Our Identities Loosen

Part 2

Photo by Catia Dombaxe on Unsplash

In my previous piece, Integrating Body and Mind, I described how my daughter agreed to read my research on cross-sex hormones, and how afterward, I needed emergency surgery for appendicitis.

Was there a connection between my body’s sudden infection and the emotional strain of guiding my daughter? What was the universe or G!d saying to me? What lesson was I meant to learn from this close sequence of events?

Emailing through pain

When I spoke to my daughter right after surgery, she was upbeat and encouraging. She joked that my appendicitis was her fault, and, even though I privately wondered if she was right, I reassured her that it was not. She chuckled and said, I think we both got rid of something we didn’t need.

During those first awful hours of bandages, aches, and raw incisions, I experienced a deep urge to send that research on hormones to my daughter. I propped myself up, opened my laptop, and gathered the information I had found.

Through bleary vision, I painstakingly drafted the email, choosing every word and monitoring my tone as though our lives depended on it. I wanted to share it with her in a way that was most constructive and least combative. I read my email a zillion times, even after I sent it. Looking back, I think I felt driven, in my weakened state, by something beyond myself.

Here is an excerpt of what I wrote to my daughter:

Thanks for letting me share these with you; it’s really important to get all the information you can before taking such a major step. You’ll see that cross-sex hormones are an experimental treatment (because they are new and not fully understood or studied); they not only shift the young female body into menopause (which has side effects), but they also present a host of serious and dangerous risks to your heart, brain, and other key organs. That’s why it’s such a huge responsibility to make this decision for your current and future health.

Ultimately, based on these (and other) studies, along with my strong intuition, I hope you choose to treat your challenging and persistent psychological discomfort with good, professional psychological remedies, rather than chemical or physical interventions on your body.

Drafting this email felt like a giant risk. I was being forthright and honest, and I concentrated on making sure my tone was loving. And though I trusted that I could send this to her because she’d given me permission, I feared her reaction. I waited and waited, and it finally came hours later. At 3 am, her text lit my phone:

I need a therapist, bad.

At first, I was scared; I thought maybe she was having some sort of new crisis. But I then calmed myself and realized she had been convinced. She saw something she hadn’t considered before. This text was her telling me she wanted psychological, not medical, help. For now, at least, I had gotten through.

“I’m just myself”

After that text, I tried not to be too hopeful. We started looking for therapists together. We emailed and exchanged texts about her mental health in a new way that felt promising and optimistic. I could sense things shifting.

And then, after a whirlwind weekend in December, she broke up with her girlfriend. She told me that the girlfriend, who considered herself straight, had been pushing her into binaries, which had caused her to want to be more masculine. She realized that did not feel right and decided she prefers a more fluid sense of gender. I was incredulous, curious, and quiet. She kept talking.

She told me she does not care about pronouns, which had previously nearly estranged her from me. And she said something I could only hope she would realize:

“I’m just myself.”

I did my best not to react, except maybe with my eyes.

“Are you relieved?” she asked, knowing me well.

I did not admit that I was. Instead I said that I want her to be at peace with herself. I reminded her that I view identity as unfixed, always changing as we grow, and she agreed. But yes, I was privately relieved that she was seeing herself outside of gender ideology. I felt it was a promising moment.

Since that conversation, my daughter seems to be growing and changing. She has seemed a little happier, a little lighter, even as she also backtracks. A few times, she corrected us from the other room when she heard us referring to her with her given name. Shopping in the men’s department, she said “I am not a she,” and I said, “Okay. I thought you didn’t care about pronouns.” She replied, “I don’t, but I just want you to know,” and then she went to try on some men’s pants. She is still wearing a binder, but also sometimes she doesn’t. She occasionally wears little earrings and nail polish; she came back from a weekend with friends telling me she feels more like a woman, but still a man. And she decided that it’s okay if our extended family calls her by her given name; she did not want to include them in her “transition,” which makes me wonder how much of a transition she feels she has undergone or will continue to undergo.

More recently, she told me that she does not want to conform to anyone else’s idea of gender. I pointed out that she was describing true gender-nonconformity, and, in that moment, she seemed to agree.

I’m under no delusion that my daughter has desisted. Out in the world, she uses male pronouns, a male name, and dresses like a man. At home, however, she is loosening, and at times seems less rigid and easier going. She seems to accept that her identity is in flux, which comes as relief, not because I dearly want her to desist, but because I dearly want her to be healthy, in mind and body.

Maybe this is what integration of mind and body looks like. A few steps forward, a couple of steps back. I do not know what the future holds, and I know this is a long haul. I’m grateful to be able to have this relationship with her, as I am working hard to provide stability for her and myself.

Letting Go

What am I meant to learn from this development, which emerged after an intense weekend and acute illness that could have killed me?

I can see that my conversation in the car with her over Thanksgiving weekend, when she allowed me to share my research, was a turning point. It was in that moment, when she decided to let me guide her, that my body reacted to my mind. The way I see it, my physical system overloaded from emotional strain, and together, my mind and my body united to tell me something. But what?

I have had time to deeply consider this question while recovering. My oldest daughter, pregnant with her first child, suggested that my ordeal — the pain, the surgery, the healing — serves as an initiation into the next phase of my archetypal journey. As she prepares to give birth, she sees herself moving from maiden to mother, and she sees me shifting from mother to crone. This is a helpful framework for me, as I’ve alway been interested in the triple goddess archetype, and I’m starting to explore the work of Jean Shinoda Bolen.

And certainly, after surgery, barely able to lift myself out of bed, I definitely felt older, more encumbered, and newly vulnerable. In the weeks since, I can feel my wounds healing and turning to strength. I am becoming different. Life is preparing me to become a grandmother.

The experience of surgery has changed me. I have heard people say that before, and now I understand. I have always accepted mystery in my life; I have never really had religious or spiritual faith, but I have accepted that there are things beyond human knowing.

And now, I understand more. I see that we grow by letting things go. In my case, I let go of my appendix. And more importantly, I was forced to let go emotionally, psychologically, and spiritually. I surrendered to receiving medical help from strangers. I surrendered control to the them or the universe or G!d for the outcome of my illness.

The experience deepened my faith, not because I survived, but because I felt an inexplicable closeness to the ineffable around me, and a trust in the unfolding of my life as beyond my control.

So yes, as my daughter said, I am now embracing the crone — older and wiser and determined to use the challenges I’m facing to grow. The obstacle is the path. And I am following a path into a new phase of my life’s journey, one that has led me to develop a faith that was not previously available to me. As I process and continue to heal, I can feel myself becoming the elder I’m meant to become.

I am hesitant to say that I am grateful for my daughter’s challenges or my appendicitis. But thanks to these circumstances, and my reaction to them, I have grown in ways I never imagined. I feel freer. The rich fabric of the human condition reveals itself to me, and I am open to it.