Jane

Jane was my child long before I knew her name.

She worried me from the very beginning. She refused to line up headfirst and had to be delivered by C-section, and within moments of her birth doctors were running tests because they’d discovered a heart defect. We learned she would need surgery, although it would wait until age one. I remember the panic of those early hours, watching monitors, waiting to hear whether her heart could wait.

In many ways, it was always like that. Jane was the child I worried about.

School never fit her well, even though teachers constantly told us how smart she was. Learning came easily; being there did not. She struggled in ways that were hard to name, and I watched her wrestle with identity and comfort in her own skin long before either of us had language for what that meant. I didn’t always know how to help. I don’t think she did either.

In fifth grade, she told some classmates she was gay, and then immediately regretted it. We talked, and together we landed on a response that felt safer and truer: “I’m 11, and I don’t have to know the answer to that yet.” It helped. At least for a while.

Middle school was… an adventure. Jane continued trying on identities, including a brief and now hilarious Ben Shapiro phase where she once called her sister a “feminazi.” We laugh about that now. We also have good memories from that time, including a week-long father-child road trip along Route 66 when she was ten. It was just the two of us, miles of highway, and the kind of conversations you only have when you’re stuck in a car together.

Looking back, though, what stands out is how hard it seemed for her to settle, how uncomfortable she often appeared, even when things were going well.

High school brought its own ups and downs. Junior year, she told us she was non-binary, and I got much better at pronouns. During the pandemic, she grew her hair very long (it looked great) and a friend who had a transgender child casually mentioned that this was often an early step in transition. I remember saying I didn’t think that was what was happening. Jane later told me it might have been.

I have loved this human since the moment of that C-section, since the fear of those first tests, since the realization that her heart would have to be watched carefully but could wait. Those memories didn’t disappear.

So when, a few months ago, a friend accidentally called her “Jane” instead of the name I’d always used, and she pulled my wife and I aside to tell us who she had come to understand herself to be, I wasn’t angry. I was overwhelmed.

I wondered what the last twenty years meant. Whether I was losing memories of someone who no longer existed. What about the pictures? Selfishly, what about the name I had chosen?

Those questions fell away quickly.

The person sitting in front of me was the same person I had loved her entire life. The difference was that, for the first time I could remember, she seemed comfortable. The stories she told about herself finally matched the person I was seeing. There was alignment. There was relief.  There was… truth.

“The truth shall set you free” sounds cliché until you see it happen to your child.

Jane, whom I love exactly as much as I always have, is working full-time now. She smiles more. She feels lighter, like someone no longer carrying so many secrets and quiet battles inside herself. I get the pronouns right about 90% of the time, and I joke that I’m a girl dad now since I have two daughters. I’m learning about hormone replacement therapy and what she calls “adult puberty.” I worry less about whether she’ll find her way.

But I worry more about the world she’s finding it in. Loving my child didn’t change my values, it clarified them.

I’ve always thought of myself as a good lefty. I believed I was supportive of trans people. But it’s different, sharper, when it’s your child. I can’t understand a world that tries to vilify the little kid I remember from kindergarten. The one who went with me to the Grand Canyon. The one who drank endless free soda at an all-inclusive resort in Mexico and thought it was the best thing that had ever happened to her.

I can’t understand a world that tries to vilify this young person who, for the first time, looks like she has found peace.

This should not be a world where solving the lifelong mystery of who you are comes with hatred just for existing. But I’m afraid it is.

So, I hold two truths at once. I feel deep joy watching my child grow into herself, the kind of joy only a parent can feel when a child reaches adulthood. And of course, I still worry. I probably always will.

But I will also keep pushing the world to be better.

For Jane.

And for every other kid still trying to breathe a little easier in their own skin.