Thanks, Mom!

You taught me how to be a dad.

“You were and still are a delightful impish character!!” (1981 or 1982.)Thanks, Mom.

Hi, Mom. This one’s for you.

I still haven’t figured out what it means to be a father—let alone a mother—but I can clearly trace the influence of all three of my parents on how I parent my daughter.

Ambitious, brilliant, and driven by her mission to help all kids, my mother returned to grad school after I was born to complete her Doctorate in Education at the University of Georgia. She later opened a groundbreaking ninth-grade school in Alexandria, Virginia, and was named the state’s “Principal of the Year.” Helping thousands of kids get through one of the hardest years of adolescence made my mother into a bottomless well of knowledge on child development. Long before, Dr. Becky, Dr. Walsh ensured that you walked away from every conversation with a lesson for life. Our dinner table conversations growing up often sounded like graduate seminars.

Dedicated to helping every kid be their best self, no matter their particularities or circumstances, meant that my mom valued difference. She didn’t tolerate, she celebrated. Thank, god, truly— it was the mid-1990s in the South, and my Irish Catholic, nun-educated mother realized very quickly that her two children were not going to conform.

My mother let me, her daughter, dictate short haircuts and shop in the boys’ clothing section (most of the time); she enrolled my brother in dance classes. She probably defended her choices to her family and community more than I’ll ever appreciate. That summary makes the support appear superficial, the real magic was how she fed our growing brains. She encouraged us to pursue all our interests, to sing out loud, to read voraciously, and to put out into the world what we felt in our hearts. And she told us the most important rule was that we had to love one another, unconditionally.

As any parent knows, a million parenting books are lined up ready to tell you exactly what to (and not to) do. I picked up a few after my daughter was born, and aside from some very specific lessons on sleep training and encouraging art-making, most of the advice sounded like common knowledge. I didn’t need all these books; Dr. Walsh had schooled me in an honorary degree in child development.

Check back in on this confidence when puberty strikes our house, I see it coming over the horizon.

Love you, Mom.

Happy Mother’s Day to all the moms, moms-to-be, and those who mother under different categories.

xx Kyle

Our mom smiles as we all stare into the sun. (Note, I wore basically the same outfit last month.)

We’re reading

Oliver Radclyffe

’s memoir, Frighten the Horses, this month. Reading Oliver is a profoundly affirming experience for me. I frequently scribble YES and LOVE in the margins. I underline all the sentences that could have come from my own body:

I wondered why I'd been afraid of this for so long. I could see a pattern emerging: the things I most feared often turned out to be the things I most wanted.

I’m particularly excited to talk about parenting with Oliver when we gather on May 28th. We’re both trans fathers, but we took different paths to get here. Oliver transitioned after giving birth to his four children—a particular sequence of events that makes my own head and body spin. I’m looking forward to talking to him about his approach to parenting, what he learned from his mom and dad, and what shifted after he transitioned.

Hope to see you then. In the meantime, join us over in the chat where I’m about to ask the group how we each define “mother” and “father.”