Mimi Lemay - What We Will Become : A Mother, a Son, and a Journey of Transformation

Copyright 2019 by Mimi Lemay

All rights reserved

For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to or to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 3 Park Avenue, 19th Floor, New York, New York 10016.

hmhbooks.com

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Lemay, Mimi, author.

Title: What we will become : a mother, a son, and a journey of transformation / Mimi Lemay.

Description: Boston : Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing, [2019]

Identifiers: LCCN 2019013136 (print) | LCCN 2019980982 (ebook) | ISBN 9780544965836 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780544965867 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH : Parents of transsexuals. | Mother and child.

Classification: LCC HQ 77.9 . L 446 2019 (print) | LCC HQ 77.9 (ebook) | DDC 306.874DC2 3

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019013136

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019980982

Cover design by Christopher Moisan

Cover photograph Darren Wise / Getty Images

Author photograph courtesy of the author

v1.1019

All photographs have been provided courtesy of the author unless otherwise credited.

Excerpt from Ghost Story by Nikita Gill from Wild Embers: Poems of Rebellion, Fire, and Beauty. Copyright 2017 by Nikita Gill. Used by permission of Little, Brown and Company, a division of the Hachette Book Group. All rights reserved. Now That I Am Forever with Child from The Collected Poems of Audre Lorde. Copyright 1968, 1976 by Audre Lorde. Used by permission of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved. Poem by Jalal ad-Din Muhammad ar-Rumi from Love: The Joy That Wounds: The Love Poems of Rumi. English translation by Elfreda Powell used by permission of Souvenir Press, an imprint of Profile Books.

For my loves, Joe, Ella, Jacob, and Lucia

Each entered the forest at a point that he himself had chosen, where it was darkest and there was no path. If there is a path it is someone elses path and you are not on the adventure.

JOSEPH CAMPBELL , The Heros Journey

Ask me my favorite ghost story

and I will tell you the one

about your haunted house heart

still housing all the people you used to be.

NIKITA GILL , Ghost Story

How did we get here?

I set out to answer this question in March of 2015, here being where my family and I found ourselves a month after my essay A Letter to My Son Jacob on His 5th Birthday had gone viralas inexperienced but determined advocates for transgender children. Here was also the climax of a remarkable five-year journey that had brought us our son, Jacob. Finally, here was the rare opportunity to write a full-length memoir about our experiences and, I hoped, to further shape public discourse on gender identity in young children.

However, sitting down to write, I discovered that the answer to the question How did we get here? was anything but straightforward.

When our son, Jacob, transitioned in 2014, shortly after his fourth birthday, there were few examples for us to follow and no guidebook for parents of very young transgender children. There were only a handful of therapists experienced enough to help families with transgender children Jacobs age deal with the seismic changes, at home and in the community, that a social transition entailed. At the time, watchful waiting was considered the best course of action for a young child who claimed a disparity between his or her gender identity and the one assigned at birth.

Relinquishing to Jacob the choice to transition was an outsize act of faithin Jacob, in ourselves as parents, and, ultimately, in the world that would need to accept him. How I was able to come to this decision cannot be explained without reaching back to my own early years.

Shortly after her second birthday, when Em (a pseudonym Jacob and I chose to avoid using his birth name) started to show signs of emotional decline, the experience had an air of familiarity for me, a sense of dj vu that I could not account for at the time. As I watched my vibrant toddler fade into a shell of a child, angry, distant, almost unrecognizable, bones and shards of my memories began to surface, demanding examination and claiming relevance to this new and confounding moment. Attempting to record the experience for this memoir unfolded in much the same way.

Its like a... ghost story, I tried to explain to my husband, Joe, but without the ghost. I began to suspect that the specter was me or, rather, a former iteration of myself, one that crooked her finger and whispered: Were not quite done here yet.

As I dug up decades of correspondence and journal entries, these ghosts, no longer content in their interment, began to whisper their own stories, shifting the narrative I had long held of my life until eventually it buckled under the weight of their truths.

The book that I set out to write is not the book I have written; neither is my answer for what sequence of events led us to the moment of Jacobs resurrection. Once I allowed myself the freedom to reexamine the narrative of my life, it began to reshape itself, past lapping at the heels of present, offering insight and interpretation until the two collided in a moment of startling redemption. What emerged was indeed a memoir but, equally, a mystery, a ghost story, and a love story.

As the author, I feel I have had a surprisingly spare role in all this, yet I have emerged from the telling of this story irrevocably changed and with a new perspective on my own history and a greater hope for my sons future.

How did we get here?

It started with a birth. A girl born in 1976 in a hospital overlooking the foothills of Mount Scopus, in Jerusalem. Her mother was her entire world, and that world, one of rarefied ultra-Orthodox Judaism, began to collapse in on her when she discovered the price she would have to pay to live an authentic life.

How did we get here?

It started with a birth. A boy born in 2010 who was his mothers world, a world that began to collapse in on itself when she discovered the price her child would have to pay to live an authentic life.

Memory, degraded by time and human subjectivity, can never claim absolute accuracy. The people mentioned in this book may recall conversations or events differently than I do. I have been fully faithful to memory to the extent that my memory has been faithful to me. Thankfully, I am assisted by a quarter century of diaries, correspondence, photographs, audiotapes, and mementos (what my husband, Joe, wryly refers to as my hoarders paradise). Where memory has failed, such as in accessing the very first moment when Em planted a stake in the ground and declared herself a boy, I have stated so.

It is my fervent wish that no one will be hurt or angered by the things I reveal in this book. There are no villains here, only flawed human beings. We are all a unique composition of our desires, beliefs, greatnesses, and limitations. I say, without prevarication or exaggeration, that, given the chance, I would not trade a minute on my journey for a different one. Every moment of joy or suffering has led me to where I am today, and where I am is where I need to be. For that, I am grateful to everyone, without exception in these pages. The following are pseudonyms in order of their appearance in the book: Em, the Bialik family, Mrs. Blum, and Robbie Gold.

The deepest gratitude I offer to my husband, Joe, who has permitted, even encouraged, me to lay bare intimate details of our life and relationship in as candid a manner as possible. If its true, write it, he has told me often during this process. This is a testament to his strength of character and the visionary perspective that has pulled us through the dark moments. He continues to pilot us skillfully through turbulent times, encouraging me and our children to chart a course in life founded on the not-yet-possible.