This Is How It Always Is

by Laurie Frankel

There was nothing redemptive about a dying child.

This had always pissed him off about Romeo and Juliet, its ending platitude that at least the feud was laid to rest and the fighting families had come together as if this somehow made it worth losing their teenagers. As if Romeo and Juliet would have been willing to die just so their parents would get along.

“There’s nothing good that can come out of a child being sick.” “No.” “There’s nothing that makes that fair or worth it.” “No, there isn’t.” “It’s narratively insupportable,” Penn explained. “It’s weird how little narrative theory there is in hospitals,” said Rosie. “Yours might be all there is.” “Then it’s a good thing I’m here,” said Penn.

“The armor wasn’t empty. The armor was full. What was inside the armor was a story, a story wanting to get out.” “Why did it want to get out?” “That’s what all stories want. They want to get out, get told, get heard. Otherwise, what’s the point of stories? They want to help little boys go to sleep. They want to help stubborn mamas fall in love with dads. They want to teach people things and make them laugh and cry.”

“Babies do start babbling around six months or even earlier, Mom,” the doctors would say. Only a few of them called Penn Dad, but she was always Mom. This must have been covered in the fellowship year if you did peds because no one in all her years of training had ever suggested to her that she call a patient’s parent Mom. If anyone had, she would have explained that its subtext—you know less about your child than I do, for I am a trained professional and also because, as a woman, you are slightly hysterical—was offensive, untrue, and frankly embarrassing for the physician.

Rosie’s point was more this: the normal state of children is nothing remotely resembling normal. Which makes it hard to identify the aberrations when they come.

“I’m not usually,” said Claude. This, Rosie reflected, even at the time, was true.

“Well, real ladies,” said Rosie. She’d been tongue and cheeky—and exhausted already with a long day ahead—but this one came back to haunt her.

Real ladies wear clean, pressed dresses.” Didn’t you know then, the doctors said later? Weren’t you listening?

“Bullshit then.” Carmelo was not a woman bogged down by semantics. “He’s fine. Look at him! He’s ecstatic. He’s euphoric.” “For the moment.” Carmelo looked at her daughter. “For the moment’s all there is, my darling.”

“It means you are banning peanuts and purses just in case they might cause problems even though they’ve caused none yet and despite the fact that doing so may infringe on the rights and well-being of your student citizens.”

Five years of Orion wearing all manner of weird stuff to school had occasioned not so much as a raised third eyebrow from anyone. “What an imaginative boy Orion is,” his teachers said. “His spirit brightens everyone’s day.” If an eyeball sticker was creative self-expression, surely Claude should wear what he wanted to school. How could you say yes to webbed feet but no to a dress, yes to being who you were but no to dressing like him? How did you teach your small human that it’s what’s inside that counts when the truth was everyone was pretty preoccupied with what you put on over the outside too?

But Rosie was also used to conflicting emotions, for she was a mother and knew every moment of every day that no one out in the world could ever love or value or nurture her children as well as she could and yet that it was necessary nonetheless to send them out into that world anyway.

He was already worried his teacher and his classmates thought he was weird. The third to last thing Rosie wanted to do was make him think his parents thought so too. The second to last thing she wanted to do was make him self-conscious about what he wanted to wear and who he was. But the last thing she wanted to do was ignore her baby as he slipped away from her and disappeared.

“How do we teach him that?” said Penn’s bees. “You don’t!” Mr. Tongo clapped his hands, delighted. “He’s already learned that. You have to help him unlearn it. You have to help him see that if he’s disappearing from the world, that’s too high a price to pay for fitting in. He has to see how ‘You shouldn’t push even though you want to’ isn’t the same as ‘You shouldn’t wear a dress even though you want to.’ None of that’s any different for Claude than for anybody else. It’s all part of growing up.”

But wherever it goes from here, the best thing about gender dysphoria is this. Ready? Claude’s not sick! Isn’t that wonderful?”

“What would make things easier?” Penn got down on his knees so he could meet his son eye to eye. “What would make things easier?” Rosie got down on her knees to offer something close to prayer.

“I just feel a little bit sad. Sad isn’t bleeding. Sad is okay.” He was wrong about that though because his happiness was his parents’ first concern. Rosie took a bottomless breath and whispered, “Do you want to be a girl, baby?” To which Penn, Tongo-tutored, appended, “Do you think you are a girl?” They waited, fathomless breath held, fathomless fear held, just barely, at bay. Claude only cried. “I don’t know.”

She smiled down at him and shone love deep into his eyes from the depths of her own. “You can be anyone you want.” Claude looked love back at his parents and whispered, “I want to be a night fairy.”

“Do you know what ‘fairy’ means?” said Ben, very seriously. “Do you know what that’s slang for?” Rosie did, for she was a human on the Earth. “He’s five.”

“Easy is nice, but it’s not as good as getting to be who you are or stand up for what you believe in,” said Penn. “Easy is nice, but I wonder how often it leads to fulfilling work or partnership or being.” “Easy probably rules out having children,” Rosie admitted.

“But it’s terrifying,” she whispered. “If it were the right thing to do, wouldn’t we know it?”

“Never,” Penn agreed. “Not ever. Not once. You never know. You only guess. This is how it always is. You have to make these huge decisions on behalf of your kid, this tiny human whose fate and future is entirely in your hands, who trusts you to know what’s good and right and then to be able to make that happen. You never have enough information. You don’t get to see the future. And if you screw up, if with your incomplete, contradictory information you make the wrong call, well, nothing less than your child’s entire future and happiness is at stake. It’s impossible. It’s heartbreaking. It’s maddening. But there’s no alternative.”

“So the comfort you can offer me about sending our son to school next week dressed as a girl fairy is that it seems like a good guess.” Penn shrugged. “It’s worth a shot.”

But Penn went. That was another thing Claude wanted when asked. Yes, he wanted Penn to come to kindergarten for the day as long as he sat in the back and said nothing and left at lunchtime. So that’s what Penn did. He sat on an impossibly tiny chair, knees up by his shoulders, heart up in his throat, and sweated. It was three degrees outside.

could start over where no one knew who they really were so they could be, instead, who they really were.

They say it is what you never imagine can be lost that is hardest to live without. Rosie had always assumed this referred to postapocalyptic scenarios where what you had to live without was power or water or Wi-Fi, but in fact, it was deeper sown than that. It reminded Penn of the French toddlers whose family had rented the house next door the summer he was sixteen. It was très irritant how much better French they spoke than he did, and it was even beaucoup plus irritant that they remembered, without even trying, which nouns were masculine and which were feminine when he could not, even though he’d spent a thousand hours studying and they weren’t even potty trained yet. Now his whole life was like that.

Neither Claude nor Poppy seemed bothered one way or the other, but Penn felt something essential in his brain had been severed. Whatever link you got for free that picked the appropriate pronoun whenever one was called for was permanently decoupled, and suddenly Penn’s mother tongue was foreign.

They all went to Phoenix for spring break. Poppy went to the mall with his grandmother, shared cinnamon pretzels in the food court, and threw pennies into the fountain to make a wish. He wished everything would always stay exactly like this because suddenly, for the first time in either of his lives, all the kids wanted to be his friend. Shy, all-alone Claude was replaced by laughing, gregarious Poppy, who saved his allowance to buy a fairy calendar on which he recorded all the requests he got for playdates.

Rosie hated that calendar. Penn adored it. To Penn, it represented a triumph, difficult things overcome and implemented. Maybe the transition from Claude had been daunting and fraught, but here was Poppy, loved, friended, present, no longer disappearing off the page. He considered the calendar a hard-won trophy. To Rosie, it bespoke people’s cloying, pandering, PC bullshit and a strange Poppy cachet. Having status, she warned Penn, was not the same as having friends. Maybe parents just wanted their kids to invite Poppy over so they could gossip to their own friends or make a big s...

Rosie appreciated the support but wasn’t sure parenting ever really qualified as brave—or maybe it always did—because it’s not like you had a choice. But what she would have chosen, she got too. Poppy’s hair was still short, but not short enough to prevent Rosie from plaiting two little braids every morning, one on each side, which Poppy tucked happily behind his ears.

Rosie tried not to let any of it get to her. She had too much to do without worrying about her kid’s friends’ parents’ ignorance. Her job wasn’t to educate them. Her job was just to raise her kid, all her kids.

“Everyone in the car,” she said, and turned to face down Nick Calcutti Sr. with her husband.

Maybe Penn was just incredulous to find himself in a low-budget action film all of a sudden.

“She must feel pretty outgunned.” Penn looked puzzled so the stranger nodded at Poppy. “Her and me both,” said Penn.

On the last night of school, Rosie was at work, and Penn was doing bedtime. Grumwald’s friends were over, helping him pack. Grumwald was leaving his parents’ house to go make his way in the world. It seemed silly to the king and queen that he should do so. Grumwald didn’t need to earn any money, for the castle was his to live in as long as he liked. He didn’t need a job, for prince was job enough already. He didn’t need a way in the world. He needed a way to stay out of the world, to stay home, to stay put. But Grumwald had secrets which meant he had to go. And it was time. “How will you learn to be king if you go?” Grumwald’s father and mother pled. “How will I learn to be king if I stay? I have to go.” “Go where?” his parents moaned. “Away.” “But if you don’t have anywhere specific you need to be, why can’t you just be here?” “Here is the only where that’s not away,” Grumwald explained. “Away is anywhere that is not here. So that’s where I must be.” Even though they were the queen and king, his parents were confounded, as parents of young people—not too young, Penn emphasized—are meant to be. They were worried about him being anywhere but there, Away as he called it. They could not find Away on any map, though they called in their atlas maker and made him do a thorough search. Grumwald was a little worried too, truth be told, but he had to go. He also knew some things his parents did not, and these things gave him strength. He knew he had infinite stories to see him thro...

Penn was a poet and a storyteller and a disciple of the cult of narrative theory, a grown man who still believed in fairy tales and happy endings.

Head colds should be tolerated. Children should be celebrated.

“You can’t uproot a whole seven-person family because of the needs of just one of them,” said Penn, and it wasn’t clear whether the “just one” in question referred to Poppy, with his need to be somewhere he could be who he was, or Rosie, with her need to be Away, but that was how Penn lost the argument regardless because of course you could uproot a whole family of seven for the needs of just one of them because that’s what family means.

Leaving wasn’t weak, and it wasn’t giving up. It was brave and hard fought, a transition like any other, difficult and scary and probably necessary in the end. Fighting it only delayed the inevitable.

On the final descent into Seattle, they flew so low over snowy, craggy Mount Rainier it looked like they could hop a few feet out of the plane onto its lid and just walk down. And that’s what the whole move felt like in the end, in the beginning, epic and age-old and monumental, ice-covered and treacherous and breathtakingly beautiful.

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For the first few thousand of them after they met someone, it was too soon, Poppy’s story too awkward and complicated, too intimate, too risky to share with new acquaintances. But by the time those acquaintances became close friends, it was too late. Perhaps there was a perfect moment in between, when you were close enough to tell but not so close it was problematic that you hadn’t done so already, but it was infinitesimal, too fleet and fleeting to pin down, visible not even in hindsight.

“You can tell anytime,” Penn said, “but once people know, they can never unknow.” For such a short statement, it was astonishing how much of it proved untrue.

“No one here knows. They say she and they say her, and it’s like they’re not even pretending, you know?” “They’re not,” Penn said. “It’s like I’m not even pretending too.” Poppy’s eyes were closing, sleepy-happy.

“Well, no one here knows who we really are,” said Rosie. “No, it’s the opposite.” Her daughter shook her head happily. “It’s like they know exactly.”

And so she missed it, his warning, his fledgling teenage foresight that secrets are miserable things, that secrets, be they deliberate or accidental, will out, and then it won’t matter where you live, for no place anywhere can protect you from the power and the fallout of a secret once exploded.

Rosie envied the dog, for whom it was socially acceptable to walk around whining ceaselessly when she was feeling anxious.

“No, it’s like a fairy tale,” said Penn. Rosie rolled her eyes at him. “Maybe you look like a filthy scullery maid, but inside, you’re really a princess, and if you’re good, you find the right grave to cry on or the right lamp to rub, and you become a princess on the outside too. You look like a frog, but kiss the right lips and you magically transform into the prince you’ve known yourself to be inside all along. If you’re good and worthy, you always get an outside to match your inside. Virtue leads straight to transformation; transformation leads instantly to happily ever after.”