The Parenting Milestones I Didn't Expect

Illustration by Audrey Malo

By Adrienne Martini

On Saturday, my younger child will graduate from high school, just like so many thousands and thousands of kids have over the last few weeks. My younger child is just like her peers. And like her peers, not particularly remarkable on a global scale while wildly loved and appreciated in the microcosm that is her family and friends. She also happens to be trans, which is both the most and least notable component of who she is, depending on who you ask.

Don’t worry. I know exactly how so much of the country feels about my kid. I read the news, too, and hear from all sorts of folks I’m related to who should stick to their own knitting. I can control approximately none of that (occasionally violent) behavior while working toward lasting change. It seems like it’s taking forever to grant non-white, non-cis, non-straight, non-male humans the full slate of human rights but, dang. Just in my lifetime, women can now get credit cards and mortgages. Gay people can marry other gay people. There have been setbacks, of course, like the overturning of Roe. Yet when we look at a longer timeline, the moral arc of the universe is bending toward justice.

What gets lost in the discourse is how cool it is to watch your child evolve into who she is supposed to be. You know, just like it is for any parent whose kid is old enough to launch into the next phase of his/her/their life. There’s joy in knowing how far they’ve come in the last 18 years, no matter which gender they were assigned at birth.

Some small moments hit differently with my younger kid than my older one. Our first trip to Target to buy her some bras, which is a milestone I’d never anticipated but found weirdly moving. When her older, cis-gendered sister and I went bra shopping, we nearly had a shouting match in the lingerie aisle. Her tweenage prickliness hit my overly sensitive momness in just the right way for a meltdown, which were a feature of her middle school years.

But with my younger kid, it was different. She was excited by her body becoming what it should be. Our shopping trip was a celebration of jumping through so many hoops successfully, rather than yet another opportunity for your mom and your body to embarrass you. 

Which isn’t to say I don’t embarrass each of them on the regular. I just try not to do it in Target.

Not all of those small moments are about the physical transition. Some are about the psychological changes. For her first 15 years, my younger kid seemed continually uncomfortable in the world, so much so that I wondered how anyone could be that miserable and live. It was as if she was fine silk and the world was sandpaper.

School was a nightmare on a number of levels, from struggling with academics to finding friends. In her case, pandemic-induced, home-based learning was a salvation. Without the daily pressure to be something she wasn’t in public, the blackest clouds lifted. When she came out as trans to us, her skies weren’t suddenly blue, mind, but seemed like they could be eventually. All of her discomfort started to make sense.

Yes, my husband and I found it hard to wrap our heads around it at first. Yes, we did feel grief. Yes, we suddenly found ourselves in a place we didn’t anticipate and it was incredibly uncomfortable. But small changes — like using her pronouns, like saying her name — made such an outsized difference. We could viscerally feel how much this eased our youngest kid’s experience of the world. The success of those little changes made the bigger ones easier. 

Before her transition, my younger kid had nearly no ability to handle obstacles. Vacations were tough because her routine would be upset. Even a school day with a fire drill was hard to work through. My kid was a kid constitutionally opposed to all of it.

I feared what would happen when we went through the process to change her legal name on all of her documents. Government systems are not known for their flexibility, especially when you’re dealing with birth certificates and passports. As expected, nearly every step took twice as long and required three times as many pieces of paper than the websites said. 

The biggest hurdle, however, was our bank. The day we showed up with the big file folder of all of the paperwork, the bank still couldn’t change her name on her account because her new passport wasn’t in my hands, but in the mail. I braced for a meltdown from my younger kid, whose hopes seemed pinned on all of her stuff matching. 

Instead, she shrugged. “We’ll come back,” she said, nonchalantly. 

I know it doesn’t sound like a big deal. It was. My younger kid let herself stop pushing against a world where she didn’t fit and was able to simply live in it, despite all of the reasons she could make another choice. That’s where the joy is.

That joy is what makes all of the other crap that comes with parenting (and with politicians who need an enemy to distract from their failed policies) worth pushing through. You have to celebrate joy when it comes. Otherwise, what are you fighting for?