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Thread. My 12yo kid has had a tough time these past couple of years with the family break-up, school & coming to terms with transitioning from a she/her to a they/them identity. She’s been sad a lot & spent a lot of time alone. There has been a lot of anger and violent outbursts.
It’s been a long and dark period if truth be told. But we’ve had a lot of support from social and children’s mental healthcare services and slowly but surely these past months, we’ve seen green shoots of parts of her old self coming back and parts of new new personality emerging.
It feels like both me & her mum firstly understanding, then coming to terms with her/their preferences around gender identification has been pivotal. She/they now identify as non-binary. While we’ve been cool with that, I won’t lie, the gender politics has been a learning curve.
They no longer wish to be called by their “dead name”, so the name we chose for her/them at birth has been rejected & replaced with a kind of a nickname. That’s been difficult to get my head around: changing the muscle memory of calling out by their original name is a challenge.
The whole third-person thing is of course a minefield. But slowly we’ve all shifted into this new way. I recently introduced them to a neighbour on the street the other day as “my kid” instead of defaulting to “daughter” and they was visibly chuffed about me doing that.
Their sister, my 15yo daughter struggles with it. She’s more traditional in the way she sees the world & the sibling rivalry is real. But she’ll get there. She choses to call them a completely different nickname - bum - which seems to be happily accepted. I generally use “kiddo”.
This, along with a number of other interventions by the services all seems to have helped. They’ve been bouncing back of late: slowly their smile has come back & the sound of laughter has returned. Yesterday they was dancing around the kitchen, the first time in a very long time.
Can’t say how happy it made me to see them dancing, bouncing back and beginning to find their own path in life, no matter how unconventional that might be. The music was some thrash-metal racket and the lyric “satan” occasionally interjected, but I’ll take it. Merry Christmas.
