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Overview
From the age of two-and-a-half, Jacob, born “Em,” adamantly told his family he was a boy. While his mother Mimi struggled to understand and come to terms with the fact that her child may be transgender, she experienced a sense of déjà vu—the journey to uncover the source of her child’s inner turmoil unearthed ghosts from Mimi’s past and her own struggle to live an authentic life.
Mimi was raised in an ultra-Orthodox Jewish family, every aspect of her life dictated by ancient rules and her role as a woman largely preordained from cradle to grave. As a young woman, Mimi wrestled with the demands of her faith and eventually made the painful decision to leave her religious community and the strict gender roles it upheld.
Having risen from the ashes of her former life, Mimi was prepared to help her son forge a new one — at a time when there was little consensus on how best to help young transgender children. Dual narratives of faith and motherhood weave together to form a heartfelt portrait of an unforgettable family. Brimming with love and courage, What We Will Become is a powerful testament to how painful events from the past can be redeemed to give us hope for the future.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780544965867 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | HarperCollins |
| Publication date: | 11/12/2019 |
| Sold by: | HARPERCOLLINS |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 352 |
| Sales rank: | 780,934 |
| File size: | 20 MB |
| Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
About the Author
MIMI LEMAY is an international advocate for transgender youth and the author of the viral essay “A Letter to My Son Jacob on His 5th Birthday.” Lemay and her family meet regularly with legislators, business leaders, educators, and clergy to share their vision of a more equitable world. She is a member of the Parents for Transgender Equality National Council at Human Rights Campaign and holds a master’s in law and diplomacy from the Fletcher School at Tufts University. She was recently named one of the Commonwealth Heroines of 2020 by the Massachusetts Commission on the Status of Women.
Read an Excerpt
Preface
Ask me my favorite ghost story
and I will tell you the one
about your haunted house heart
still housing all the people you used to be.
—NIKITA GILL, “Ghost Story”
How did we get here?
I set out to answer this question in March of 2015, “here” being where my family and I found ourselves a month after my essay “A Letter to My Son Jacob on His 5th Birthday” had gone viral—as inexperienced but determined advocates for transgender children. “Here” was also the climax of a remarkable five-year journey that had brought us our son, Jacob. Finally, here was the rare opportunity to write a full-length memoir about our experiences and, I hoped, to further shape public discourse on gender identity in young children.
However, sitting down to write, I discovered that the answer to the question “How did we get here?” was anything but straightforward.
When our son, Jacob, transitioned in 2014, shortly after his fourth birthday, there were few examples for us to follow and no guidebook for parents of very young transgender children. There were only a handful of therapists experienced enough to help families with transgender children Jacob’s age deal with the seismic changes, at home and in the community, that a social transition entailed. At the time, “watchful waiting” was considered the best course of action for a young child who claimed a disparity between his or her gender identity and the one assigned at birth.
Relinquishing to Jacob the choice to transition was an outsize act of faith—in Jacob, in ourselves as parents, and, ultimately, in the world that would need to accept him. How I was able to come to this decision cannot be explained without reaching back to my own early years.
Shortly after her second birthday, when “Em” (a pseudonym Jacob and I chose to avoid using his birth name) started to show signs of emotional decline, the experience had an air of familiarity for me, a sense of déjà vu that I could not account for at the time. As I watched my vibrant toddler fade into a shell of a child, angry, distant, almost unrecognizable, bones and shards of my memories began to surface, demanding examination and claiming relevance to this new and confounding moment. Attempting to record the experience for this memoir unfolded in much the same way.
“It’s like a . . . ghost story,” I tried to explain to my husband, Joe, “but without the ghost.” I began to suspect that the specter was me or, rather, a former iteration of myself, one that crooked her finger and whispered: “We’re not quite done here yet.”
As I dug up decades of correspondence and journal entries, these “ghosts,” no longer content in their interment, began to whisper their own stories, shifting the narrative I had long held of my life until eventually it buckled under the weight of their truths.
The book that I set out to write is not the book I have written; neither is my answer for what sequence of events led us to the moment of Jacob’s resurrection. Once I allowed myself the freedom to reexamine the narrative of my life, it began to reshape itself, past lapping at the heels of present, offering insight and interpretation until the two collided in a moment of startling redemption. What emerged was indeed a memoir but, equally, a mystery, a ghost story, and a love story.
As the author, I feel I have had a surprisingly spare role in all this, yet I have emerged from the telling of this story irrevocably changed and with a new perspective on my own history and a greater hope for my son’s future.
How did we get here?
It started with a birth. A girl born in 1976 in a hospital overlooking the foothills of Mount Scopus, in Jerusalem. Her mother was her entire world, and that world, one of rarefied ultra-Orthodox Judaism, began to collapse in on her when she discovered the price she would have to pay to live an authentic life.
How did we get here?
It started with a birth. A boy born in 2010 who was his mother’s world, a world that began to collapse in on itself when she discovered the price her child would have to pay to live an authentic life.
Memory, degraded by time and human subjectivity, can never claim absolute accuracy. The people mentioned in this book may recall conversations or events differently than I do. I have been fully faithful to memory to the extent that my memory has been faithful to me. Thankfully, I am assisted by a quarter century of diaries, correspondence, photographs, audiotapes, and mementos (what my husband, Joe, wryly refers to as my “hoarder’s paradise”).