Here’s something you might not know: the person who titles a book is not always the person who wrote it. I’ve written three so far and picked zero titles. It turns out I’m better at the inside than the outside. So I didn’t choose the title “This Is How It Always Is,” but I did write the line in the book that it comes from. And I’m so glad we landed on it because it makes people ask me what the title means, and that is a question I love to answer.
Books change a lot over the course of being written; at least, mine do. The seed of the idea, the inspiration, the reason I started writing the thing in the first place often gets lost along the way. But this idea was at the heart of this book from the moment the first inkling of it came to me one morning in the shower. (Sidebar: Sometimes, this is the only reason people who work from home even bother to bathe, so good ideas will come to them.) What appealed to me about this book idea from the beginning was not necessarily writing about a family with a transgender kid. What appealed to me were the commonalities. What appealed to me was how this is how it always is.
It’s true that most parents won’t have a transgender child. But most parents will have a child who is sometimes gender non-conforming. And all parents will have a child who is sometimes non-conforming, period. Sometimes your kids are right in the middle of whatever spectrum. And sometimes they’re out there on one edge or the other of any number of them. Sometimes your kids fit in and behave predictably and blend, and for a while their lives (and yours as a result) are smooth and straightforward and easy. And sometimes, well… not so much. So while transgender kids are relatively few in number, that feeling where some aspect of your kid is a little (or a lot) unusual is one of the more common emotions of parenting.
So is the one where then you don’t know what to do next. The decision to love and support your kids when their lives go in directions you’re not prepared for is an easy one. Of course you’re going to love and support them. The hard question isn’t whether. The hard question is how. How do you proceed when kids are always changing, all the time and unpredictably and in directions you never imagined? How do you proceed when you don’t know for sure what to do? When the information you have is incomplete and uncertain? When you don’t know if changes are here for a week or a year or forever? When the paths ahead are rough and unclear? When no one can decide but you? When your kids’ happiness and confidence and entire future feels at stake?
I don’t know. I don’t know how you proceed. But what I do know is this: These moments feel aberrant but they’re not. This is how it always is. The stakes feel higher when it’s you and yours, the circumstances vary hugely, but every single parent in the world asks these same questions. Raising kids is challenging, but also isolating—so you become convinced there’s no one who quite understands your particular circumstances and no one with the big picture and no one who gets your kid and no one who’s ever answered these particular questions before. It makes us feel alone at the times when we most need support. So that’s why I wrote this book—not just to say, “You’re not alone” but also to say, “It’s like this for everyone all the time.”
As parents, we feel such pressure to make the right decisions as if there is only one good answer and we’d know for sure what it was if only we were smart enough. And unfortunately, that’s not how parenting works. But fortunately, that’s not how parenting works for anyone. We’re all in this together for this is how it always is. And while that might not make it any easier to make all the impossible decisions parenting requires, isn’t it nice to have company?
