Let’s start here: I have two children.
They came from my body, a long time ago. To be precise, 20 years and 18 years ago.
They know me as Mom.
I am a trans man, in an excruciatingly slow and measured transition. To all but three people in the world, I am not Will, but someone with a girl’s name. Those three people do not include my sons.
For now, I continue to work toward transition in private (in near-isolation, really) until it is more safe for me and for them to be more public. For now, I aim for androgyny in public, living in the sort of place where even that is only minimally understood and not at all respected.
For now, that androgyny is the best I can hope for with my sons, as well. They are engrossed in transitions of their own–to independence, college, careers, life on their own. It isn’t yet time to tell them more.
Mothers Day for me may as well be the Annual Day of Confusion. I am a mother. There’s no getting around that. Biologically: I carried them, I birthed them, I nursed them. Emotionally: they have a father who is all things Dad to them.
I imagine they will always call me Mom.
The least common denominator of Mothers Day revels in those things we extol as innately feminine: cooking, cleaning, laundry. And we reward mothers with more of the same: flowers and fancy meals out. For years I’ve gone to church on Mothers Day and invited to stand and be recognized with all the other ladies, given a carnation to mark me as another one of the ladies, asked to be happy that for this one day, I and all the other ladies won’t have to do the dishes.
Because I don’t experience Mothers Day as a feminine being, I can’t say whether this is what most mothers want. I’m not most mothers. It seems to me folks mean well, of course. How are they to know that when it comes to me, their cookie cutter is wishing for another appendage?
My newsfeed bursts with pre-holiday cautionary pieces, pleading for sensitivity to those for whom Mothers Day is painful: those who’ve lost a mother or child, those from whom a mother or child is estranged, those who suffer the emptiness of no child, those who’ve suffered at the hands of a mother. Whose but the very coldest heart could not feel at least a modicum of empathy for such a woman amidst the hyperfrenetic milieu of Hallmark’s celebration?
Still, I’ve heard no plea for Mothers Day kindness to the men–and by men, I mean men like me, men who don’t know what to do with a day that means to honor and and yet in in its honor serves to ignite a peculiar shame. I don’t blame them for such neglect, of course. We’re few and far between, mostly invisible. But invisibility is no guard against the bewilderment that grows between the joy of having been mother to my boys (for indeed, I have mothered them) and the sense of dismemberment that comes with all the naturally feminine attachments to motherhood.
In the end, I admit to wanting the side benefits of Mothers Day–I do want a day free from cooking and cleaning (for these still fall to me as the mother in this house). I don’t want the inevitable feminization the single-stem carnation with the soft satin ribbon symbolizes. I don’t wish to stand with the ladies, even if through our shared experience we are peers.
I want to be left alone on Mothers Day. But first, I think one of the boys fixed me dinner.