The Bold World Read online

  She’s been so restless these days, as though she’s uncomfortable in every place she stands. Your closest friend from high school comes over for the day, visiting from Florida, and her oldest daughter, barely eight, relays to her after they leave, “Penelope doesn’t like her skin.”

  When you first heard Penelope say “Cut off my hair,” you froze. The prospect of cutting it short wasn’t the issue. Remember your Spelman days. It also wasn’t an issue for Joe. Growing up in Ghana, most young schoolgirls wear short Afros. No, it was the way of Penelope’s declaration, the absolute clarity of it that stopped you short. She’d said it with so much determination in her voice that it caught you off guard. What could be so urgent that she’s trying to say? She’s only three years old, but she’s willing to go against what everyone around her sees as “normal.” It’s as though she knows something, a truth that she’s not willing to back down from.

  You and Joe looked at each other when she first made her demand, searching for answers. But the answers didn’t come, so you just walked away. Away from each other, away from Penelope. Away from the confusion you still feel.

  You think Joe understands more now that he’s home every day. He sees her unrest and tries to fix it. When his snuggles don’t work—when nothing he tries works—his face starts to have the same look on it that yours has had for months. Defeat.

  Baby’s suffering has become your suffering. The tantrums, the tears, the constant disruptions. The tension in the moments leading up to picking out an outfit for the day, or preparing for a bath at night. The agitation with her body, as if she’s ready to jump out of her skin. Clearly her hair, like so many other things, has been getting in the way of her joy.

  So, after she asks you for the third time to cut it off, you and Joe both know what you have to do. It just feels right. In fact, you realize that it’s the first good-feeling decision you’ve made together in a while. You don’t do it for convenience, or for your needs. You tune in and do it, simply, for her.

  Standing in the doorway, you watch as Joe leads Penelope into the bathroom and begins slowly cutting off row after row of her curls. In less than fifteen minutes the deed is done, and a smiling, glorious child emerges. She walks out of the bathroom with a lightness you’ve never seen before; it swirls around her, eventually spreading throughout the entire house like incense. A lightness you want to bottle up and preserve for her so that she’d never be without it again.

  * * *

  —

  Don’t stop, don’t slow down. Keep going. Keep pushing. Push a little more.

  Amid your frenzied days, you start to notice things. Penelope’s agitation rippling, deepening, expanding. Cutting the hair helped. Finally letting her wear clothes from the boys’ department has helped, too. But these changes are not enough. You realize she will never be a pretty dress and Mary Janes kind of girl. The short rebellious hair and wide-legged jeans are part of the presentation—how she wants to be seen—but you know, at least you think you know, that these small changes are not telling the full truth.

  Tiny differences—things you’d never noticed before—come into sharp focus when Penelope lays her eyes on them. She is a merciless judge, so attuned to what makes “girl” and what makes “boy” that you now analyze details that were once invisible to you: the sharpness of a collar, the size of a button, the hidden messages in the bedtime stories you tell her. The sweet, smiley tone in your voice when you talk to her and Georgia versus the matter-of-fact one you use with Cassius and Othello—even with Joe.

  You see these things because Penelope reacts to them. How she frowns when Joe still calls her Baby, even after she’s communicated to you both how much she hates that nickname. How much she hates being treated differently from her brothers—softly, delicately, with the extra care often reserved just for girls. And because you notice these things, you start to resent the blind spots of Joe’s affections. You understand he is expressing his love in the only way he knows how, and you love him for that—but you still get mad. Can’t he just do whatever makes her happy? you think. It’s hard to watch the push and pull between them. You wonder when Joe’s going to catch up.

  The smiley voices, the feminine clothes, the expectations and assumptions for girls—they add up to a story your daughter doesn’t see herself in. Present them to Penelope and her agitation builds, her anger bubbles up and spills onto anyone within reach. And it lingers, too—she is mad more than not. She’s a bully on the playground, and a bully at home. This anger follows her around everywhere.

  There is a bigger darkness looming, you know. Every night for months, Penelope wakes up screaming, her cries wild. You and Joe take turns rushing into her room to find out what’s wrong. She tells you something about monsters, that they are chasing her, ready to gobble her up. You untangle her from sweat-soaked sheets, rubbing her back and touching her face so she can feel you next to her. You tell her something Mama used to tell you when you had nightmares: “Next time, say to the monster, ‘This is my dream—go away!’ ”

  But looking at your daughter’s face, her eyes wide with fear and her voice a whisper, you know the monster is getting the best of her. You feel that something is very wrong. You feel it like a dull ache in your gut and in your chest. It reminds you of when the monster used to invade your dreams, chasing you for miles. You feel small again when you see how troubled your daughter is. You feel in danger again when you hear her crying at night. All you want is for the monster to go away. All you want for Penelope is peace.

  ELEVEN

  The Room

  IT HAPPENED IN 2011 during Penelope’s third year, late in the month of June. School had just let out for the summer and we’d begun spending long weekends at our house in Callicoon, a little mountain town on the New York–Pennsylvania border, near the Delaware River. The place is dewy and vibrant green—all the surrounding sounds made softer by the moss and thick trees encircling the property, and the rush of the stream that snakes around the back of the house. We have no neighbors up there, save for the black bears who stroll across the front yard at dawn during summertime, and all the little critters—the crickets and woodpeckers and frogs—who’ve made our backyard their own. The life we fall into when we walk through the house’s big wooden door has become our haven. It’s a space, I always think, that demands tranquillity. But on that particular afternoon, Penelope was fighting back against the calm, being especially difficult, displaying the usual outbursts on hyperdrive—throwing toys, provoking her siblings, refusing clothing, and falling on the floor in hysterics more than once.

  “Baby, find something nice to do!” I remember ordering from my favorite spot on the couch.

  She steamrolled through the living room, keen on taking down anything in her way. Then she zeroed in on Cassius, who, in his signature style, had just finished building an intricate tower of colorful wooden blocks that I knew Penelope had in her sights. She made her move, and with one deliberate push took down her brother’s creation. He was devastated, shocked, and soon both kids were in tears. After all that yelling and screaming, I felt like joining in, too.

  Exhausted from playing wrangler and referee, I decided to give both Penelope and myself a rare one-on-one time-out. I peeled her off the floor, scooped her up into my arms, and carried her into the kids’ bedroom, shutting the door behind us.

  I pulled her down onto the carpet with me and we sat face-to-face.

  “What’s the matter, love?” I exhaled, surrendering to whatever tirade was about to come. “Why are you so angry all the time?”

  A pause, and then a flood of tears sprang from her eyes. And then came this:

  “Because everyone thinks I’m a girl, Mama—and I’m not.”

  * * *

  —

  The stream passes right outside the kids’ room on its way to join the Delaware. We hear the water most clearly in that room—it sounds urgent,
galloping around the back of the house. Yet it is the kind of sound that doesn’t quite register until it does—one minute it’s background noise and the next it’s all you can hear. Whenever I revisit this conversation with Penelope in my memory, the stream’s presence is palpable—it was one of the most vivid parts of that day. Constant, strong, intruding, it was the soundtrack for everything soon to come.

  In the seconds that followed Penelope’s declaration, without hesitation, I pulled something from my Mom Rolodex of go-to references, words, and phrases that might fit the dilemma.

  I remembered a book Mom read to Ramona and me when we were kids, Free to Be You and Me—the gender equality clarion call of the 1970s. I told Penelope then that she was free to act however she felt. She wanted to roughhouse with her brothers, have short hair, and be just like the boys? I was on board. “However you feel is fine,” I encouraged. “It’s what’s inside that counts.”

  “You’re perfect the way you are,” I said. “I love you—and everything about you,” I said.

  But hearing this, Penelope’s face crumpled. She jerked her body away from me, straining to put as much distance between us as she could.

  We’d been here before—over and over and over. Penelope lying naked on the bathroom floor, her body in a tight coil while her tears made little pools on the tiles. Me lying next to her, trying to calm her. Every reassurance I gave was met with resistance and seemed to scratch her skin. Watching her in this room, I could finally recognize her expression for what it was—it was the look of deep disappointment. I had betrayed her. For Penelope, clearly the body had been the enemy. And if I didn’t understand that—if I were siding with the body—then I was the enemy, too.

  Picking her head up off the floor, Penelope tried again with me: “I don’t feel like a boy, Mama. I am a boy.”

  The words shook me. I knew then that Penelope was talking about something deeper than what I knew.

  Half the time as an adult, you already have the answer—or at least know what the shape of the answer looks like. We’ve done the job at work before, we’ve taken that route on the subway before. As parents, we’ve often dealt with the kid who doesn’t want to brush his teeth or do her homework. These tasks may be difficult, but they’re not necessarily surprising.

  But this? “I don’t feel like a boy, I am a boy”—this was a sentence I wasn’t prepared for. It rolled around in my brain, pinging against the folders of my experiences looking for a match, an appropriate response, and came back with nothing. Blank, opaque, nothing. And in that moment I believed I failed my child for not knowing. Failed because I didn’t see it coming, and could not offer up a plan.

  “I love you, but I don’t want to be you,” Penelope cried, tears now starting to spill down my own cheeks. I listened carefully to Penelope tell me about hating her body—hating it so much that she wanted a doctor to make her a “peanut.” She told me that her “tomorrow” would be worse than her “today” because tomorrow her body would look like mine. Penelope did not want tomorrow ever to come.

  I watched Penelope watching me, waiting for a response, and I heard myself say that there were doctors who could help. I made this promise to Penelope without knowing what “help” even meant. I didn’t know what being a boy looked like for my daughter, had no clue what truths “boy” held for her. But I did know the fear in her eyes. I know what it is like to feel small and alone, to feel afraid and weighed down, boxed in, constricted. And so when she told me “I’m not a girl, I am a boy,” although I did not have an answer, I wasn’t compelled to say “You’re wrong.”

  But the guilt—the guilt seized me by the throat immediately. What did I forget to do? I thought. What have I missed? Had the tension between me and Joe, Penelope’s difficult birth, my packed work schedule, manifested into something fundamentally imbalanced in my child? Or did it go deeper than that? Maybe I’d forgotten to tell Penelope the stories—of Toni Morrison and Maya Angelou and Nina Simone and Dr. Cole and her own grandmothers—all my sheroes who proved that I could be a woman and be more than one thing. Having been raised to cherish being female, I felt as if my child’s rejection of that venerable symbol was my failure. The women in my family are proud of who we are, proud to be female. But my own daughter was ashamed.

  My emotions were swinging wildly—between humiliation and protection. Between sadness and compassion. Between panic and relief. How can this be happening on my watch? How has this moment made its way into my life? But there were no explanations, no answers to the questions. Nothing but the silence, and that steady, galloping stream, filling up more and more space in the room.

  The minutes continued to tick away. And in front of me Penelope sat there, still. My hows and whys were muffled by the sight of my three-year-old—this person I’d made a vow to be responsible for, to tune in to, from the moment I’d felt Penelope’s presence inside me. This human, my human, was now suffering from a hurt rooted in something beyond the words immediately available to me.

  But beyond my understanding is clearly where my child exists. And so, after words fail me, when my thoughts and explanations run up against the dark, I decide that the only way to walk through what I do not know is to shut off my questions. To honor the gaps in my understanding and let those huge holes just be—taking up the space between us.

  We sat in that room together for hours, or days, or years, I don’t know. Time blurred, the earth spun a little slower. And as my tears continued to fall, I gave myself over to my child, learning about how Penelope wanted to be seen by the world.

  How…he wanted to be seen. How his heart beat.

  I took Penelope at his word, and at his feeling. And for the first time in my life as a parent, I allowed my child to take the lead on what would come next.

  I once saw an electric-pink sunset that hovered over the water in the most breathtaking way. It was so pure and vibrant and awesome that I needed to see it only that one time for it to be imprinted on me, deeply and profoundly, forever.

  On that day with Penelope, late in the month of June, I felt something close to that electric-pink sunset. Together, in the room without time, while the stream galloped toward the Delaware River, a seismic shift began to rumble around us.

  TWELVE

  Ten Thousand Hours

  MINUTES AFTER PENELOPE AND I EMERGED from the bedroom, I delivered the news to Joe. I did it like any other debrief on a typical kid meltdown, downplaying the major plot points in an effort to hold on to the deeper meaning a little longer, to sort things out on my own. I felt protective of the trust Penelope had given me, of the belief that I would not betray him or his secret, and of the hope that I was the person who could help.

  I saw myself in Penelope—both of us smaller than our fear, smaller than the world around us, and smaller than the answer. I had felt myself die in that room when I saw how scared Penelope was. And then I was born again as we sat together, and I realized that it would take my being present, with eyes and heart wide open, for my child to stay alive. Stay close to Penelope. I knew nothing more than that.

  If someone could have done that for me—looked into my pain and dissected it, thoughtfully, carefully, preciously—I would have clung to that person and never let go. Dropping the ball on Penelope, I felt, would have been like abandoning myself. It was that primal. For those reasons, it was easier than I expected to let the “she” next to Penelope’s name fall away. When we walked out of that room together, in my mind, Penelope became “he.”

  “So, Penelope just told me she’s a boy,” I said as I approached Joe, who was resting on the living room couch. He looked at me over the top of the cookbook he was reading and squinted, cocking his head, trying to get a better read on what I’d just said. “I got this, babe, don’t worry,” I told him, waving the words away as I said them—pretending our entire life hadn’t just turned upside down.

  “Penelope said she’s a boy” could n
ever sound the way it did when it came from Penelope’s mouth. It was like a message in a game of telephone that was sure to get mangled. I knew that attempting a detailed explanation to Joe would dilute the meaning. It would leave it susceptible to being explained away with sensible answers and practical reasoning—reasoning that took the shape of statements like “She’s confused” or “This is a phase” or “She’s just our tomboy.” Penelope’s news went beyond all that. I knew in ways I couldn’t yet articulate that this new information was vital—delicate, combustible—and needed to be treated with care. What it needed was time and protection, just as Penelope did. I wanted to keep it close to me, away from prying eyes, away from doubt and skepticism—and away from Joe, who would rationalize the information away with his practicality. I needed it to be just mine for a while.

  Luckily, this wasn’t hard to do. Raising children means there are always moments of total chaos in one corner while life goes on as normal in all the others. One kid falls out of bed, hits their head, and has to go to the hospital. Another kid gets rushed to the emergency room with a lung infection. Little crises pop up everywhere, but at the end of the day we’ve got to keep things moving. And so it was easy to pretend that this was another one of those times. I would handle the Penelope Event on my own while Joe kept the rest of the plates spinning.

  The night of our conversation in the mountain house, and in the months that followed, while the rest of the house slept I lay awake attempting to make mental pictures with Penelope’s declaration. Trying to reimagine body parts in bathing suits, summertime swimming, and first dates, reshuffling the pieces I knew until the image revealed a new assemblage of Penelope as “boy.” I tried to transpose my predesigned “normal” with this other thing that was so unformed, all raw and jagged edges. This thing that I couldn’t yet see clearly.