When the Moon was Ours(75)

We’re young enough, and all of this happened recently enough, that we heard the word transgender as we moved from our teens into our twenties. But neither of us could say it yet. Saying it would have marked a point my husband couldn’t turn back from.

It was during this time that I learned of bacha posh, a cultural practice in parts of Afghanistan and Pakistan in which families who have daughters but no sons dress a daughter as a boy. This daughter then acts as a son to the family. As an adult, a bacha posh traditionally returns to living as a girl, now a woman.

It’s understandable that often a bacha posh has difficulty adjusting to her role as an adult woman after years of living as a boy. From the other side of the world, it’s easy to pretend this discomfort is just a product of the culture she lives in. But what daughter, in any part of the world, could learn the language of being a boy and not feel unsettled stepping back into her role as a young woman?

That space, between the lives boys and girls are expected to inhabit, came into sharper focus when my husband did come out as transgender, and as he transitioned to living in a way that better reflected his gender identity.

As teens, we feel the growing weight of questions we’ve held in our hands since we were children. For my husband, that question was how he wanted to live and what name he wanted to be called. For me, it was whether I could see myself as something more than a daughter born in that space between worlds.

Something happened when we sat with those questions, together but quiet. The boy I married became the man he’d never thought he was allowed to be. And I came to understand that the night held not only la llorona but the moon and all those stars.

This is the thing I learned from loving a transgender boy who took years to say his own name: that waiting with someone, existing in that quiet, wondering space with them when they need it, is worth all the words we have in us.