Words

This post is the sixteenth in a series.

I did quite a bit of journaling through the time when I was coming to recognize my reality. I would like to share some of these entries with you as a window into what it means to come out. Please come back to read through the rest of the journey. If you haven’t read the first, you can click here to be redirected to that post, called Truth. From there, at the bottom of each post you can navigate to the next.

Content warning: This post contains a word considered an offensive slur.

May 7/20
0847hrs

As I was lying in bed last night, I was thinking about pronouns. For some reason, “she” and “her” are okay. BUT…I don’t like (really don’t like) being called a lady. I don’t prefer being called a woman. Mother and Mom are okay so far. I think I’d like to experiment with “partner” instead of “wife.” Being referred to as a person, thinking of myself as a person, makes me happy. I have been thinking of Gloria’s teaching us to be a woman first (before being a wife or mother), and I like thinking of it as being human first. It’s interesting trying to give myself freedom from “shoulds.” If I don’t like “lady” then I should be equally uncomfortable with “she” or “Mom.” Right now, I’m just trying to accurately gauge how things make me feel without any values added.

Words to consider:

wife
mother
daughter
sister
aunt
mom
grandma
daughter-in-law
woman
lady

For some of these, I just don’t know what else someone would use. What is a non-gendered parental title? It seems like “Mom” is more like a name than a title when my kids call me that. Maybe they could call me Mom, but other people refer to me as a parent? A little while ago, I was thinking about things and had a surge of pleasant warmth when I thought of being Dad’s daughter. I don’t really know what that means.

 

Photo by Paweł Czerwiński on Unsplash