Lilac. The color of the grapes that grew on the vines along the fence line.

The popping sound they made when we’d pull them off and bite down on the crunch. The sweet and sour competing like waves across our tongues.

I miss those days like I miss the soft petals of lilacs brushing against my skin. You’d pull them straight from the bush, twigs snapping and aching against your strength.

I’d lie down in the warm spring grass, my bare feet clenching against the damp soil, that had moistened by the spring rain.

You always laid with me, softly brushing the petals across my freckled skin. Nose. Cheeks. Lips. The lips you had kissed so many times before.

I’d breathe in those petals, breathe them in like they’d be the last thing I would ever smell. And I’d breathe you in, too. Your oaky cologne that hit me between my legs every time you wore it, the scents tangling, coating every part of me.

The petals drifting lower, across my collar bones that peeked out from the top of my shirt. Down my stomach, circling my navel.

The tickle I felt as your fingertips stretched out playfully, past the stem, brushing ever so slightly against my bare thighs until your palm, along with those petals, would cup the length of me, the hardness between my legs neither of us could ignore.

That smell. That glorious smell.

Lilac and oak.

Lips and limbs, teeth and tongue.

Every part of me lit up like the spring sun that warmed the grass and made the grapes and lilacs grow.

Pounding hearts, pounding together.

Always together.

God, how I love lilacs.

Photo by Olha Suntsova on Unsplash

The real problem with the label of girl began with my dad, as I’m sure many people assigned female at birth have experienced. When I was little, I was the socially acceptable “tomboy.” I was a super hero loving, tree climbing, fort building kind of girl who relished in my dad treating me like the son he didn’t have. When he took me fishing and target shooting, I felt more like a son than a daughter. When I told him I wanted to be a welder like him when I grew up, he was so proud. I’d be a man just like my dad. I never said I was a boy because it was the 80s. There was no language to describe those feelings, and there was never an indication from him that who or what I am was wrong.

When my brother was born, and my dad had a real son to love, the closeness I felt to the man I admired so much was gone. I was suddenly very aware that I was nothing like a boy or a man, and it was impossible to change his perception of me. The value I had once held in my dad’s eyes was gone, replaced by something weak and unworthy of all the attention I had experienced before. I felt broken, like I had failed him as not just a son, but as a daughter as well. In the rare moments where my dad saw me for who I am and praised my strength, intelligence, or ability to argue with the best of them, I felt a joy I can’t describe, and the only explanation I have for it now was that it was the real me trying to tell myself something true, that I couldn’t understand at such a young age.

I used to think I was just bad at being a girl, if there could be such a thing, and I often felt like a walking contradiction. I loved Disney princesses (honestly, I still do), but didn’t want to wear the dresses. I loved imagining myself as a mermaid, but would have preferred to not have a reason for the clam shells. I had friends who were girls, but I wanted to run around, wild and free, with the boys, not cry over scraped knees but rub the dirt a little deeper to prove I belonged there.

As I grew older, the division between my perceived gender and who I was inside expanded. A friend once said to me that she needed to take me shopping to teach me how to dress. But I liked my baggy t-shirts and cargo pants with way too many pockets. I liked shoving all of my shit into those many pockets instead of carrying a purse. Part of me was insulted by her comment, as if my style was inferior to hers. The other part of me felt like she was saying something about my soul like, Shawn, you’re not a real woman. You don’t belong. You need to be better at being a girl. That internal monologue was right on one count—I’m not a real woman because I’m not a woman at all.

Despite the indignation I felt from that conversation, I still tried to be the woman I wasn’t. I’d go through phases of buying cute girly clothes that exposed my cleavage because I liked the attention from men, or perhaps it was because it somehow validated the false belief that I could be a girl if I just tried hard enough. I would model myself after my friends and the popular styles. I had credit cards for Torrid, Lane Bryant, and Avenue, and they were always maxed out. I bought the damn purses I hated; I wore the ballet flats that were uncomfortable; and I had leggings in all colors and prints. Everything I did felt right socially and so very wrong internally, but it was the price I thought every woman paid to be girl enough for the world. I just didn’t realize that my price was three times higher than average.

When I was eighteen, I met a girl, and we became fast friends and hung out often. One night, she said, “You’d look so cute as a boy.” I honestly can’t tell you why that one sentence upended my entire world, but it made me realize something important about myself—I had a choice. If being a girl was hard and didn’t feel right to me, I could choose an identity that did. So I went home, and I cut my hair. I changed my wardrobe, but not much because I was in my off-girl season, where I wore what I found most comfortable and not what I thought I should have been wearing. When my dad saw me like that for the first time, he called me a dyke. I knew right then and there that he’d never see me as a son, no matter what I changed. I ended up detransitioning pretty quickly. Maybe he was right, I thought. But a year or so later, when I no longer lived with him, I tried again.

This time, I was armed with information. I researched how to transition in the state of Oregon, places to get surgeries, how to change my name legally, and I started building a support network of trans and queer people. Most importantly, I asked for people to use he/him pronouns for me and call me by a different name (Gavin Orion Hawk—yikes). But despite all of the research I had done, and knowing I was transgender, I still had no clue how to communicate it fully with others. How could I possibly describe something as complicated as gender identity? So I did what I was supposed to do, what I was required to do in order to transition medically or legally at the time: I booked an appointment with a gender therapist.

I was so nervous at that appointment. I could have told her about other trans stories I had read online, about how I had always known, but that would have been a lie. I hadn’t always known. Some trans people just know when they are four or five years old that they were born in the wrong body, but I grew up in the 80s and 90s. It wasn’t a thing—not like it is now, and no one talked about it. So I did what I usually do when I’m nervous. I babbled. I said anything and everything I had been thinking and feeling throughout my life. I admitted that I was insecure about my weight. I talked about how my dad didn’t treat me like a son the way he had before my brother was born. I laid it all out there. When I was done, I expected validation. I expected this professional to tell me I was right, that my body and brain didn’t match, and that she could help me. But that’s not what happened. And what she said—that I was just insecure about my weight and wanted my dad’s approval—made me go back in the closet for another sixteen years.

For the longest time, I had convinced myself that it was all just a phase. I’d make self-deprecating jokes about it, like I used to think I was a boy! How silly is that! People would laugh, of course, but I think there was always a part of me that was sad and angry with myself for not living my truth, as cliché as that sounds. Only those closest to me, mainly my husband, knew the truth—that if I had been given a choice of gender at birth, I would have chosen to live my life as a man. And not because men undoubtedly have a social silver spoon that women are not afforded. I wanted to be a man in every sense of the word—balls and all, even though I think they’re a tad bit gross. But things needed to change before I could admit to myself that I wasn’t living the life I truly wanted.

Thankfully, those changes finally came when I was thirty-five. I got a new job and with it came a lot of feelings that it was time to take care of myself. I sought out therapy (with a new therapist) for the first time in years, initially because I had a lot of sexual trauma that I thought was hurting my relationship with my husband. Those two life events, a job and a therapist, seemingly small and insignificant, changed everything.

In my new role, I formed a strong connection with a trans woman—Lucy. She wasn’t even in my department, but volunteered to mentor me in a role that I wanted, one that she already worked in. I’m still not sure how this one person managed to reawaken something I had long felt was just a phase, but she did. My identity started swirling around in my head, and everything I thought I buried felt new and confusing all over again. When I started seeing my therapist, many of our early conversations moved towards gender instead of the sexual trauma I thought I needed to discuss. In those conversations, I told her something I had never told anyone, perhaps not even my husband—that part of me wished I would get breast cancer so I’d have an excuse to remove my breasts without judgment from others. When she told me that cisgender people don’t usually think about stuff like that, I became painfully aware that it wasn’t a phase after all. And if that fundamental truth was actually a lie I told myself over the years, what the hell could I do about it, as a thirty-five year old in Washington in 2020, versus a nineteen year old in Oregon in 2004?

It turns out, many things changed in those sixteen years. In 2020 and beyond, there were the WPATH Standards of Care that helped to define how to treat and care for trans people based on evidence. That along with Washington being an informed-consent state regarding gender affirming care, I was able to get hormones immediately after a brief discussion with my doctor. I came out August 1st, 2020, in the middle of the pandemic, and two weeks later, I had a prescription for testosterone. Two months after that, I changed my name and gender marker legally on my ID and social security card. These were things that would have taken years in 2004, but in 2020 they took months. Just this year, I finally had it updated on my birth certificate, something you can thankfully do in Washington, where I was born. That little piece of paper no longer can dictate my identity. And just a couple of months ago, on September 23rd, I had top surgery—a double mastectomy. Now the only scars of my gender identity are physical ones, and they’re so beautiful.

I’m forty now. When I look in the mirror, I don’t just see a fat body that the gender therapist said I was so insecure of. Yes, the fatphobia I was exposed to as a child will probably always whisper some harsh words in my ear, but it doesn’t carry the same punch that it used to. I’m finally starting to see the person I always knew, deep down, that I was. And the joy I feel at seeing my reflection is indescribable. I’m finally myself, and those labels of girl and tomboy and dyke can’t hurt me anymore. Now my label is what I say it is, and I say it’s man.

Being a girl was always hard. I struggled for so long, just trying to survive and prove myself to people by doing everything I was supposed to do—everything girls are supposed to do. But forcing myself to live a lie is not a life I want to live. Being a girl isn’t supposed to be hard in those ways, unless you’re not really a girl at all, and I never was. Now I’m stronger and better than I ever have been before, and I’m thankful for having a therapist who believed me and treated me with respect and dignity. Rachel, you’re amazing. And to that gender therapist I saw in 2004, whose name I can’t even remember but wish I could so I could send this message to you directly—wherever you are—I hope you’re not practicing anymore because you were wrong.

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My dad had trauma—and loads of it. His mother left his father and took my aunt and uncle with her, but my dad stayed. He told me once that he didn’t want his dad to be lonely. I wonder if he regretted that decision.

Before my grandma left, I heard my grandpa used to beat her, once so bad she ended up in the hospital. He beat my dad, too, just for being a kid and doing things kids do. I didn’t hear those stories from my dad, though. He would never have admitted to something like that. He was too hung up on his dad dying to ever be able to think about how his dad wasn’t a good man or a good father.

When my dad was twenty-six, he and my grandpa went to a bar, and a fight broke out. I never heard the details of how the fight started exactly, only that my dad said he was mouthing off. All I know is that my grandpa, who was sixty-one, was involved, and while my dad was fighting someone else, another guy got my grandpa on the ground and kicked him in the head. He died later, in the hospital. My dad has talked about that experience with very few words, but I could always see the guilt and regret. It was a visceral thing, clinging to him. How could he have ever felt the pain of his own abuse when he had guilt gnawing away at his memories, poking holes in his life’s narrative so that there wasn’t a clear picture anymore? They say ignorance is bliss, and I think my dad had just enough ignorance to pretend his trauma didn’t happen or at least nullify it enough to keep living.

My parents knew each other for about a month before getting married. I guess that’s how things were in the 1970s, because a woman’s purpose was marriage and kids, and a man’s purpose was to provide the money to support the marriage and kids. I think a lot of people had kids back then because they thought that’s what they were supposed to do. My mom always wanted to be a parent, and I think in some ways, my dad did too. But it probably would have been best if he had sat that one out. He didn’t know how to be a parent, and I share enough of his traits to know that I shouldn’t be a parent. I think about that sometimes—about how maybe he was better than his dad, but not good enough to spare me some of the same bullshit he went through.

When I was born, my parents lived in a trailer on a small property in Prosser, Washington. My dad always considered himself a cowboy, and he loved horses, so naturally he had an old mare, who he called Sis. He used to say she’d follow him around the pasture and nip at him. There’s a picture of me as a baby sitting on her back. When I was about a year old, we moved to Rupert, Idaho, near my mom’s parents, and my dad had to sell his horse. I think it was a massive loss for him to lose something he loved and treasured, and he mentioned her throughout my life and even nicknamed me Sis. To this day, I’m not sure if I should have been honored or insulted that I, his human child, was, at the very least, as well loved as a horse.

I knew from a pretty young age that my dad had abused my mom before I came along. She told me once that he would hurt her and she would be upset and deny him sex, so he’d be kind again until she gave him what he wanted. It’s odd to me that he could understand consent to a certain degree but couldn’t understand why unleashing that rage on those you love is a shitty thing to do. Or maybe he knew all along and didn’t care, though I doubt that’s the case. He was far too emotional to not care about things, but not emotionally intelligent enough to deal with everything he felt. After my brother and I came along, my dad didn’t hit my mom like he used to, but the intimidation and multifaceted abuse continued.

After dinner one night, when I was about eight or nine, my mom was cleaning up the kitchen. My younger brother (four and a half years my junior) and I were still sitting at the table. They were arguing about something, but that was nothing new. My mom knocked over Dad’s full can of beer, and said something like, “Go have another one.” It spilled all over the counter and soaked his shirt. Everything happened so fast, and then he was on her, choking her. My brother and I started crying, and I got up and pounded my fists on his back and pulled at his shirt until he let go. I have no idea what would have happened if I had stayed at the table. I do know that once when I brought it up, my dad deflected it and said, “She kicked me in the balls!” And I screamed back, “Good!”

Talking to my dad used to be a battle of wills, and my parents loved to remind me that I have always been strong-willed. Maybe that’s why my dad and I clashed so often, at least in part, or it could be because he was an asshole and an alcoholic who didn’t have any business raising kids, if you could even call it “raising.” I learned a lot from him, though—mostly how not to be. My brother has said that his motto growing up was, “Don’t be like Dad,” and that says it all.

Despite that ongoing tug-of-war game my dad and I played, despite the push and pull of the battle of wills, and the way he made me feel like shit about myself and didn’t know how to be vulnerable or give praise, despite all of it, I miss him. I miss those talks, which sometimes were just, “shootin’ the shit,” as he’d say. Oftentimes we were two very strong-willed people trying to take the top spot. There were a lot of those. Yelling, screaming, seeing red, wondering if this argument would be the one where he finally took a swing just so that I’d have an excuse to hit him back. After all, Dad said, “Never start a fight, but you make damn sure you finish it.” And there were times when I felt the rage in me that he must have felt his entire life, that rage and generational trauma that has been laced into the core of who he was.

A couple of months before my dad died, my brother and I were sitting on folding chairs in the small living space of my dad’s studio apartment, the one our mom had built for him when she decided to take care of him as he aged. I still can’t understand why she wanted to take care of the man who made her life hell for over twenty years, who divorced him in 1999. But I don’t have to. I’m just grateful she did because it gave us all a little more time together.

My dad was lucid that day, which was unusual. He was on a high dose of knock you the fuck out so you can’t feel anything which meant that most of the time he was passed out in his chair, pissing himself because he was too drugged up to notice that he still had bodily functions. Every time I think of it, I also think—what a miserable existence.

My brother and I never knew what to say because communicating with a man who is barely conscious is like playing by yourself on a playground. Sure, you can talk to yourself and make up whatever games you want, but no one is there to care. And that’s how it felt, trying to talk to him. It had felt that way for a long time, so we just sat. He wasn’t saying much, so we didn’t either.

“You know what I regret the most?” he asked us suddenly. I’m still not sure if he was talking to us or the space in between, but my brother and I still looked at each other in shock and had a silent conversation between us.

“Did he really just say that?”

“Is he about to actually apologize?”

“Oh my god, what is happening?!”

So, we listened, and we waited, our hearts pounding, breath held. Just waiting.

“I really regret selling that horse.”

And the moment was over. My brother and I laughed, and I said, “Really? That’s what you regret the most?” I don’t even remember the rest of our time together. I don’t remember anything I said to my dad, or he said to me after that. All I remember is that brief, tiny sliver of hope vanishing with, “I really regret selling that horse.”

I think about that conversation often. I sometimes tell that story to anyone just to get a laugh, though most of the time, they don’t laugh. If they do, it’s an awkward chuckle because they don’t understand. The other part of that story, the one I mention that makes people really uncomfortable, is that my brother and I were very close to putting it on Dad’s plaque in the cemetery. But “He really loved that horse” wouldn’t fit, so we settled on, “One tough son of a gun”, something Dad said about himself over the years. And it wasn’t a lie. He went through hell in life, and he came out of it alive and whole—mostly.

Memories live on even after people are gone—the good, the bad, the terrifying—but we keep going. We still remember. We remember it all. My dad tried to bury his pain by pretending it didn’t exist or by drinking or whatever hidden methods he might have used. He buried it so deeply that his greatest regret was selling his horse. But I know the truth. My brother knows the truth. There was pain behind his eyes, and not just the physical that was numbed by the medication. There was real emotional trauma that he didn’t have the language to talk about, or the emotional capacity to understand. So, he used his rage and unleashed it out into the world to push that pain away, and I’m not sure I can completely blame him for that. Who knows the horrors my grandpa suffered and my great-grandpa, and so on.

My dad did one thing right, and I feel this in my bones. I know this to be true. He raised two intelligent, self-determined, strong-willed kids who were able to put down the rage and feel all the things life throws at us. As my brother said, Don’t be like Dad, and I’m grateful that I can say we are not. My dad died in 2016, but he lives on in our memories, and in the positive traits we inherited that I know came from him. He lives on.

Losing him wasn’t the worst thing I’ve ever been through, but it was one of the hardest things to heal from. Losing my dad meant facing the bitter truth that I’d never be able to fully reconcile my emotions with him, improve our relationship, and get an apology. Truthfully, there was never a chance of that anyway, but there was the dream that it could happen, and that dream died with him. One of my biggest regrets, if you can call it that, will always be never knowing if he regretted hurting me.

I will never forget the look on my mom’s face when he choked her, or the way he called me a slut in front of all my friends, or how he beat my self-esteem into the ground because he didn’t know how to be kind. I can’t forget those things because they made me who I am, shaped me into this imperfect being with all the flaws of my father, and his father before him, but none of the follow-through because I know better. I know better because somehow, my dad managed to make me into the kind of person I wish he had been. Despite his best efforts, I’m a better person because he was my dad. And I’ve worked harder than I ever have at anything to make sure of it. I’ll never forget, but somehow, I can forgive. I miss you, Dad. Despite it all, fuck, do I miss you.

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