical transition, the counsellors, school advisers, and medical professionals told me I must face the inevitable.
When I said I was sad about the unique obstacles my child will have to deal with in the larger world as an adult, they told me to tamp down my homophobia and trans bias. Seek counselling to overcome your prejudices, they advised. I am not ashamed or biased, I told them. I am grieving the loss of my daughter, and that does not mean I do not love my trans son. Modern loss. Modern grief. None of them grasped any of it, so I share a story with one of the school advisers.
When the school had a mother-daughter tea for Mother’s Day, Donald and I did not go, and skipped over to a nondescript Dunkin’ Donuts in a strip mall instead. As we finished our iced coffees, both milkywhite with extra cream, I noticed two guys with heavily tattooed arms sitting two tables away listening as we chatted about Cher’s trans son, Chaz, who had been in the news a lot.
The men’s shoulders seemed tight, their lips closed. I eyed the pickup truck outside. I stared at the ice cubes in my cheap plastic cup. I told Donald we needed to leave. He thought it was because I’d finished my drink.
In that moment I did not feel shame, I tell the adviser, just fear.
I take no issue with any individual’s right to affirm and assert his or her identity.
But I know that outside the super-accommodating world of my child’s liberal school, approximately 40 per cent of Americans still disapprove of homosexuality. Imagine how they must perceive someone who is transgender? Even within the LGBTQ community, the T falls toward the end of the continuum.
In that moment, I explain to the adviser, I understood my daughter would never return. Her person remains, but my trans son faces a day-to-day life I never imagined for my child. As I drove Donald back to school, my fear transformed into something else, something that now follows me through my days, something I can only describe as grief.
I know from reading books and articles about parents with children who do not fall within “normal” parameters, in particular Andrew Solomon’s book Far from the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search
for Identity, that millions of families struggle with this unusual form of grieving. Two tall parents might have a dwarf; a scholar might have an autistic boy who does not speak. Counselors focus on “acceptance” of the situation rather than processing the grief first, which, unfortunately, falls right in line with the American Psychiatric Association’s recent decision to identify depression associated with deep grief as mental illness, not a natural reaction that an individual should be encouraged to feel and move through without guilt or shame. Leave it to American culture to take a fundamental human emotion and classify it as a condition.
I reflected on how I handled my father’s death to help me cope with my situation with my trans son, but that only brought back memories of how poorly American culture handles even this most timeless of losses.
All I remember of the moment when I first heard my father had died were the white walls of my small bedroom, my mother by my bedside shaking from the stress of what she had to tell me, the sense of dislocation I felt when she spoke the news. I remember wrapping the cotton bedspread around my shoulders and leaning into the softness and warmth. I don’t remember leaving the room or going downstairs or how I told my friends. I now associate white, not black, with death, and have purple, lilac, deep blue, yellow, and other colours on the walls in my house, but not white.
The general world treated my loss as sad, unfortunate, but nothing so out of the ordinary that I wasn’t expected to return to school, to sports teams, to my student work job at my high school within the week. We had a church service, a burial; I missed a few days of classes and that was it.
Only now, as an adult researching grief and loss, have I discovered that just 4 per cent of children in the United States under age 15 lose a parent. When I asked my sister to guess the percentage (and she’s a health-care professional), she said about 25 per cent. In places and time periods in which such losses were more commonplace, the larger society was better equipped to recognize grief and loss as an ongoing experience — not something with concrete stages that you go through in lockstep, but something you carry with you, often always.
In American culture we do not celebrate a Day of the Dead, as they do in Mexico; we don’t have secular altars in public spaces to honour those who have passed, as in many Eastern cultures. Here grief is more of an individual responsibility, a framework that encourages isolation and often morphs into debilitating depression. The fact that modern American life continues to add ever more complex types of loss just exacerbates the problem.
My emotional journey with Donald seems to more closely mirror more nebulous losses, such as moving away from someone I will never see again. The average American moves12 times in his or her lifetime, and one in five children eventually move far away from their families, a geographic mortality rate, for want of a better term, that’s startling when you consider that for most of human history, the majority of people rarely travelled more than 80 kilometres from where they grew up.
Similarly, a single woman like me with a decent job can have dozens of romantic relationships over a lifetime, a tremendous freedom that comes with a price: you become intimate with a much larger pool of people, but, conversely, you also experience the loss of that intimacy anew each time it doesn’t work out. I call that “goodbye grief.” When Donald came home after the top surgery, he felt freed of the physical binds he had used to compress his breasts for years. He could wear a light T-shirt with nothing on underneath on a hot July day. His shoulders sprang back when he walked now, instead of slouched. He held his head differently, more confidently, and looked outward instead of downward. He felt more at home in his own body.
I looked at his now slim torso and saw a fawn before me — all legs, reddish-brown coat, and so vulnerable I wanted to hire a bodyguard for him. Donald’s radical adjustment has made it easier for me to remember to use male pronouns when referring to him; I only slip up when I am out of Donald’s presence and around strangers who ask about my family. At one point, while Donald was still in college, a contractor building a porch for me wanted to know if I had children. Without thinking, I said, yes, I have a daughter who is a sophomore in college.
Two weeks later Donald came home, and as we pulled into the driveway the contractor stuck his head in my car to say hello.
“Oh,” he remarked later, “so you have two kids.” Oh. I had no vocabulary to explain the complexity of my situation in such quick passing conversations.
Instead, despite taking great pride in being an honest and direct person, I say little and am left with what I wryly call my own grief geography, territory that no one else can navigate or fully know.
Adapted excerpt from At the Broken Places: A Mother and Trans Son Pick Up the Pieces by Mary Collins and Donald Collins (Beacon Press, 2017). Reprinted with permission from Beacon Press.
My emotional journey with Donald seems to more closely mirror more nebulous losses, such as moving away from someone I will never see again.