Welcome to #TransTuesday! This week we’re going small and personal, yet is still entirely related to my transness in ways I will never be able to escape. So let’s talk about: PARENTS WHO WILL NEVER KNOW THE REAL YOU. And for me, that means: MY DAD.
His birthday is not too far from when this thread is going up, same for Father’s Day, which means he’s on my mind now even more than usual. And every year I struggle with this and every year it haunts me, and it probably always will.
This is pretty tied in with how THE PAST can be difficult and complicated for trans people who transition as adults, so see the Trans Tuesday on that for more info.
My dad died in an accident when I was five. I… wrote out the details, but no, it’s better without them. It’s too horrible to talk about, or even think about. It was… well, it was really bad.
Suffice to say the method of his death made me terrified of some things as a kid, and I still feel some of the lingering effects of that today. He was really young, only 25 or 26 at the time.
I’ve mentioned before how my mother, who died over a decade ago, lied to me about him for my entire life. She used me as a weapon to hurt him, and convinced me he abandoned us. She had me hating him for a good portion of my life.
You can learn more about my incredibly complicated relationship with my mom, and the ways it affected my own motherhood, in the Trans Tuesday on BEING A TRANS PARENT aka MOTHER’S DAY.
A ways back, Susan and I found his family. I got to know my grandparents in the few years they had left, and my step-mom is one of the kindest and sweetest people I’ve ever met, and I have a great relationship with her that I cherish.
Once I reconnected with them, well into adulthood, I learned who he really was. It was an extra knife in my heart knowing the ways I’d been used to wound him, and the awful things I’d been led to believe about him.
All I have left of him are a scant few photos. I remember some small things… very few of them good. One of the most visceral memories is screaming to get away from him, because if I went with him for the weekend my mother told me I “wouldn’t be her special little [girl] anymore.”
The one thing I remember better than anything is him lying in his casket at the wake, right down to the pattern on the shirt he was wearing. It’s seared into my brain forever. I can see it right now. He’s laying there so still.
I remember not understanding what death meant, or why he wouldn’t wake up. How awful for that to be almost all I can remember of him. I only have a couple happy memories I can think of, one of which is playing hockey with him in the winter.
No skates or anything, I think we were on a driveway. I’ve never really liked hockey much, but maybe he did? I remember he had a pipe (a guy in his early 20s with a pipe is kind of hilarious to me, sorry dad) and he set it in the snow while we played and it melted a little hole.
And so he forgot it was there because he couldn’t see it and then couldn’t find it. Why do I remember that? I don’t know. The only other memory I have is this: I don’t remember why, but he asked me if I thought I looked like him.
And I said no, and he asked why. And I told him it was because he had a beard and I didn’t. So… so he went into the bathroom and HE SHAVED OFF HIS ENTIRE BEARD. Oh goodness. What a kind and remarkable thing to do for your kid.
I never got to apologize to him for what my mother did, how she used me like a weapon to hurt him. If I hope for anything for those of you reading (and I do hope for a lot, for all of you), it’s that nobody ever uses you like that.
I still struggle with it. My step-mom tells me that he knew I didn’t actually hate him, that it was all the things my mom told me, and that he never blamed me for those things. But it still happened, and I was still part of it.
A confused little kid who didn’t understand what was happening, weaponized to hurt someone who never, ever deserved it. The cruelty of that is very difficult for me to live with. I hope none of you ever have to experience it.
I never got to talk to him about how I unknowingly helped those things happen. I never got to be sure MYSELF that he knew I would have never done or said the things my mom told me to if I’d understood.
I don’t remember him hugging me. And I’ll never, ever know what it felt like. My step-mom said I get my kindness and curiosity from him. I have this photo of him inside a hobby shop where he worked… and I wonder how much of my love of miniatures and gaming is rooted in him.
For that matter, he apparently had little me convinced he was Superman for a while (he told me he just moved so fast I never saw him changing), and my bottomless love of Superman… probably also began with him.
I’m going to share this little story my grandmother told me before she passed, because this is my thread and I can do what I want (I’m mad with power). When he was little, she’d give him breakfast at home, and pack a lunch for him to take to school.
She later got a call from a neighbor, asking why they never gave him breakfast. What? She was so confused. He was apparently stopping at a friend’s house on the way and eating another entire breakfast.
And then he’d also eat the lunch she packed, AND THE BREAD THEY’D LEAVE OUTSIDE FOR THE BIRDS. I never did those things, exactly, but knowing that my astounding and much-envied mega metabolism comes from him? That’s good stuff.
Even better is that our son has it, too. Although his is already slowing and when I tell you he’s SUPER grumpy about it in the exact same way I was when it happened to me… well that makes my heart a bit happy. I wonder how my dad dealt with it? I’ll never know.
In any case, my feelings about him are so extra complex. Because not only did I not get to know him… he never even really knew ME. The real me. And that has never gotten any easier. What I wouldn’t give for just a moment to tell him.
If you’d like to know how I hoped that’d go, Susan and I wrote a short comic about it that appears in the Color of Always queer love anthology. It’s out now from A Wave Blue World, you can get it at Barnes & Noble and any comic shop.
I keep a photo of him over my dresser, look at it every day, and wonder. I don’t know what he’d think… of believing he had a son who turned out to be a daughter.
Every account I’ve heard about him, from everyone who was not my mother, is that he was smart, and funny, and most of all kind and compassionate. So that’s what I take with me, hoping that he’d have accepted me for who I am without question.
I do have one other thing from him, though. His middle name. I talked about that a bit in the Trans Tuesday on my LEGAL NAME AND GENDER MARKER CHANGE.
I made NO decision about my middle name up until the night before I filed the paperwork. And I thought it was because I was too busy (I am), but it’s not like that’s stopped me from doing other important transition-related things when I needed to.
But I kept putting it off, over and over again. I think I felt… bad? Guilty? Awful? At the thought of changing my middle name.
I don’t really like the name. And I definitely don’t like that it’s pretty masculine. I don’t feel it fits me. But it was HIS too, and it’s all I’ve got from him, and I had to hold onto it even though having it associated with me is somewhat dysphoric.
I just don’t know. It’s all so complicated. I suppose I could change it later if I wanted, but it was such a headache to just go through it ONCE, I don’t see myself doing it again just to remove the last thing of his that still belongs to me.
Although now that I look at his photos, I think our hair color is the same. I never noticed that before. Oh goodness. My heart.
A photo of my dad, with short wavy brown hair and a brown beard, leaning on the railing of a bridge over a river, looking at the camera and smiling.
He would have been 25ish in this photo, so it was just a couple years before he died. I’m gonna try to remember him like this, and imagine he gave me that hug I can’t remember.
And that he’d love the real me just as much.
I miss you, Daddy.
Tilly Bridges, end transmission.
tillysbridges@gmail.com