One of the great gifts of my transness is that I am forced, constantly, as a matter of course, to try to explain my existence around the context of existing social constructs that naturally exclude me. And being forced to do that, without pause, without rest, has led me to some different views of reality. It's not that I think I have the best possible view of reality. We all have our own view of it, and mine, like yours, is necessarily limited and defined by my own experience. But so much of what comprises my view of reality these days is an understanding that I will never, ever be able to see all of it.
So, with that, today, I am asking myself, more pointedly, a series of questions I have had mulling around in the background for almost two years. Am I a father? Am I a mother? Am I both? Neither? Have I always been all of those things, in some way? What is a mother?
One common refrain I hear is that simply contributing to the birth of a child is not what makes one a mother or a father. So, in that regard, the fact that I contributed sperm and not egg to create three children has no real meaning or value. It has genetic value, but not social value. I had to do more than that to be a father. I had to do something other than that to be a mother. I fathered children in the genetic sense, but that wasn't what made me a father. And while I agree with that construct, I find it darkly amusing that I have the same problem here as I have elsewhere when it comes to gender. We use the same words to mean different things. We say "father" when we mean "contributor of sperm, and nothing else," and when we mean "male child-rearing person, and nothing else." Often, people are both. But sometimes they are one or the other. Like gender and sex, when we use the same word to define different things, it's easy to see how quickly things become confused.
One way to think of "father" is "male role model." This is the definition people are leaning on when they say someone is "a father to us all." They're saying that the man in question is the kind of man every man should aspire to be like. And while I tried to be that for my own kids, I realize now that if I was always female (true), then I could never have actually been a male role model, for anyone. I certainly tried my best. But trying to be the best version of something I could not be doesn't change the fact that I could not be that thing. I could not show them how to be a man. I could only show them how to pretend to be one.
That's not to say that I showed my kids malignant examples of manhood. Just that all I could ever show them was a drawing, a schematic, an idea of what it might be. It was a poor idea, based on poor data, like the account of a disoriented eyewitness. I essentially said, "this is what a man is supposed to be. Right? I think?" There is literally nothing about masculinity or being a man that I can inherently understand.
So, did I show them an alternate kind of motherhood, or womanhood? A version of motherhood that was dressed up to look like fatherhood? What's the difference?
Does it matter?
I have to back up further and ask myself that question. Because I think that all the questions before that are rooted in this notion that every child needs a mother and a father, in the role-model sense. But when I think of myself, I realize that having a dad meant nothing to me, in terms of having a male role model. How ever much I ended up being like him, I never set out to be like my dad, because his life and his dreams were never mine. But that would've been true even if I'd been born cisgender female. And it's also true of my own mom.
In that sense, I don't have parents. And I've become more comfortable with that than with the idea of adopting new ones. I've become comfortable with the idea of having come from nowhere. Or at least from nowhere I can identify or place or give name to. It's a place that precedes modern cultural definitions of gender because I have always existed outside of those definitions.
From there, it makes more sense to argue that we aren't mothers or fathers, any of us, but simply parents. But to argue that is to stop before passing that boundary back into gendered space, where I acknowledge that there is an aspect to human reality that we all share: that my gender is core to who I am, and it matters. Even agender people, those who are genderless, have that property as a core element of who they are: existing as not-gender can only be expressed in relation to gender. Gender is inescapable.
So if I am a parent (true) and I am a woman (true) and being a woman and a parent are both core to who I am (true), and those are things shared by a number of other people (probably true) then it's reasonable to define this category of person, "mother," as "woman who is a parent" or "parent who is a woman." And it's reasonable to define "father" similarly, for men. But I also fathered children, genetically, so I'm kind of back to square one. Am I a father? Am I a mother? Am I both? Neither? Have I always been all of those things, in some way? What is a mother?
At the end of my post last year on Mother's Day, I somewhat flippantly stated that for all those who feel they have no mother, for whatever reason, that I was their mother, now. And a couple people have taken me up on that with some seriousness.
I can't quite remember how I ended up with two "adopted" daughters, but I know it was through a series of Third Eye Blind fan groups I have been a part of on Facebook. The younger of the two, Brittnie, is still in touch with her biological mother. But Brittnie's mom has always struggled with addiction, and has never been reliable for her in any way. I had probably said to her something like what I said at the end of last year's Mother's Day blog post — that since she didn't feel like she had a mom, I was her mom, now, too bad, haha. But it was real to her, and it's become real to me, too.
She came to me for solace and advice as she struggled to come to terms with the end of her marriage. She came to me because she needed a mom, and that is who she understands me to be. Her daughters, whom I regard as granddaughters, call me "Grandma Sera." I know that at 41 this should make me feel old and disregarded, culturally, but it has the opposite effect for me. I'm in this remarkable position of being able to finally grow up as a girl, alongside girls of all different ages. From my granddaughters, to my friend Liz, who just turned 16; to the many women I befriended this time around at college, who are generally in their mid-20s; to my other daughter, Olivia, in her early 30s; and even to women my own age, or nearly so, like my high school friends Kelly and Deanna, whom I only recently reconnected with. I get to grow as a woman in the context of other women, and I get the advantage of all this life experience that I collected but never processed. I get to take apart and digest every old trauma that even slightly resembles theirs, and we get to grow up a little bit, together.
Of all the wonderful and amazing ways in which women in general have welcomed me as a woman, this has been by far the most profound. I don't feel disregarded, I feel connected. I feel like I'm part of some great sprawling tree of womanhood, that there are parts that gave rise to me and my place, and that I in turn give rise to that in others. And it turns out nothing makes me feel younger at 41 than unboxing and
getting over something I should've figured out when I was 21. That Liz should say to me, "I really do look up to you as a role model for the woman I want to be, and I'm glad I met you" makes my chest burst. It makes me want to keep aspiring to be that, to be my own ideal conception of woman. Not to just exist as woman, which I would do no matter what, but to step beyond that primordial sea and onto land, towards the sky.
Does that make me a mother? Yes. Because now I've figured it out.
I am a mother because I am a parent and I am female. We are mothers if anyone sees us as such. Sometimes that's the racing heartbeat of a scared, pregnant 13-year-old, coming to terms with the idea of themselves as a mother, before anyone else knows. Sometimes it's the recently-out trans man with adult children. Sometimes it's the 41-year-old trans woman with two daughters who have never known her as anyone but who she always was. Sometimes it's me, acknowledging to myself that I am a woman who is also a parent, which is also known as "mother."
"Mother" is an observed relationship. And if anyone observes it, anyone at all, even if it's only you, then congratulations, you have it. Happy Mother's Day.
