The Voyage

Fore-and-aft

Mr Miller, Assateague Island, October 2022

The voyage is long and meandering. Miss Miller never officially came out in 2022 when she was fifteen. She didn’t announce a thing. There was no statement, no letter, no text. Instead she changed her name and pronouns at school. The new name was printed in the high school theatre playbill. She had won her first featured role. She wondered on Twitter, which I spied on, what her parents would think when they found out. Her followers offered support. We didn’t say much about it and she reported the anticlimactic moment.

Like I said last week, at first Mr Miller and I weakly affirmed her new identity, and tried to go along with it, because we were still allowing ourselves to be manipulated by a culture that throws you overboard if you don’t affirm a child’s “gender identity.” It was only when I started researching that I felt validated enough to stop lying to Miss Miller and to myself. She took to Twitter again to let her followers know that her mom thought she was lying.

“Why would I lie? Why would I choose this?” she’d asked, as if that were a foolproof, checkmate, gotcha.

I said, “I don’t think you’re lying. I believe you think it’s true. I just know it’s not true.”

There’s a difference.

We settled on a compromise name. It sank like a stone. We chose another. DOA. Then one night Miller Jr blurted out her real name. I snatched up the opportunity to do the same, and set sail.

That took a year.

What took less than a year was for me to stop interrogating my daughter about her medicalization plans.

“You’re not helping,” she’d scolded.

Within a week I learned that I had to redirect, refocus and affirm everything besides gender identity, in order to preserve my relationship with Miss Miller.

What took more than a year was for me to realize I would be jettisoned to the right of the political aisle, alone without a life preserver, to drift and thrash and pray for calm waters.

My marriage was sure to shipwreck, whether or not Miss Miller ventured further out to sea. My relationship with Miller Jr felt like it was sinking.

I thought it might be mercy to simply drown.

But I didn’t drown. I floated in the uncertainty and waited. I drank, and then stopped drinking. I smoked and then stopped smoking. I worked and didn’t work, napped and existed and sipped coffee and wrote and wept and raged, and talked to anyone besides my family who would offer a sympathetic ear—a buoy of support that saw me through to the next sunrise, and the next.

Now, still aboard this ship of uncertainty, Mr Miller helps with the sails and the steering, the maps and the bailing. He knows he navigated away from me and course-corrected. Miller Jr and I tread carefully, but laugh together again, which fills me to bursting and that’s saying a lot, because I’ve been battered in a way that is at once invisible and unmistakable. I can see it in photos more than two years old—the sunny smile, the carefree sunshine dancing in my eyes.

It’s gone.

Or hiding.

There but not there. A ghost ship.

Now that the high school recedes in the distance like an island inhabited by cannibals, it’s hard to imagine what exotic lands lie ahead. The distance I’ve traveled haunts me for what comes next, and even though there’s hope I can’t loosen the heavy ropes that weigh me down.

I dream of days when there will be lightness again—long walks along the shore, a salt-kissed breeze playing in my hair. Hope and joy. In the meantime, I just watch the other passengers aboard this hulking ship and marvel at the sunshine dancing in their eyes.

🌊