Jonah

The day my daughter was born was probably the happiest day of my life. Hearing the sound of those shrill, petrified cries for the first time was enough to make my heart throb in my chest. My entire being itched to hold my child close and never let her out of my sight. 

She was beautiful. Sporadic little tufts of raven hair were dotted around her head, and I let out a small laugh as her frail hand latched onto my finger with a surprising grip. She was a strong girl; I’d always known she would be a strong girl. 

“Jenny.” The word fell from my mouth like a petal falling from a flower. 

“Jenny.” Tom repeated, as if seeing how the name fit in his mouth. He grinned ridiculously and sloppily kissed my cheek. “Here we go, Kat.” 

I stared down at the baby girl in my arms, nestled in her hospital blanket. “She’s perfect.” My hand instinctually moved to take Tom’s, and I gripped his fingers tightly. “I love you.” I’d never meant those three words as much as I did in that moment. I had no strength left in my body for anything but the pure love I felt for my husband and my daughter. It was the three of us against the world. 

The accident happened when Jenny was three. Tom was driving her back from nursery and turned around to tickle her and didn’t see the car turning the corner. Jenny had severe whiplash and a few broken fingers, but she was fine. Tom’s spinal cord snapped and he died almost instantly. 

It’s always a car accident, isn’t it? You watch those films or read those books and notice how cliche it is for someone to die in a car crash. And you think to yourself, That would never happen. And then it does happen. And suddenly you’re the protagonist in a tragic novel that all the readers feel sorry for. Your life feels like it’s not even yours anymore. Like you’re watching it unfold in front of you. Like you can’t keep up with the pace of it. 

It was the grief that threatened to overwhelm me. It was like having stones in your chest, weighing you down and making it so that you didn’t want to move or eat. Like there wasn’t any more room left in your body for anything apart from this abundant melancholy. But I couldn’t let myself sink away from a world with Jenny in it. She needed her mother now more than ever, and so I got myself out of bed every morning and made her think that things were still normal. I would make her a packed-lunch and take her to school and take her to the park. And then after I tucked her into bed I would have a couple glasses of red, sit in one of Tom’s old T-shirts and cry until I eventually fell asleep. 

As Jenny got older I began to see so much of Tom in her. Her unwavering stubbornness and fiery determination to be the best at everything she tried could’ve only come from one man. She even had Tom’s questionable passion for tennis, which, frankly, I never understood. It was like having a carbon copy of him walking around the house. He would’ve been ecstatic to have a daughter just like him; he probably would’ve rubbed it in my face how little she was actually like me. 

I hadn’t realised back then how much Jenny and her father were alike. As Jenny ventured into puberty and started having periods, she also began going through phases. Every parent I’d ever spoken to told me to expect as much - teenagers were bursting at the seams to discover who they were and feel comfortable in their own skin. Jenny went through the tomboy phase - which I had also gone through when I was her age. She wanted her hair cut short and to wear trousers instead of skirts. 

Jenny was seventeen years old when she came downstairs one evening and told me she was transgender. I was half-heatedly watching X Factor at the time, and was caught completely off guard by the heavy statement.

“What…what does that mean, sweetheart?” I was concerned. 

Jenny sat beside me on the sofa. “Mum, I don’t feel…comfortable. When I wear boys clothes and have my hair short and look at myself in the mirror, it feels like I’m actually seeing me.” 

“Okay.” I was nodding along, trying not to let the heartbreak show in my expression. “How long have you felt like this?”

Jenny shrugged. “I guess, since I was old enough to know what it meant to be a girl. I’ve known for a while that this-“ she motioned to her body up and down, “-isn’t who I am.” A tear rolled down her cheek then, and she quickly wiped it away. “I was afraid that…that if I told you that you wouldn’t see me in the same way.” 

I pulled Jenny into my chest and wrapped my arms around her, holding her like I had the day she was born. “I love you, always. You will always be my child, do you understand?” 

The two of us cried together, and I realised that she was holding onto me just as much as I was holding onto her. We spoke until early hours of the morning about how she felt like a weight was gone off of her chest. She told me about the process of transitioning, and how she wanted to start undergoing said process when she was eighteen. And she asked me to call her Jonah. 

“Jonah.” It felt alien in my mouth. Like it didn’t fit. 

There was a part of me, a deep, deep part of me, that wished none of this had happened. That wished Tom had never died in that crash and instead was here, helping me raise our daughter into a fantastic young woman. A woman with Tom’s fierce personality and my vanity. I found myself reminiscing on dreams of being a grandmother, and answering all the questions Jenny would inevitably have when she got the chance to have a child. 

I was so happy that Jenny could be honest about who she - or he, rather - was. But I couldn’t help but feel like I’d lost another family member. That sickening sense of grief washed over me like a shower stream, and that night, when I finally went to bed, I mourned the loss of my daughter. And I hated myself for feeling as if I’d lost something, because I knew I hadn’t. I knew that Jonah was still my Jenny, but just living honestly. Living like he should be living. But it still hurt. 

After that night I never cried over Jenny again. I just needed to let it out once, to get rid of it all, and then I would be fine. And I was fine. And when Jonah turned eighteen he began to transition, and I found myself staring at him like he was a ghost. There was a shadow of his father on his face, the resemblance so stark that sometimes I found myself beginning to tear up. 

I had always thought that Tom was the bravest man I knew, but I was wrong. Because my son, my Jonah, was dauntless. And he would have made his father proud.