Transgendered Papa Smurf

It wasn’t the most flattering question to ask of someone who had recently given birth, but it was understandable. “Trevor, are you pregnant again?” Tim asked me when Jacob was a few weeks old. “Your tummy looks really big!”

I’m a guy, but I’m a gay guy so I do care a little about my postpartum figure. I sighed and explained to Tim that no, I wasn’t pregnant again - it takes a while to lose the extra fat and fluid you gain during pregnancy. Simone and Teddy’s four-year-old was working to get me all figured out. During the pregnancy, he wanted to know how I, a man, could be having a baby. We adults explained to him that I used to be a girl, and then I changed because I wanted to. I took a special kind of medicine (testosterone!) to change. Since I had been a girl before, I had the parts necessary to have a baby.

Tim asked his mother that night before going to bed, “Mommy, do I have to change?” First off, he anxiously wanted to know what this all meant for him. Maybe this “changing” thing was something everybody did at a certain age. Perhaps the next day he was to eat a bologna sandwich for lunch, go to the dentist in the afternoon, and change his gender some time before dinner. Tim was worried.

“No, no Tim. You don’t have to change. Well, you’ll only change if you want to change.” Simone was committed to answering him truthfully.

“I don’t want to change.”

“Ok, Tim,” said Simone. “You don’t have to change.”

“Ok. Goodnight Mommy.” He was satisfied.

The next night, Tim said to Simone, sounding plaintive, “Mommy, I don’t want you to change!” If I had changed genders, how could he trust anyone’s gender? Mommy might become Daddy at any moment, a particularly frightening turn of events.

“Don’t worry Tim, Mommy’s not going to change!” What on earth was going on with this kid? Simone and I laughed about it together later. Children have a marvelous capacity for saying exactly what is on their minds no matter how ludicrous or, as is frequently the case, embarrassing.

Then we realized that we adults had neglected to mention to Tim that changing genders was a rare occurrence. All of Tim’s friends and family wouldn’t suddenly be unrecognizable to him from one day to the next. And I guess we also didn’t make it clear to him that I wasn’t quite what you would call a “girly girl” before my transition. Most people who knew me saw it coming a long way off, and were very happy for me when I finally made my great pronouncement at the age of twenty-three. Tim didn’t meet me until after my transition, so it was hard for him to picture what I must have been like (miserable) in my previous incarnation.

“But Trevor changed?”

“Yes, Trevor changed,” Simone said, “but I’m not going to change. I don’t want to change. Mommy is never going to change.” Change, how? She wondered. Would Tim get worried if she got a drastically different hair cut? What about if she went on a diet and lost some weight? How about eventually getting old? She couldn’t exactly promise to remain identical from one day to the next forever and ever. But for now she had to reassure her confused four-year-old that she would be there for him in the way he expected. She left the subtleties behind and simply promised him what he needed. She wouldn’t change. Ever.

“Ok. Good night Mommy.”

“Goodnight Tim.”

Once Tim understood how I transitioned from female to male and how I could be pregnant, he got excited about the baby. He listened with his toy stethoscope to the baby’s heartbeat when we went over to visit. He kept asking when I was finally going to have that baby.

After Jacob was born, Tim was curious to see how I was feeding him. The first time he watched me using the supplementary nursing system (SNS), he laughed and exclaimed, “that’s ridiculous!”

Simone went straight to educating, using her best La Leche League leader tone of voice. “When someone doesn’t have enough of their own milk, they can put milk into a bottle like Trevor has there. See the tube going up from the bottle? Baby Jacob sucks on the tube and Trevor’s nipple at the same time so he gets Trevor’s milk and the extra milk too.”

Tim changed his tune quickly and came closer to better inspect what exactly I was doing.

“You’re giving Jacob Daddy nanas!” he exclaimed.

‘Nanas’ was his word for nursing. He and his sister Janet had a whole breastfeeding vocabulary and grammar worked out. Janet called nursing ‘mamas’. If she wanted to nurse more or lots, she’d say ‘milia mamas’. If one breast seemed to be running dry and she wanted the other one, she’d say, ‘mama dat.’

Jacob, at three weeks of age, always wanted ‘milia mamas.’ According to Tim, he was a ‘nana pig.’ We reminded Tim that when he was a baby, he was a ‘nana pig’ too. Tim laughed at this. Soon he walked around proudly nursing a doll, showing us that he could grow up to be a breastfeeding man just like I had.

Like a kid learning to apply a math concept to apples just as well as to snowmobiles, Tim tested his understanding of my transgenderism using different scenarios. Since Papa Smurf didn’t seem to have a wife but he did have Baby Smurf, Tim concluded that he must be transgendered like me. Now it all made sense. Tim was putting a lot of complicated information together and managing it well. Taking the time to explain everything to him patiently was paying off.

A few months after Jacob was born, Tim was at his drop-in daycare and said to one of the adults watching him, “I know a man who gives his baby nanas.”

Sandi knew what ‘nanas’ meant, and she laughed at Tim. “That’s ridiculous! You’re very funny Tim, but it’s impossible for a man to give a baby nanas.”

The next time I saw Tim he asked me what I was doing with Jacob. Surprised at his question, I said I was breastfeeding him. “How are you doing that?” he asked, laughing. “That’s impossible!”

Here we were, back to square one.