Chapter 1: MOTHER OF A DAUGHTER

Chapter 1: MOTHER OF A DAUGHTER

From It's Your Story to Tell: Essays on Identity from a Messy Life Well Lived" by Maryann Lombardi

“Your story is what you have, what you will always have. It is something to own.” -- Michelle Obama, Becoming

I am no longer the mother of a daughter. For fourteen years I was. Then one day in the waiting area of New York’s Penn Station, I was informed I was not. This is an undeniably selfish way to mention my child’s second coming out, but it is nonetheless true.

We had just spent a delightful day in New York City, seeing the musical The Prom on Broadway. Our usual after-show ritual includes a walk down Eighth Avenue and a stop at Balducci’s for sandwiches and copious amounts of candy, and then our leisurely stroll continues down to Penn Station. 

My husband and I had lived in New York City for ten years before our child was born. Although it seems like a lifetime ago, I always feel a sense of ease moving through the streets. I’m strangely comforted by the contrasts of the city. How you can feel a sense of privacy while amid all the chaos that surrounds you. How the people in the city can be equally cold and giving at the same time.

Back at Penn Station my child shared that they didn’t identify as a girl anymore and also didn’t identify as a boy. I was confused and momentarily distracted because they had chosen another public place for a coming out conversation. Their first coming out happened in the Moroccan desert while we were glamping (glamour camping). The camp included eight other families who had come from all over the world to enjoy a unique experience in the Sahara—just as we had. 

Accompanying my confusion about their gender was a jumble of emotions and questions, along with an overwhelming sense of pride. The only thing that was clear to me was Penn Station didn’t have enough napkins to capture the tears and snot on display from the two of us. Two years later, on January 20, 2021, two wonderful celebrations occurred; the first female and first woman of color vice president was sworn in, and we celebrated the two-year anniversary of our Penn Station conversation. 

The established rules that govern who we are supposed to be are powerful, but they are also impermanent. These rules are taught to us in overt and discrete ways. When we are born, a complicated biological process pieces together the parts internal and external that upon birth set off a wave of assumptions about who we are and what we will become. And the fervor with which those assumptions are spun up into actions that define our choices or opportunities is a problem.

Once pregnant, somehow I just knew I was going to be the mother of a daughter. We were still living in NYC at the time and I was walking down Broadway when it hit me. I remember it like it was yesterday. Maybe I willed it to be, but I just knew I was having a girl. It’s possible my unconscious desire to figure some shit out with my mother led to my certainty. Or it could have been the mac and cheese I’d been eating for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Either way, at roughly twenty weeks it was confirmed with an awkward picture of our child spread eagle for the ultrasound. 

The discarding of my mother of a daughter narrative set off a journey of self-discovery I wasn’t expecting. Out of all the navel-gazing I had anticipated exploring over time, this was not the one I had envisioned. Our status as mother and daughter was confirmed, wasn’t it? Once the gender was identified fourteen years ago, there wasn’t much point to reassess it, right? I happily took it for granted. It was symmetry. There was a romance to it; it was the two of us against the world. I loved the fact that the closeness my child and I share filled a space missing in my relationship with my mother. I hadn’t realized how attached I was to having a daughter. It made sense at the time and it fed me. In hindsight, I think the narratives we hold onto the tightest are usually the ones we should disentangle first.

We are born into a world of circumstances and expectations that prescript our identity before we can even make a choice about who we are and what we want to be. There is so much about who we become that we do not choose. We do not choose our genetics, our socioeconomic status, our place of origin, our ethnicity or race, our parents’ education or physical or mental health, or even our parents desire to parent a child. Layered on top of that is a mirage of expectations perpetrated by our parents, our extended family, our schools, our care providers, our cultures, our media outlets, our governments and governmental systems, and our societies. We stand at the center of that matrix of circumstances and expectations, trying to develop our own personal identity. An identity that encompasses our gender or sexual identity, our goals or beliefs: the things that we claim as our own.

All these circumstances and expectations weave together into stories that tell us who we are, before we even think to ask ourselves the question: Who do I think I am? It is easy to get attached to those stories. They form this big thing called our identity. They form our sense of self, inform our relationships, and shape our roles in society. We often just accept those stories without doing the actual work to understand them. It’s worth considering we are the author of some of those stories, but many of them have been created for us by others. It’s good to distinguish the difference between the two. Soon after our Penn Station exchange, the questions emerged. Why was my mothering so intricately laced around the gender of my child? Why do I feel like I’m losing something? Why do others feel so invested in which bathroom my child uses? How did my child become so wise at such a young age? Why do Broadway musicals always inspire us to have deep, meaningful conversations at their conclusion?

These essays are an exploration of those questions and many more. They discuss questions that didn’t make sense until I began this journey into better understanding my identity thanks to my child’s willingness to question their own. Once the floodgates opened, the questions kept coming. Why do I feel guilty for loving my single parent life? Why is being a single woman so complicated? What does it mean to be a woman in the first place? What’s up with my relationship with my mother? Why do I have a hard time answering the question ‘Where do you come from?’” What is my origin story?

I guess, as Robert Frost wrote, the only way out is through. The only way to know is to get started.