Blog / 2024 / A Mother’s Confidence

She referred to her child using that word: child. She didn’t say “daughter” or “son.” There was no cutesy language like “rug rat” or “little one.” In fact, she didn’t even call her child a “kid.” The only other noun she used was “eldest,” and she referred to her eldest child with “they/them/their” pronouns.

This was notable because this mom was the author of a memoir, and, in her book, she’d referred to the child as a daughter. Still, looking around the circle of awed faces, I was pretty sure I was the only one in my library’s book club who noticed her word choice. It was a rare treat to have this local author at the meeting where we’d be discussing her book. I’d been as excited as the rest of the book club members, but when the questions turned to the author’s child—a person who’d been a newborn in the text and who was now a teenager—my interest as a genderqueer person sharpened.

Here was a mother doing what was necessary to acknowledge that the child was their own person, and that’s not easy.

I think it’s difficult for a lot of us to give the people in our lives the ability to establish their identity on their own terms. We tend to view others in relation to ourselves. We might think of a particular friend, for example, not as a whole and complex individual, but instead as the one who helps us laugh at our foibles, who makes us feel capable, or who brings out some other aspect of our personality more than someone else would.

I’ve talked a bit about the assumptions people make about me based on my being an artist, and I know that I sometimes assign restrictive roles to others as well. For instance, growing up, I assigned my brother the role of the socially adept sibling in order to explain away my social anxiety. For years, I defined the two of us against each other. In fact, it wasn’t until I was almost forty and I watched my brother being reserved and rather self-effacing at a celebration for the opening of a play he’d directed that I realized he might feel less-than-adept in social situations as well.

We all see others through our own filters, deciding who people are based on who we know ourselves to be. My guess is that it might be even harder for a parent to let go of their idea of who they think their child is. Yet here it was: a mother recognizing her kid’s sense of self.

The author didn’t correct anyone in the book club when they asked about her daughter—after all, these people were referring to the child in the way the writer had in her memoir. At the same time, the author didn’t shy away from talking about her eldest, and her confidence in the language she used to refer to her kid brought me so much joy.