One of the first fears, underneath all the others, was about a word. Not a pronoun. A title.
Dad.
I have been Dad for a long time. It is, without competition, the most important thing I have ever been called. And somewhere in the early days, beneath the larger questions, sat a small and frightened one: do I lose this? Does becoming who I am cost me the name my children call me?
I had it backwards, and it took me a while to see it.
Dad was never a statement about gender. It never was, for any of us. It’s a relationship — the particular person who shows up, who carries you, who is there at 2am and at the school gate and at the end of the phone for the rest of your life. My children didn’t attach that word to a body or a presentation. They attached it to the one who has always been there and always will be. That person hasn’t gone anywhere. If anything she is more present now than she has ever been, because she can finally feel the whole of it.
So I’m keeping it. Not reluctantly, not as a compromise, but gladly. I can be a woman and be Dad. The two were never in competition; I only thought they were because I’d spent a lifetime being told that everything about me had to line up into one tidy, legible category. It doesn’t. People are bigger than their categories, and a child’s word for the parent who loves them is bigger than grammar.
There’s a version of this people expect — the trans parent who sheds every old name on the way to the new self. That isn’t mine, and it doesn’t have to be anyone’s. You get to keep what’s true. And the truest thing in my life isn’t my gender, or my name, or any letter on any document. It’s my children, for whom I am, and will always be, the same answer to the same question: who’s always there?
Dad is. Still. Always.
I changed almost everything about how I understand myself. I didn’t change that, and I’m not going to. Some things were never on the table — because some things were never the problem.
