The Nearest Exit May Be Behind You (16 page)

Gloria doesn’t seem to care that we’re trans and she clearly likes it that we’re sweet on each other. I don’t realize how much that affects her treatment of us until the day when I see her sniff dismissively at the back of a very well-dressed, polite white couple who are never at all tender with each other. I think about what it means to have your fertility phlebotomist’s blessing or good wishes on the baby-making process, and I am glad to have it. Obviously, I am glad to have anyone’s blessing, everyone’s blessing, in this somewhat strange and yet also entirely commonplace endeavor, but it somehow seems especially useful, especially good and right, to feel that the woman who literally opens up the door for us to come in and begin this process would like for us to succeed.

Like many queers who are interested in parenting, we have discovered that heterosexuals are often curious about how, exactly, we plan to implement our small-person acquisition. It’s the age of Oprah, so they’ve all heard about turkey-baster babies and adoptions from poorer nations and Indian surrogates, and it’s not so much how as which one, with the options depending, of course, on whether they know we’re trans or not. We’ve been so pleased with how our cheerfully matter-of-fact approach has worked at the fertility clinic that we’ve taken it on the road. “Oh, my future husband still has his uterus and ovaries, so we’re going to try to get him pregnant.” Any befuddled looks are helpfully clarified—“He’s a transsexual, dear”—and, where necessary, the ways in which a female-to-male transsexual is different from a male-to-female transsexual more thoroughly explained (a tactic I was forced to adopt when I realized that my breezy delivery of the biological facts without a lot of explanation elsewise had left a couple of poor souls believing that male-to-female transsexuals could have reproductive organs installed, and use them to give birth. Oops).

But other than that, it turns out that the world is more or less composed of two types of people on this matter. There are those who do not believe that queers should be raising children at all, no matter who bears them or how any individual couple might come by them. These people hold the whole business as wrong, bad, and an abomination before their god. So the part about my tranny husband’s childbearing plans, while perhaps the extra-aberrant icing on an already-sinful cake, isn’t really a big deal, and no amount of normalizing explanation about the mechanics of transguy pregnancy is going to do a damn bit of good.

The other kind of people, the ones who are fine with queers raising children, also do not care that much about the trans part, and that, I have to confess, is what I was not prepared for. When we made plans to start trying to get pregnant, I imagined fighting this battle on every possible front—going to war over and over again about our right to have a baby in this way, about the perceived and actual problems of gender, identity, body, and autonomy. I figured I’d have to make the point over and over that Ishai could be pregnant and still be a man and a father (or, in our case, an
abba
, Hebrew for father); that this was not an invitation for anyone to create hir own interpretations of his gender identity nor arrogate the right to judge it.

So far, not so much. Mostly there have been a lot of nods, some quite knowing, some clearly a bit befuddled and accompanied by a sort of questioning bob of the head, as people clearly hope more information will be forthcoming without them having to ask. But that’s the whole of it, really; a lot of curiosity and hardly any hostility at all except from those people in the previously mentioned first group whose hostility walked into the conversation with them, spitting on the floor and muttering darkly under its breath. All of my well-practiced arguments, step-by-step explanations, charts, and graphs haven’t seen the light of day once. Either I’m fighting a much more broad and basic battle, or there’s no fight to have at all, just some explaining and then some reassurance that, yes, I do promise, I will let them know the very moment that the time to knit things has arrived.

I have no idea whether this will remain true as my beloved goes about preggers. I imagine that overalls and chef pants, the classic butch maternity wear, will also serve well as transsexual paternity wear, and perhaps we won’t schedule any really dressy events just then. But because he’s someone whose T-shirt slogans have often caused strangers to march over and demand he explain himself, I assume that his pregnant belly will, likewise, raise some conversation. I worry that the last couple of months (when he’ll really show) will be demoralizing for him if anyone is mean or unkind, and upsetting for me (since I have been made to swear an oath that I will not pay a visit, carrying my big stick, to people who have been mean or unkind). I’m afraid it will stress the baby. I know already that I am going to have to police myself very carefully in order to mitigate my desire for Ishai and the baby to stay home and be safely unremarked upon except by me with regard to their utter fabulousness. Just in case someone says something mean. Just in case someone—G-d forbid—does something. I worry about that anyway, every time any of my beloved queer, freaky outlaws leaves the house, but my very own personal pregnant tranny husband bearing our child? Pass the Xanax, please.

What I am sure of is that we will spend a lot of time on the mommy conversation. Every pair of homo boys with a kid I have ever known has spent a certain amount of time discussing the apparently pressing question of “Where’s your mommy?” In our case, the answer, “There is no mommy,” is going to be, for a rare and delicious instance, entirely true. There is no mommy. We have a birth dad, a donor, and then me, which, on the one hand, might be more than I can explain in the supermarket, but on the other could be a pretty interesting thing to try.

Early in the process, I had a recurring dream about this that provided me with some comfort on the whole matter of making the explanation, and I continue to cling to it as my subconscious mind’s very useful assistance in difficult situations. In the dream, a bossy woman in her early retirement years sees me out doing the grocery shopping with my (entirely theoretical at this stage) toddler son and, after engaging him in a spot of peek-a-boo, asks him where his mommy is.

“I don’t have a mommy!” he replies, and when she insists in a somewhat patronizing tone that
everyone
has a mommy, dream me cuts in: “Actually, he doesn’t have a mommy. He has an
abba
and a papa. And two great-grandmothers and five great-aunts and three great-uncles. Plus four grandparents, six uncles, eleven aunties, and a brace of cousins in varying degrees of consanguinity. Also a Tante Hanne and an Uncle Malcolm and an Ankle and a Spuncle and a Baba and a Big Pup—so really, it’s probably just as well he doesn’t have a mommy, as I frankly have no idea when we’d schedule time to see her.”

And with that, in my dream, I wish her a good day and turn my cart full of spinach and cheeses and precious baby boy toward the next thing on our list.

I would say that. I would say all those things, and I would probably even be able to keep myself from going on a rant about what decade she thinks she’s living in and how dare she give my son a complex. Probably. But I am not sure I would be able to resist telling her my favorite
Animal Planet
fact, which is that seahorses never know their mothers. They’re borne by and out of their fathers, growing and being nourished and nurtured in the male seahorse’s body until they’re ready to be born, borne out of the distinctive curves of him. The father is the one who feeds and cares for the babies until they’re ready to go out into the big ocean. I would say that we’re seahorse papas, Ishai and I, not usual but certainly not unheard of among all the beings of the world, bearing our family into being between the two of us, out of our own distinctive curves.

Writing the Landscape

I do not think I am going to have as much time as I really need to write all the storybooks that my eventual, theoretical child will require. Even if I already had the experience and didn’t have to learn the craft from scratch, I’m not sure I would have time. This is not ideal. Not that I am not glad about
Heather Has Two Mommies,
And Tango Makes Three,
and so on. I’m simply not clear that the storybooks I am going to need are available yet.

Children like social stories, as I have learned while I’ve been thinking about, you know, making one. Social stories are the kind in which you read about or talk about something that is happening or, ideally, will happen to them. Seals go to the dentist, tiny blue aliens get tiny blue baby siblings, the parental units of hippopotami come to see that they have irreconcilable differences, mice fly on airplanes, and so on. This way, a child learns what to expect, and gets some useful vocabulary for thinking about or describing it. There are books for flower girls and dentist visits and first days of school and all manner of other things. This is very nice indeed.

I cannot, however, find the
My Two Tranny Dads
picture book. There are now two books that feature an uncle-daddy/sperm donor kind of character (including the oh-so-lyrically named
Let
Me Explain: A Story about Donor Insemination,
which features, um, a straight couple), but I cannot seem to find much about our eventual child’s relationship to our donor’s parents, who are not step-grandparents of either kind (neither parents of steps nor remarried grands) but really-o, truly-o, naturally occurring grandparents of the kind you get when you have this kind of family. Also, I seem to have overlooked the bookshelf I need. Have you seen it? It’ll be the one with the giant extended multi-ethnic queer family picture books, in which small persons are taken out to eat all manner of foods and participate in an endless variety of festivals and religious services, with all sorts of people in all kinds of places. You know, the ones in which ze learns to behave respectfully, by which I mean not yelling, “Why is that man wearing a dress!?” at an inappropriate moment. (Although, I’m guessing that won’t be such an uncommon sight in our spawn’s childhood. Ze’d probably be more likely to yell, “Smoke means fire! Smoke means fire! Get out and get help!”)

I am not sure where I will find the
Yes, We’re All Jewish, But
Everyone Does It Differently Around Here
book for use when various players of hir small life observe Jewish rituals in an assortment of ways. Except, of course, because Ishai is a Jew by choice, there is one set of Anglican grandparents, so they are probably going to want to do Christmas things with him. I’m not especially concerned about this, because I have an idea that it will all be okay in a cultural-exchange kind of a way, as above: let us now enjoy the customs and traditions of our loved ones, which are not our own. On the other hand, I have seen tender, instructional books about Chanukah and Kwanzaa for that time of the year ,but not yet a “What’s this Christmas thing all about?” book that isn’t uncomfortably Jesus-y to me. So I think we’re going to need that one, too.

What Does Daddy Do All Day?
is probably also going to be a nonstarter, what with “diversity coordinator,” “consultant,” and “writer” not being the sort of job titles that make for books with fantastic illustrations. That, plus neither of us is going to be Daddy, I don’t think. We do
know
some people who have verifiable occupations, though, which is good, and my wonderful brother Jeffrey works for an art gallery, so that’ll provide a rock-solid field-trip opportunity to watch an adult at work and tell nice stories. Also, not for nothing, I read constantly as a child, whereas Jeffrey played a lot of video games, and many dire predictions were made about this. He’s turned out spectacularly. So I hereby solemnly swear that if our eventual munchkin somehow turns out not to be a reader and has no special interest in all these many, many books, I will not totally panic. Feel free to remind me about this.

After small childhood, I think this lack of seeing hirself on the landscape might get easier. In books, I mean. There is actually already a decent book about a kid who gets bullied for having queer parents, and—

Did I just write that? What is the matter with me? I will tell you right now that I am having this unmanufactured emotion as I write, and further that I’m going to either sweet-talk or bully the copyeditor into leaving it in because, excuse me, but—what the holy fuck? Here I am rattling along about books I would like to write for my sweet little theoretical bundle of joy, and then I get to the later school years and go: “Well, that’ll be easier, there are already books on being bullied because you or your folks are queer.”

Disaster. Clearly, my work is just beginning. Especially because I might be starting to understand
why
these sorts of books are less widely available: in order to write them, an author has to feel ready to make a case about what’s great, not just what’s hard. If you asked me right now, I could think of a hundred ways that having a large, queer extended family, including married dads plus a bonus spuncle (that’s the fellow who donates the sperm, and no, I can’t say it without snickering either) is great for a kid. So many opportunities, perspectives, routines, people to complain to, Chanukah gifts. There are stories to be told about how that works, both explicitly and in the byproduct-of-another-narrative sense. Also, I have a theory about kids who are raised in large, extended-family situations of whatever type and how they are more creative and adaptable than kids whose worlds are smaller and more routinized. And how about being able to find a mentor or activity partner no matter what weird-ass thing you want to try? Or having a bunch of adults who adore you and are not your parents to talk to about sex and drugs and introduce you to rock’n’roll (note to my family, both biological and logical: please observe verb/object pairings in the previous sentence). All of those seem as though they would make a young-adult book with room for the requisite angst and resolution, but also without it necessarily sounding so very weird as all that.

It’s clear to me that being accustomed to a variety of kinds of table manners, that being a seasoned houseguest, that learning to roll with other people’s food traditions and television rules will be a boon to a small person. I also think that getting to be a little fussed over and made to feel special on outings with people who don’t have their own children might be very nice, especially if we ended up doing the whole thing all over again and have two of ’em. But I don’t know exactly how to fit all of that into a YA book that is also, you know, about something (my general experience of the tween set being that a certain amount of plot is pretty much always required to carry them along). But regardless, it’s not as though the field is crowded. I shall just have to try, and soon. I anticipate many revisions.