Time to be Trans-Parent

50 years. As I approach the end of my 30's I am hit by how long 50 years of life really is. It's a marriage, 3 adult children, grand children, the loss of parents and the rise of social change. Its a lifetime of knowing yourself when no one else does, or maybe they did and you just didn't know how deep love can be. 50 years of being a woman when everyone else saw you as a man.

I am the child of 2 amazing moms. One of them I knew as my Mum my entire life, and the other in the past ten years has affectionately become known as my Tall Mum, or my Other Mother (a little nod to the novel Coraline, but without the creepiness!). Growing up I always knew there was something different about my Tall Mum. She wasn't like the other Dads in the small prairie town where we lived. She loved the ballet and jazz music, she was obsessed with fashion and deeply disappointed when none of her daughters shared her love for it. She didn't hunt, fish or hang with "the guys" at bars.

Living in a small town, in an era without social media, cable tv or vast libraries with diverse literature there wasn't really any context to understand my Tall Mum's differences. Honestly it didn't really matter to us anyways. We were always the oddballs of our community. We didn't play or watch hockey, we sat around and read books together or played board games instead. We weren't big drinkers or partiers and we just never quite fit the mold of the other families anyhow. But we were happy with our wackiness and we were family.

I remember as I got older vaguely understanding what homosexuality was. I had never met anyone who was gay, and despite my own attraction to other girls I just regarded that as a normal experience that everyone went through. The word transgender wasn't even in my vocabulary. It wasn't until college that I really started to grasp what any of it meant. I imagine now that my small farming community probably had no shortage of LGBTQ+ members, but that the people who fell under that alphabet soup umbrella were probably living a life in fear of coming out in a world where they would most definitely be unaccepted.

As time went on the world seemed to change. Us small town kids spread out across the world. We moved to big cities, we met people who came from diverse backgrounds with every shade of skin, gender, orientation and religion. Our world views grew, and as the internet rocked the face of what we all knew the views of our quiet sleepy little communities grew too.

A decade ago my Mum nervously sat in a car with my sister and I and revealed to us that our Other Mother was transgender and to not be surprised if she wanted to wear skirts in the house. My sister and I looked at each other and I think the words out of my mouth were. "Yeah we kind of figured." In my head I was thinking, "It's about time." And it was, about time. It was past time. Because 50 years is a long time to live not being able to live as who you truly are.

I am glad the world has changed. I am proud of my two moms. I am happy that teens today won't have to grow up feeling the way that my Tall Mum did growing up. I am overjoyed that my Other Mother can feel confident growing her hair out, dressing as she pleases and getting use female pronouns without the fear that haunted her in her past. Don't get me wrong, I still worry about her every day. I worry that some jerk with an intolerant heart will take issue with her living her authentic self, but I do take peace in knowing that the world is changing, and that it has changed for the better. It's time.