becoming a parent my child never has to come out to
This is my aspiration. That my child never has to come out to me about anything. I’m pretty sure I can’t achieve this, because I’m pretty sure there are things I’m not even considering yet, which my child will show me, about ways of being and being with others. And yet this is what I’m going for.
For me this means doing my sacred homework of staying open, and stretching myself to include and understand more experiences that are far from my own. So that I can stay agile enough to update to wherever he is in the present. This is the gift that the younger generations offer us: look at what you didn’t see, look at what isn’t working anymore, look at what you hadn’t yet considered.
When I say I want him to not have to come out about anything, I mean I want to feel like a person he can tell about the range and depth of his experience, and that he can trust that I won’t turn away from him. That I won’t be on the list of people he feels anxiety to tell about what is happening in his life, about who he is and is becoming.
One of the biggest places I think about this lately is gender. Because I sense how outdated those of my generation are around gender, especially mostly those of us who are cis-gender, and therefore haven’t had to examine gender as intimately as others.
The other reason I think about it so much is how absurdly obsessed we are with gender in the realm of babies and children. From gendered clothing from day one of a child’s life, to the predominance of “he” in children’s books and in my immediate community’s storytelling to my child, to gender reveal parties - it feels really overwhelming - like how and why are we THIS obsessed with reinforcing gender norms at every turn?!
When I turn something over like this in my head a lot, I usually find a way to explore it in my business, with you, because I figure you might be thinking about it too.
Luckily, my huge-hearted friend Stuart Getty agreed to co-facilitate a circle for parents in which we can reflect on how gender shows up in our own personal experience, notice the gender influences our children are receiving, and set some intentions to pave a path in which our children don’t have to come out to us about gender - meaning they feel our fluency around gender and feel safe in exploring their own gender. Stuart wrote a very generous book called How To They/Them, and at the very least I recommend that you buy and read this book, whether you have kids or not - it’s for everyone. It’s generous because it takes the time to explain a lot of things that help us become more fluent in loving our nonbinary friends and co-habitants of planet earth.
So Stuart and I hope you’ll join us in this space where we can devote time to this realm of gender, so we might become parents our kids feel safe with. And! Become parents that our kids know their friends and peers are safe with. Regardless of whether our kids are trans, nonbinary, cis, or another gender we haven’t considered yet, developing our own gender fluency will help us support all the humans in our lives, which wow seems like we can all use more support lately.
Love!
Sarah