Rick Prashaw - Soar, Adam, Soar

Copyright Rick Prashaw, 2019

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Cover image: Rick Prashaw; edited by Jennifer Scrivens
Printer: Webcom

Be Not Afraid Text and Music 1975, 1978, Robert J. Dufford, SJ and OCP Publications. All rights reserved. Used with permission.
You Alive, 2014, Malik Ferraud, 2014. Used with permission.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Prashaw, Rick, 1951-, author
Soar, Adam, soar / Rick Prashaw.

Issued in print and electronic formats.
ISBN 978-1-4597-4276-5 (softcover).--ISBN 978-1-4597-4277-2
(PDF).--ISBN 978-1-4597-4278-9 (EPUB)

1. Prashaw, Adam. 2. Transgender people--Ontario--Ottawa--Biography. 3. Epileptics--Ontario--Ottawa--Biography. 4. Ottawa (Ont.)--Biography. I. Title.

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We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, which last year invested $153 million to bring the arts to Canadians throughout the country, and the Ontario Arts Council for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Ontario, through the Ontario Book Publishing Tax Credit and the Ontario Media Development Corporation, and the Government of Canada.

Nous remercions le Conseil des arts du Canada de son soutien. Lan dernier, le Conseil a investi 153 millions de dollars pour mettre de lart dans la vie des Canadiennes et des Canadiens de tout le pays.

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J. Kirk Howard, President

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To Adams family and friends, for loving him home

ADAMS STORY IS both inspiring and complicated.

How else do you describe my kid a kid whose mother intuitively recognized as a boy in the womb, who was then identified as a girl at birth by the doctor, was named Rebecca Adam by their parents, and spent about eighteen years going by she/her and, finally, about four years as he/him?

The kid who told us that he was always Adam.

It is not just writers who know that words matter. Names, pronouns, and language matter to every single human being. They tell us who we are and who we want to be. Words definitely matter to members of the transgender community who, as diverse as any group of people are, still find their fierce inner warrior when they meet people who want to erase them. I will let Adam name himself, explain and explore his own gender identity. In time, he came to accept his Rebecca years, sharing with the world his Rebecca pictures and stories.

The early chapters of Soar, Adam, Soar jump back and forth between the Adam and Rebecca years. Each trans person is unique in how they think about themselves pre-, mid-, and post-transition. I strive out of respect for Adam and for all for a consistency in names and pronouns as much as possible. I refer to Rebecca and use she/her for those early, Rebecca years, and Adam, using he/him, for the Adam years. There was no fixed date that this transition happened. Really, it happened over a lifetime. Adam is his name, as he will tell you, F-bombs and all.

Listening, learning, and loving worked well for Adams family and friends. I highly recommend it.

I KNEW I WOULD write a book about my kid. Just not this book.

Rebecca Danielle Adam Prashaw was born April 22, 1993, in Sudbury, Ontario. Suzanne, her mom, spent only seventeen minutes in labour, and then, swoosh, Rebecca slid into lifes fast lane, never to put her foot on the brake.

As a record of her life and our relationship, I wrote my child a letter each year around her birthday. It took time to realize the letters might someday inspire a book. There was a story I wanted her to appreciate someday hers, mine, ours.

I was a Catholic priest: a Roman Catholic priest who married when he was forty, becoming an instant stepdad to his wifes three children, and a year later, a first-time dad to one child, that kid with the interesting name.

I worked as a journalist, too. I like to tell and write stories, and I recognized a story here. The letters, I thought, would bind my story to Rebeccas story, so when the time was right, she would better understand the first chapters of her own journey. Or so I thought. That there was a book, too, was, well more a dads hunch, a crazy intuition.

The working title for this book idea was Dear Rebecca: Love Letters from a Married Priest to His Daughter. I knew that it wouldnt be on the Vaticans blessed books list. That might work in my favour, I thought!

Those annual birthday letters chronicled the years events: celebrations, family trips to California and North Bay, camping, cottage visits, outdoor adventures, the pet dogs and rabbit, and a few mundane moments, too, that still somehow captured lifes wisdom. They also recount some madcap misadventures I confess to a few missteps as a later-in-life dad on training wheels. Memo to Dad: venturing out in winter with your five-year-old onto the Castor River in Russell, Ontario, without first checking the ice is not a good idea; the unexpected polar bear dip to my waist qualifies as top shelf in the family legends.

The fifth-year birthday letter reports the epileptic seizures that first appeared out of nowhere at the breakfast table dark, ominous clouds on an otherwise sunny horizon.

The eighth-year birthday letter tells of my own heartbreak over my separation from Suzanne, the breakup of a marriage that I did not want to end. Damn. Now there would be stories Id prefer to omit from my book.

More dad letters follow in the next few years, charting Rebeccas significant challenges in learning and at school, some clearly the consequences of the epilepsy. This would be the place where I would revisit a wickedly fun period of seven years when Rebecca played goalie for various girls hockey teams in Kanata, in the west end of Ottawa. Unknown to anyone at the time, what she learned in the goalie crease would tutor my kid for lifes adversities. Tales are emerging, too, of first jobs, hints of first loves, and more.