Supplemental Parenting

The aboveground train that takes Bostonians from downtown to Cleveland Circle comes barreling up Beacon Street, breaking the frigid air that I've easily embraced. Growing up in Chicago prepared me for many things, cold among the simplest. The whole city has donned the same L.L. Bean coat, and the sidewalks have filled with waddling marshmallows, angrily looking for the next respite from this perpetual winter. I push my gloved fists a little deeper into my pockets and turn down Harvard Street, headed to a bookstore so I can find my own type of respite. 

The glass door fights against the wind as I pull it open. But once inside, the din of the city is muffled by the walls of books. All I can hear is the distant sound of an employee getting out the stepladder, a woman in the corner turning a page. In recent weeks, as I wander through Boston directionless and lonesome, I've begun to rely on books the way I used to. In middle school, when I discovered this very first vice, I found that you could force a body to go anywhere. But the mind was a trickier thing. 

So like any good addict does, I spend my days escaping into my brain. Or maybe out of it is more accurate. I consume memoirs by people who have lived vastly different lives, who have stared down monsters before whom I can only crawl. I watch how they contextualize their experiences, how they make sense out of their lives. And, as usual, I look longingly in the abyss of the future, always ready to jump though I'm not sure into what I will land. 

I round the corner of a bookcase to look at the LGBT+ section. In the last six months, I've gotten comfortable bringing home the books I used to hurry past. I let my mother see me reading James Baldwin, and I wonder if she knows how magical it feels. To hold up that work, to tie myself to it, if even just for a minute. 

I skim the rows of books and read off the titles in my head. "The Transgender Dictionary." "If I Was Your Girl." "The Art of Being Normal." I think to myself that if one day my child comes to me and says I got it wrong, that I assigned them a gender different than the one they've grown into, I can find a bookstore like this. I can pull these texts off the shelf and stack them in my hands. I can bring them home to my kid and say, "These are for you. Here is your history, and your community, and your roadmap. I'm proud of you. I love you." 

But in this store today, before the remaining chapters of my life have been written, I am standing in front of this bookcase. Coat too big, gloves too small, in the fourth pair of white sneakers I'll slowly destroy. I'm trying to figure out what it means to live truthfully. And I'm scared. And I'm showing up every single day even though a lot of days it seems easier to not show up at all. I realize that the child of my imagination has already materialized.

So because there's no one to do it for him, I'll pull these books off the shelf. I'll stack them in my hands, and bring them home. And when I get there, I'll turn to myself and say

These are for you.

Here is your history

and your community

and your roadmap.

I'm proud of you.

I love you.