The Bold World Read online

  We had seen the future in visuals, and the future looked good.

  NINETEEN

  The Lab

  I’M PART DREAMER, YES—but I’m also part realist. I know how important it is for people to explore and imagine beyond what’s directly in front of their eyes, but I also try to prepare my kids for the real world—the one in which people aren’t gentle, kind, and accepting. I know all five of my children need to learn about the hard truths, those ugly realities that are almost too painful to utter. We tell those realities knowing they’re hard, because they’re crucial for people who look like us to hear. The fact that many people hate us is a reality we must swallow.

  But it’s tough to coach a kid to be defensive, especially when it’s about who they are. I’ve always wanted my kids to be open and accepting, not closed off and ready for a fight. And I knew that for Penelope, that fight would be doubly hard. For him—and trans people like him—self-confidence is just half the battle. Every day he engaged with the outside world, he’d likely face people intent on poking holes in his truth. Or violently rejecting him altogether. I wasn’t prepared to be the one to tell Penelope—or any of my kids for that matter—that some people on this earth hate other people based on the simple fact of their existence. People hated Penelope for being transgender; hated us for being Black; hated little Black boys who turn into Black men, for nothing less than the history they evoke. I couldn’t deliver that blow to my children. What I wanted—needed—was to inform them without breaking them.

  In the same way that resistance builds muscle, I wanted to make them stronger from the pressures of life. So, as we opened up the dialogue on big topics more and more within our immediate family, I decided to allow the kids—in the house only—to discuss their opinions completely uncensored. Doing so would allow us to thicken our skins, stockpile our defenses, and get us ready for the real world.

  Our home became the laboratory for tough discussions—trans being at the top of the list.

  “So, what does transgender mean to you?” I asked the boys one night before bed. It was not long after we returned from camp, and it seemed like a good time to work in a conversation around transgender to see how they were feeling, and where each of them stood. Sometimes I liked to throw out blunt, to-the-point questions in hopes that the kids would respond just as viscerally.

  “Well…I don’t believe in transgender,” Cassius started. The strict, meticulous rule abider of the group, he reasoned that while he would always use male pronouns for Penelope, transgender was not scientifically proven. Penelope was still technically, biologically speaking, a girl. Female.

  “I respect you, Penelope,” he said from his top bunk, staring at the ceiling. “But you can’t just change your gender.” Hearing this, Penelope sat up, leaning on his elbow to get a better view of his brother. “It’s not scientific, Cassius,” he said with authority. “It’s not an opinion, either. This is just how God made me.”

  “Well, I don’t believe in God or transgender, Penelope. So, I’m sorry, but you’ve lost me on both points.” Just like his dad, Cassius was always demanding proof.

  Penelope, visibly annoyed, rolled his eyes. “You always have to be so sciencey, Cassius. It’s not always about science.”

  Cassius retorted, in his usual unbothered tone, “Life is science. Everything, even you, Penelope, must make biological sense.”

  “Well, you know what I think, Mama?” Othello chimed in from the bottom bunk, yawning, eyes nearly closed. “I believe in God. God is everywhere—even in my toe!”

  Othello was a believer—in Penelope, in God, in the Tooth Fairy, in transgender. Belief, to him, meant hope, and endless possibilities.

  That night, they continued for a few more minutes, respectfully bantering back and forth about those big topics—Gender, Religion, Belief—from underneath their cozy blankets adorned with stars, until sleep finally took over.

  * * *

  —

  After our first night in what I liked to call the Lab, nothing became off-limits. We “labbed” about gender, race, God, science—even who got the window seats in our truck. Pinching, teasing, touching, sharing—every conflict, every fight on the basketball court—got handled in Lab format. Sometimes we sat so close together that our knees touched, sometimes we each took a corner of the room to get as much space from each other as we needed. But the core has always remained the same: We talk from our truth, we listen without interruption, and we speak from our heart, not our ego. These were my only rules.

  My success rate at complying with these rules, particularly in the beginning, usually hovered around 75 percent. I remain guilty of talking over each and every person in our household on any given day to make my point. But I tried, with the Lab, to set a new standard. “Let him finish,” I’d say if one kid tried to interrupt another, too excited to wait his turn. Then, before I could stop myself, I was often blurting out my own two cents, too excited to wait my turn. But the Lab wasn’t about perfectly following the rules, it was about getting better with each try, practicing what we wanted to be. We were in a state of becoming, and in order to become, you have to do. If you don’t do, you will never become. So I used the Lab as a way for all of us to become better thinkers, listeners, and lovers.

  We would all do our best not to give in to knee-jerk reactions, or resort to yelling or drowning each other out—which was hard, because things do get heated with such polarizing topics. But I quickly found that sometimes the very things that we think divide us—those drastic and radical ideas—are exactly the points that end up pulling us together.

  “Mom, if you don’t get that Penelope is normal, you’ll just be old and weird,” Georgia said to me one day when she saw me stumbling over some point I was trying to make about transgender. She’s always had a particular way with me, a bluntness that forces me to be accountable for everything I say I stand for. I have to prove my conviction, each step of the way, and course-correct whenever I’m being hypocritical. She holds up the most scrutinizing mirror, and I see things I’ve never thought to look at.

  For Georgia, trans has never been a big deal. She was processing Penelope as trans at a time when she was coming into her adolescence, trying to investigate her own body—and her own identity. During the rare occasions when Georgia wasn’t shutting me down, or retreating into teenagerdom, I got glimpses of who she was becoming—the ideas she was starting to grapple with as she was navigating her way through her changing self. As I did when I was her age, Georgia was trying to suss out her place in the family, in society, among her peers, in relationship to boys. She was figuring out how she felt about belonging to multiple races (Black, white, and Asian), and how she might set about navigating the social nuances of growing up in New York City—the center of the center of the world.

  Sometimes we embark on those introspective journeys out of necessity, because, like Penelope, we experience a clear friction between who we are and who we’re “supposed” to be. But sometimes we do it simply because we’re curious to see what’s on the other side. Georgia has always been curious. She wants to know how, why, and what if—and she wants to understand those things in a tactile way. It’s always been Georgia’s mission to leave no stone unturned, she wants to question it all. For her, nothing is assumed.

  It was Penelope who sparked a conversation in Georgia’s mind, an internal dialogue about identity: Who are we allowed to be? Who are we not allowed to be? Watching Penelope unfold gave Georgia time to marinate all these questions that were forming within her, without the spotlight being on her. She could privately test the waters and see where she might arrive.

  I think people look first to see if obvious, visible diversity is present, and then, depending on how it’s received, they decide if they want to reveal their own form of variety. If we don’t see those visible differences, we aren’t as comfortable announcing our own less obvious nuances. With Penelope, Georgia g
ot a little comfort knowing that her parents—even when they weren’t totally on the same page—were at least willing to explore identity without judgment. When she’d see me changing my language to match Penelope’s reality, using “he” instead of “she,” Georgia would smile at me from across a room. Good job, Mama, she was telling me with her eyes. Georgia wanted us all to be better.

  Her words about my latest Penelope fumble nagged at me that day. Old and weird? Perhaps I’d been missing the point altogether, overemphasizing Penelope’s nuances as a trans person simply because of my age. My blinders, my generational presumptions around differences being important stood out to Georgia as awkward and unnecessary. And perhaps they did need to be relegated to “no big deal.” But, I told her, “Until lives are no longer at stake, Georgia, and liberties are no longer being denied, those nuances matter.” She nodded, getting it—then flashed me a smile and raised a clenched fist in solidarity as she walked out of the room. Politically, Georgia understood where I was coming from, but she was clearly less agitated by it all.

  There was a whole generation coming up under me whose definition of “normal” cast a far wider net than that of the generations before. In fact, they eliminated the net completely; Georgia was proof of that. The things my generation were still stuck on—gender, identity, sexuality, race—Georgia’s generation was chopping up, flipping around, slicing and dicing in an infinite number of ways.

  Penelope spoke to Georgia in a very personal way. He was, I think, a beacon for what was possible for her: a self far beyond boundaries.

  “Pleppy! You have to come see this photo!” Georgia yelled from the living room couch one day, photo albums spread all around her. We’ve all thought it ironic that Georgia and Penelope favor each other so intensely. Neither of their dads has any golden-hued features, yet Penelope and Georgia share the same golden skin, light brown curls that go almost blond in the summertime, eyebrows that fade into their skin tone, and lovely, kind faces.

  Penelope ran over to Georgia, plopping himself down on the couch next to his big sister. “Guess who this cutie-pie is?” Georgia held up a photo of a chubby, smiling toddler wearing a pink swimsuit.

  “That’s me!” Penelope grinned with delight.

  “Nope, it’s me when I was young. We’re twins! You’re the boy version of me.”

  Georgia always found a special connection between herself and her siblings. With Cassius it was intellect—she’d sit with him for hours in his bedroom reasoning with him, talking him out of being angry with me for something I’d done, always using logic to get her point across, never frustration. With Othello, Georgia found rhythm—they’d stand in front of our living room mirror while she taught him whatever dance was trending with her friends. Always, he’d master the move in five minutes flat. “Ooooo, get it, Othello! Get it!” she’d cheer him on, taking videos of him on her phone.

  “I thought that was meeee!” Penelope flipped through picture after picture, blissfully unable to distinguish between himself and his big sister. Penelope looked up to Georgia, and resembling her was a huge compliment. I loved how it didn’t matter to either of them that one is a girl and the other is a boy. All they see is their love, and their aura.

  They continued looking at old pictures of Penelope in pink dresses and Georgia in plastic dress-up high heels, exclaiming, “Look how Mama used to dress us! We’re so cute!” Georgia never once made the images of Penelope in a dress seem shameful or awkward, she praised each one just the same. I could see what Georgia was doing—she was helping to establish Penelope’s total and complete self-acceptance, despite the silly clothing that Mama might have draped over him once upon a time. She placed the mistake on me—“Silly Mama!” she’d say—and then keep all the glory for themselves: “We’re so good-looking, Penelope.”

  Cassius’s main line of argument whenever it came to the transgender conversation was that believing in something does not make it true: “If you can’t calculate it or measure it, it can’t be real.”

  I often got lost in metaphysical discussions with Cash. He’s two grades ahead of his age and eats three-hundred-page books for breakfast. Cassius wants to know the chemistry and the makeup of this life. He craves to understand the mystery of existence by examining its elements—the molecules and particles, life’s true essence. He takes pride in knowing the size of the earth, the heat of a shooting star, the density of lava, and the combustion point of liquid nitrogen. Things that don’t even register to me. He teaches me to examine, to probe and consider the details.

  “Do you know that the air around a lightning bolt is hotter than the surface of the sun? Do you know that if antimatter and normal matter collide there will be a gargantuan explosion?” Cassius will follow me around the house all day—and anyone else who happens to be around—asking us questions he knows we don’t know the answers to, just so he can bring us up to speed.

  That intellectual appetite keeps him really inquisitive, which is a good thing, but it also makes him deeply analytical—to the point where he leaves little room for gray area. Cassius takes after his mama: He likes to be in control. The idea of having someone else’s ideas dictating or informing what he believes is a no-go for him. He’d rather come to his own conclusions, through his own experiments. I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if he actually does believe in God and transgender, but he’ll never admit it—not if he feels cornered, or pressured to conform.

  But my heart hurts for Cassius when he tells me he doesn’t believe in immeasurable things. “Some things can’t be proven, not scientifically at least,” I remind him. Because more powerful than quantifiable proof is the notion that even without concrete confirmation, things do exist—some of the best, most awesome things. Powerful, soul-defining unexplainable things, like love. I’m past the point of wanting more things, to fill up more closets and drawers. If I want for anything, it would be more love.

  Unfortunately, we can’t tell people about love, they have to feel it—even if briefly. Only then does it become real. And only then will they seek it out for the rest of their lives. I’ve witnessed the reality of love and how it pulls us toward each other, day after day. Forcing us to believe blindly, making us pour our faith into one another. Without knowing exactly where we’ll end up, we follow.

  Although Cassius thinks practically and logically, making it hard for him to believe in things like God or transgender, I’m seeing something else emerging in him, something surprising. He, more than any of the other kids, loves teddy bears. He sleeps with five in his bed at night, closely snuggled up to them. And in the morning before he leaves for school, he wraps them in blankets so they won’t be alone and scared. I quietly watch as he talks to his bears—about his seven-year-old problems, I imagine—and then the expression on his face when they respond. I love that he’s having a relationship that doesn’t quite make sense.

  After watching this for several weeks, one day while sitting in the living room I approached him. “Cassius, do you still not believe in God?”

  “No, Mom. I don’t.”

  I paused for a couple of beats, poker-faced. “Well, I’ve noticed you talking to your bears lately. Do they answer you?” His expression changed to an “I-know-what-you’re-about-to-say” look. I smiled. Cassius is smart and could tell what kind of conversation I was steering him toward. One about belief, and the importance of the intangible.

  “Yes, Mom, we communicate,” he says, leaving it at that. I try not to hit him over the head with the point I’m making. “That’s interesting,” I say, smiling, “that you and your teddy bears…communicate.” I shoot him a wink, so he knows I’m on his side.

  After that, I started buying Cassius more teddy bears in a variety of sizes so he could travel with them, and he smiled with pure, undisguised happiness every time I brought a new one home. When he thinks no one is looking, even more snuggling takes place with his teddies—and he’s cuter than ever before. �
��Cute” was never a word that I typically used for Cassius. Smart, presidential, exact, but not “cute.” But now, I’m starting to see his cuteness overflowing.

  Going forward, I remind myself that Cassius, our realist, our scientist, the one who’s skipped two grades and sits at the dinner table with a compound microscope next to him, is also a fantasist and a dreamer. He has the ability and the desire to step outside that straightforward reality and go into the other world, the one of teddy bears, and perhaps one day, even God.

  It was this kind of boundary pushing that I appreciated seeing and the type of work I was always practicing with my kids—in the Lab and outside it. Erasing the lines of our limitations, redrawing the parameters of what’s possible, expanding our definition of normal. Whether it was Georgia telling me I was “old and weird” for not getting it, or Othello finding faith in every inch of his body, growth within these tough conversations always required one fundamental skill: mental flexibility—the ability to see and work through things from alternate perspectives.

  With Nain, the sibling connection was and always will be about invisible bonds. The kids’ early vocabulary around family has always been rooted in love, not biology—in embracing the multiple ties that bind us. Nain has loved Penelope wholly from the very first day they met. Penelope was calling Nain “brother” before I started calling him “son.” And that clarity of love enabled them to move with each other wherever and however they were. Nain never once missed a beat when it came to thinking of Penelope as his brother instead of his sister. For Nain, transgender has always been just vocabulary, semantics. And honestly, the two of them seem to live outside language anyway—cracking up on the couch over some joke I can’t even understand, using barely decipherable slang: “Buckets, Penel! I get buckets! All day, errr day”—whatever that means.