Thank you for joining me for this listening party.

This post is Volume 12 in my memoir project They Will Keep on Speaking Her Name. The crux of this project is that I’m using my transition mixtape as a framework to write memoir pieces about my life as a transgender woman. Learn more about me and this project in the Liner Notes.

Sleep / Sleep tonight / And may your dreams / Be realized / If the thundercloud / Passes rain / So let it rain / Let it rain / Rain on him

-from “MLK” by U2

I’ve always been the bedtime parent in our household. It’s one of my favorite moments in each day as our kids’ Mum, a chance for us to bond and let go of what the day gave us, good or bad. I’m not the best at letting go, but being intentional about the effort with our kids helps them and me.

They’re both teens now, so our bedtime routine looks different than it used to. Now we often end the day by sharing memes and TikTok videos with each other, talking about the day we just had, and talking about tomorrow.

When they were younger, I sang to them every night after reading a bedtime story (or two or three or half a dozen), and then I would say the blessing from Numbers 6 and make the sign of the cross on their foreheads.

Here’s how I spoke that blessing over them:
May the Lord bless you and keep you.
May he make his face shine on you and give you grace.
May he turn his face toward you and give you peace.

Our bedtime songs and blessings were tender moments in which I felt emotionally and spiritually fulfilled. During the days, I so often felt acute dysphoria from how my efforts to be a “good dad” conflicted with my soul’s desire to be a mom. Dad’s can, and should, have tender moments connecting with their children, of course, but this isn’t about “dad roles” and “mom roles” as such, this is about how I felt in that moment of parenting — I felt like a mom, like myself, like everything was aligned like it should be.

Our kids were toddlers when I chose “MLK” by U2 as a lullaby, and it does fit naturally in that lullaby space musically. It was also about the message, Dr. King’s message, that we should strive to judge people by the content of their character rather than their race (or any other trait) and that ideals like that are worth dreaming about, hoping for, and fighting for.

Since Dr. King’s murder, our nation has failed to live up to that dream in a thousand ways, and our current political situation feels to a lot of people like we’ve backslidden. The President, this government, GOP members, and the evangelical church scapegoating Somali refugees in Minnesota (for one) makes racism obvious in a way that seems stark, but the Democratic Party’s response to reform and train ICE instead of dismantling the agency makes them just as culpable.

ICE abusing and murdering people in the streets is just part of the current form of racism and oppression in this country. These violent gangs are the direct descendants of slave patrols in the 1800s. King’s dream feels so far away sometimes.

This wasn’t supposed to be a post about current politics. But teaching our kids MLK’s dream was a political, as well as moral, choice my wife and I made. Lullabies have always been political. The songs we sing, the stories we tell, our children show them the frame of the world we see and the form of what we think the world could be.

Just as oppression and its forces have descendants, so do hopes, dreams, and lullabies — Dr. King’s dream that people would be seen by the “content of their character descends from Jesus of Nazareth’s Kingdom of G-d that “set[s] the oppressed free.”

Sometimes we need a mom to sing us a lullaby and speak into our hearts a blessing, so that we can dream with hope.

the father explained: / you've been somewhat deceived... / we've all called me your dad, / but your True Dad's not me / no, I lay next to your mom /and your forms were conceived / but your Father is the Life within all that you see / He fills up the ponds as He empties the clouds, / holds without hands and speaks without sounds, / provides us with the Cow's waste and coconuts to eat / giving one that nice salt-taste and the other a sweet, / sends the black carriage the day Death shows its face / thinning our numbers with Kindness and Grace / and just as a Flower and its Fragrance are one / so must each of you and this Father become

-from “King Beetle on a Coconut Estate” by mewithoutYou

As our kids got a little older and more musically aware, one of the artists they heard a lot from my playlists was mewithoutYou. I have quite a few mewithoutYou songs on my transition mixtape, and in an upcoming post I’ll tell you about how their first album was basically a psalm book for a young closeted trans woman. This song, though, became my go-to choice for the bedtime lullaby after I'd sung “MLK” for a few years.

I keep thinking about the lyric “just as a Flower and its Fragrance are one” and how it relates to me being a trans woman. Before I came out, I felt disconnected from myself — always. I lived in a semi-permanent state of disassociation and self-loathing.

My transition isn’t just about how I always felt like a woman masquerading as a man. It’s about my connection to myself. My self. I didn’t have that before. I spent almost 40 years trying to be who other people wanted me to be. I tried to be my father’s son. I tried to be a “Godly man” for the Church. I tried to be a breadwinner and leader for my family for the sake of the complimentarian model of family structure I was taught. I tried to be the man I thought my wife wanted as a husband. I tried to be a good dad for our kids.

None of that stuck because it wasn’t me. Those were roles I played for everyone else, expectations they had about who I should be. The people closest to me — my wife and kids and my dearest friends — are the people who released those expectations and embraced the real me. Me being a better spouse and parent aren’t claims that I just make for myself; they are the realities that my family constantly affirms. If you ask them, they’ll tell you that. They are proud of me, happy for me, and benefit from me finding how to make the flower and the fragrance one.