From Dad to Emme

The trans journey to find a new parental term

What's in a parental title? What's the importance of having a name like mom or dad or some other replacement for those instead of your given name when interacting with your kids? That's what we had to confront when my transition was really moving along, I had changed my name, my hormone medication was doing it's thing, and dad wasn't the word for me any more.

Is it about holding authority over children? About not wanting to appear on an equal level with them? I know I certainly never talked to my parents on a first name basis growing up. But that same thing applied to teachers. I never called anyone older than me by their first name.

Here we were though with two kids who had already done extremely well transitioning to a new name for me, suddenly finding trickier to transition from dad to mom. So as a group we sat down and talked a lot about what felt nice for all of us.

Mom wasn’t something that I needed and it wasn’t something that felt right for the kids either. And this is the things with transition and identity and being able to manage through these things in my forties—-there was no right or wrong way to do this. There were only best ways for us to do this for us.

It took a few of these family meetings and some in house trials of using Emme, not mom, not dad, not some term we came up with just for ourselves, to try and move forward with. But outside of the house, the kids still slipped into what was comfortable for them for most of their lives and would quietly say “dad” when they needed something.

One day we were in a pool in Mexico on vacation as one big family, and one of the kids yelled dad to me. There I was in the pool floating in a blow up donut in my one piece bathing suit, my lips adequately covered in red lipstick and very well applied mascara, when I heard one of my kids rather loudly call over to me using the word “dad.” At that point, with my worries of strangers looking over at who these kids might be calling growing, I called the kids over for what could be called nothing other than a quick huddle.

“Ok dudes, here we are in a pool in another country with a bunch of people we do not know. Starting now, you can call me Emme. Yell it as loud as you want, yell for anything, just don’t use dad.”

“Oh, yeah ok, we can do that. And Emme works for you?”

“Definitely.”

And then we ate nachos.

Honestly, they have not called me dad once since that moment and that was a year and half ago. I have been introduced since as “my Emme” referred to in therapy as Emme, talked about in parent/teacher interviews as Emme and have been called Emme in pretty much every circumstance you can imagine a child or grownup using Mom or Dad or some parental alternative for. And it doesn’t bother me one bit.

The things you get to do as a trans parent are pretty neat. The opportunities to work through different aspects of family dynamics that you otherwise wouldn’t are astronomical. Would I have ever broken down the idea of what being dad meant to my kids in terms of titles if I hadn’t transitioned? Absolutely not. Do other parents do the same or do they simply go through life forever calling their parents mom and dad or whatever title they have come up with?

There is something different, and I will say for my case, special, about being on a first name basis with my kids. I don’t find it harder to be a parent because they call me Emme. There is just some extra work that went into us defining what it means for them to call me Emme, both as the human person transitioning from another name, and as a parent transitioning away from a title.

In a kind of neat way, it gets you thinking more about what parenting means and makes you reflect on how your relationship with them is more than titular. And now that we’ve got here, there will be no awkward wondering later in life when it’s ok to move to first name basis with these kids. I’m always their parent and I’m always their Emme.

And they don’t eat too many nachos with me, but we still love taco night.