Integrating body and mind

Part 1

Photo by Dustin Humes on Unsplash

Holidays can intensify both our challenges and our joys. As they recede and the new year begins to unfurl, I am starting to make sense of my holidays this year, which brought a major change in my life.

In November, as Thanksgiving approached, I trusted that my trans-identified daughter would join our family celebration, even though she would not confirm her plans. Our connection is strong, as I’ve written, but she was being secretive, or maybe just private. As it turned out, she wanted to bring her new girlfriend to Thanksgiving dinner, which was objectively not a good idea. We debated for a while; my daughter made the case, and ultimately, I relented. This argument kicked off my long weekend. And thus begins my chronicle of an appendectomy, and my exploration of mind-body integration, both mine and my daughter’s.

In my midlife, I have three terrific adult daughters, and they are all intense. Family time together is often a mix of poignant beauty and screeching conflict. At the moment, I find myself managing an unusual combination of circumstances. My oldest daughter, age 26, is pregnant with her first child, my first grandchild, and she is moving thousands of miles away from home. At the same time, my trans-identified daughter, at age 23, has been considering testosterone. So this year, Thanksgiving saw a collision of wide-ranging emotional demands. It was, in other words, a time for me to practice being a loving guide, while also respecting their adult autonomy with healthy boundaries, both for their sake and for mine.

After a challenging couple of days of family togetherness, I sensed that my trans-identified daughter was struggling. I invited her out of the house for coffee — there’s a local shop that makes Starbucks taste like airplane coffee — and she accepted. Sitting at the small cafe table, we had an intensely open and difficult conversation about her identity. This was not a demand for pronouns or a debate about ideology. This was something deeper and more psychological, about how she exists in the world. During this discussion, she mentioned the difficulties of dating and shared that her girlfriend considers herself straight. Of course, this made no sense since my daughter is female. I decided to be honest.

I said, “wait, that is just too much of a strain on that word.” She responded, “well, they say trans men are men. That means I’m straight, and my girlfriend is straight.” My daughter has always been openly gay, so to hear her call herself straight felt absurd. But I did not react. I just said, oh, and looked away. She knew I didn’t accept it, and I knew neither did she. So I let it sit in the air between us.

On the way home, something started to shift. She told me, crying, that she feels a disconnect between her mind and her body. She was talking about her distress generally, not specifically around gender. But this comment was a key insight that I saw as an invitation for psychological growth. And I suddenly remembered the confusion and pain I experienced when I was in my twenties.

As a young adult, I was unsure of my path in life, confused about how to live and who I was meant to be. I sometimes called this pain “existential angst.” Back then, I encountered a novel by Doris Lessing called The Golden Notebook, which helped me see that fragmentation and integration of different parts of ourselves are expected features of our journey to wholeness. (I had gifted this book to my daughter when she was in high school, perhaps sensing that she would experience similar distress one day. I came across it in a box in her closet recently; it had never been opened.)

I took seriously my daughter’s insight. The idea that her distress could be related to a body-mind disconnect made perfect sense. In my view, her innate feelings of masculinity are entirely consistent with her being a woman, since a woman can experience both masculine and feminine inclinations. She always exhibited both when she was young — for example, playing with dolls and trucks — which I encouraged. I never wanted my daughters to be limited by stereotypes; I wanted them to be free to become their most authentic selves. But this very paradox may be contributing to my daughter’s distress if her mind feels masculine, while she knows her body is female.

Unfortunately, our culture is not helping. Regressive gender ideology, which reinforces rigid stereotypes, is probably exacerbating her suffering. Rather than inviting my daughter to expand her sense of self to include masculinity and arrive at wholeness, the culture is feeding my daughter’s fragmentation and discouraging her integration.

In the moment, I tried to offer the support she needed. I told her that this disconnect must be painful, and I reiterated that it’s important that she feel whole. I encouraged her to work on integrating mind and body. I said that the journey to wholeness is different for different people, and it’s an expected part of the process of becoming a full adult. Coming to terms with different, even seemingly contradictory, parts of ourselves can be challenging, but it is necessary for growth and wholeness. She understood and agreed, even while in the grip of this deep existential pain.

But then — and this was a key moment — she said she thought testosterone might help her with her integration. I was shocked, but I somehow managed not to react outwardly. I focused on the snow on the ground and the light coming through the trees. I could feel her pain and confusion. She lives in a world where people change their bodies to ease their mental distress. In this moment, I knew I had to be both calm and authentic, which took some courage since I didn’t want her to reject me.

I gently but clearly reminded her that I did not approve, that I had been against her sister going on birth control (estrogen) years ago because of side effects and risks, and that I felt that way about any hormones. I asked her if she had looked into, not just side effects, but the physical risks to her health from cross-sex hormones. She seemed jolted by the words “cross-sex.” I then asked her if she’d done any research, or if instead she’d like to see what I had found. And, her face streaked with tears, she said okay. She agreed to let me send her my research.

For a brief moment, I was stunned. I was also incredibly relieved that she trusted me. I could see in a tangible way how our relationship might begin to pave a way for her to move beyond her distress. And as that fragile moment passed, feeling the weight of guiding my daughter through her suffering, I was exhausted.

It was late afternoon. We went inside where the rest of the family was sitting by the fire. My nerves were shot. Half kidding, I told my husband I needed a drink. My daughter was in a much better mood by then, and she helped me make dinner and clean up.

Soon after, I started not feeling well. I thought it might be the coffee or the drink, but later than night, I suffered from excruciating pain in my abdomen. I wondered whether I was having an emotional reaction to my weekend, but then the vomiting started. I suspected food poisoning, though no one else in the family was sick. Soon after, I had a fever, and a few hours after that, I was on the operating table. It was acute appendicitis.

The timing of my illness was not lost on me. I had been focusing intensely on my daughter’s mind-body disconnect when my own body became seriously ill. Could there be a connection between the conversations with my daughter and the onset of infection? Or was the timing merely a coincidence? Either way, I could not ignore my own mind-body pain. For me, the stakes had become life or death.

Thankfully, the surgery was routine for the surgeon and the hospital staff, though it was far from routine for me. The recovery has been more grueling than I expected. I have been healing not only from the trauma of pain, infection, and surgery, but also from accepting the reality that I nearly slipped away. I have been processing that one of my internal organs had become necrotic and threatened my life; I felt betrayed by my body. And of course, as I have been healing, I have needed to make sense of the uncanny timing in relation to my conversation with my daughter about testosterone and mind-body integration.

What was I meant to learn from the sequence of events? Did our conversations literally almost kill me? How might this experience help me grow? What should our next steps be?

Continued in Part 2, “Our Identities Loosen.”