Bonding

(at the end of January, 2009)

A fair amount of time has passed since last I wrote -- either here or elsewhere. A fair amount of life has occurred.

My son. My son is here.

He was born, beautiful, marvelous, late in November, and began changing lives.

Amazing tiny marvel in my arms, I often find that I can do little more than coo and murmur and smile as I struggle to salvage enough scraps of my eroded literacy to satisfactorily describe the delight and awe that keep flooding through me.

I am beginning and planning a transition; I am dicing with a vindictive fire, and playing in deadly earnest with my world in the ante; I am sleep deprived and impatient and fearful and resolute.

But each time I hear him draw a sweet little breath, each glimpse I catch of his tiny feet, I wonder what fear is. I kiss his downy hair and everything is happening as it should and must. As I cradle him and he stares at me, I table the dice and let the ****** burn.

For it's a drug, and I'm hopelessly addicted. I love this child. I, Rachel love this child. There is no burden of years of earnest, striving quasi-fatherhood to reconcile, no nomenclature to set aside. I accept myself from the beginning as both his father and his mother, and I understand myself as his mother. Whereas precisely six months ago, the idea of being father to my son terrified me, today in my heart I am his mother, and his Daddy, and I know he knows who I am, and I am at peace.

Sure, it's a thorny peace, with a high-energy 4-year-old, an exhausted-and-confused co-parent, a frustrating day job, and precious few full nights of sleep. But those are my beloved family who love me, and that is my life, and I cannot and would not change things.

Okay, maybe my daughter could be a little less bouncy after 8pm.

...

(2 months later)

I had this tiny (well, 16lbs.; not so tiny, really, any more) marvel with me at a therapy session a couple of days ago, and I found myself saying to him, as I gazed with wonder into his eyes, "can you believe that when I learned you'd be coming, I very nearly lost my mind?" Then I teared-up and held him for a good long while, as he grumbled sleepily. It was such a shock, how unimaginably distant that person seems.

Make it stop

Sleep won't come with any reliability. Work is draining, my three-year-old is feeling ignored and rebelliously independent, and in 2-3 weeks she will have a baby brother. 3-6 months after that, he'll be weaned, my wife will be able to take her meds again and think clearly, and I can start asking her to learn, learn about the details of being trans, learn about the parts of my life she's never looked too closely at, learn why being a feminine man will not stop the gradual spiral of self-destructive impulses, the attrition of self-neglect. I am terrified of discovering what happens, then, when she looks and learns, just as I am terrified of the prospect of waiting so long alone and unheard.

I want off, I want everything to stop ... but I don't really. I've come crashing through the hidden walls in my world, and from without it's clear they've insufficient value in themselves to merit rebuilding.

I'm full of resentment over her conflicted, angsty wafflings over breastfeeding. Bitterness, such deep, deep bitterness at the way she threw-up walls when I offered. But simultaneously, I cannot possibly fault her. It's jarring.

Hahn's setting of Paul Verlaine's D'Une Prison, keeps echoing in my head:

Qu'a tu fait, O toi, qui voila
pleurant sans cesse?
Dit! Qu'a tu fait, toi la,
de ta jeunesse?

... I suppose the question some part of my psyche is struggling to ask, with that, is "how did this happen?" It would be "how did it come to this?" if not for the rich, battered love we still share. Oh, desperation, you are cruel. Poor Verlaine, he broke and ran when his world shifted, and madness ate at him to the sad end of his days, the madness of being unhomed, robbed of his beginnings. Poor sweet, fiery, brilliant, mad, pious, queer Verlaine; and yet ... and yet I find only bitterness that a trans woman today can often hope for little better than the savage uprooting disjunction he suffered for his homosexuality a century ago.

I have so much anger that bubbles to the surface when fatigue thins and loosens my reserve, my blankets of hope and optimism. Why am I unable to remember this in therapy? What do I hope to gain by cooking it inside? I feel ill.