#30 (aka: An amazing moment in time)

*I wrote and posted this on LiveJournal last night. Sorry about all the "Tonight"s -- that's what I used when I posted on LJ, and didn't think to change it. But, you get the same basic gist of what happened anyway.*

Earlier this week I posted about how excited I was to have rented the entire season of "TransGeneration" from Netflix. Well, both discs arrived yesterday, and I watched all eight of the episodes in one evening (some life I have, huh?). This morning, I talked to my father about the possibility of us watching an episode together. The particular episode that I had in mind was the last one, where one of the cast members, Lucas, is graduating from college and has his whole family come from Oklahoma. This "whole family" includes his father. Since Lucas is an FTM, and I am too, and since I've had more issues with my father about this than I have with my mom, I thought it would be something good for us to watch together. Tonight, we did.

With my father and stepmother sitting on one of the couches near the half-wall and the stairs leading down to the basement and my brothers' room, and me reclining in a cushioned rocking chair, we watched the last 50-minute, commercial-free segment of "TransGeneration". I kept waiting for my father to get up and start doing more laundry or something, but he didn't. Tonight, for the second night in a row, I realized that he really does care about this. He really does care that I'm becoming his son. That feels incredible. *I'm tearing up as I write this, by the way... excuse me... * I never thought that my dad and I would start to see eye-to-eye about this. I thought he hated me, or at least this part of me. But maybe now he's starting to see that it's not so terrible that I'm becoming his third son. Or his first son, depending on how you look at it, since I'm the oldest child.

Something that Lucas's dad said in this final episode was, in short, that he quickly realized, upon doing some reading about being a parent of a Transgendered child, that he wasn't alone in feeling that he was mourning the death of a child. But he eventually said something profound: "My daughter just grew up to be a man". I should have looked back to try to see my dad's reaction to that statement, but I didn't. I wish I could have seen if there was any look of revelation or comradery or shock or understanding on my father's face, but if he was affected to the point of showing that kind of emotion facially, I didn't want to risk ruining it by letting him know that I saw it. So I watched the rest of the episode, and shed a couple of tears near the very end when Lucas and his Transbrother Kasey are telling each other how much the other means to him because I know what it's like to love another Transguy as much as they love one another, and then as the credits were rolling I turned to my dad with as much bravery as I could muster and said, "I hope that, someday, we can have the kind of relationship that Lucas and his dad have. That father/son relationship". He asked why, and I replied, "Well, I know that you already have two sons, but I'd just like us to be able to be friends, like you and the boys seem to be. Most of the time". We chuckled a bit about that last remark, and I said, "Do you think that will ever happen?" I didn't give him the time to answer, really. I just waited through the couple seconds of silence before I got up to come into my room. But I know that what I said touched something in my father. For the first time, I think I can finally say that I'm proud to be his son.