“Mommy Daddy.” “Dad 2.” These are some of the names my kids have started using as they transition away from calling me Mom?and I transition from female to male.
I have five kids. I met my husband, who?s five years older than I am, when I was 14. Our first child was born when I was 17 and is now nine. We had our second in 2009, our third in 2012, and then, finally, I gave birth to twin boys about 18 months ago.
Photo: Ian McCausland
All this time, as happy as I was being a parent and as much as I loved my babies, I never felt like the other moms. I was surrounded by stay-at-home moms whose husbands worked long hours in Alberta?s oil industry. Many of them embraced being the primary parent and homemaker, seeing those roles as extensions of their femininity. It was a conservative place and the gender roles were rigid: The women I knew talked about clothes and worried about whether their kitchens were clean enough. I was never comfortable with that life, and I wasn?t comfortable with myself. I connected more naturally with men, but mostly I felt like I didn?t belong anywhere at all. There were men and there were women. And then there was me. I was a tomboy growing up, jealous of the boys I knew because I wanted to be like them. Eventually, I started to think I actually wanted to be them. But in northern Alberta, where I grew up, there wasn?t a lot of education about LGBT people, specifically transgender people, so I wasn?t sure what to do with those feel...