A Boy Named Sue

With apologies to Johnny Cash (and Shel Silverstein, who actually wrote it) adjusting to your child's new gender sometimes feels like living A Boy Named Sue. "He, er, she" is horrifically common at first. For those who don't know he-she is very offensive, so that stumbling as you try to adjust can feel mean, when, in fact, you're trying to be supportive. Kids are remarkably resilient (these are the same people we practiced the whole parenting thing on years ago, enabling us to now be the annoying experts our parents and aunts & uncles were twenty years ago). They survived our learning to be parents, they'll survive our fumbling now. They can tell when you've stumbled and were correcting yourself and appreciate that you want to respect their wishes. Keep trying, it gets easier.

My friend from the Trinidad Clinic once told me that the pronoun is the hardest thing for parents to adapt to. The secret to proper pronoun usage is the same as learning any new thing. Practice. Practice some more. Practice again. Seriously, it's that easy. E has been my daughter for less than a year and I get it right half the time. True, that means I get it wrong half the time, but just as my daughter's girliness is a work in progress, so is my vocabulary.

When I meet new people and they ask about my kids, I make a point of saying two boys & a girl. It's a conscious effort to say "my daughter" "she" "E". Because I try to refer to her regularly, my brain has started to think of her as "her". Also, I changed her name in my cell phone so texts come from E ~ that has been hugely helpful in retraining my brain.

What's been the hardest part is calling E by her new name. I think of her as E, I talk about her as E but when I call her name, I keep saying D. grrrrr

So, what's been your issue ~ name or pronoun? If you have any tips for other parents, please share, I could use them. It would be nice to be right 75% of the time.