Leslie Lagerstrom
Proud mom of two children; advocate for families with transgender and gender-variant kids
It's a Boy!
Posted: 05/14/2012 5:03 pm
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/leslie-lagerstrom/its-a-boy_2_b_1515645.html"I'm not right," my old-souled 8-year-old child says upon discovering that our weathered mailbox sits empty yet another day. With a classmate's birthday party on the horizon, we wait anxiously for an invitation that never comes. These words, simple yet profound, slice through my flesh, piercing a hole in my heart, causing me pain that's greater than I can bear. It's a pain I have come to know all too well raising a transgender child.
It wasn't always this way, at least not in the beginning. With 10 fingers and toes, a perfect Apgar score, and no obvious birth defects, our healthy firstborn was greeted with celebration. Yes, on that blue-sky August afternoon I delivered a beautiful baby who came wrapped in a blanket of hopes and dreams that were not meant to be, at least not as we envisioned them when the doctor divulged the secret -- "It's a girl!" -- that we'd been patiently waiting to learn for nine months. Truth be told, no one in our delivery room that day, from the medical staff to my husband and me, could have guessed how wrong the doctor's proclamation would turn out to be.
