Knowing

I’m looking for something non-binary
for my eldest for Valentine’s Day,
I tell the Ulta sales associate.
She/they seems like a safe bet
with her/their pierced eyebrows
and 3D sparkly things adorning
bright green eyeshadow.

We settle on M.A.C.’s Turquatic,
with notes of anemone, cottonwood,
and Coriscan blue cedar, and I don’t know
what any of that means, but it smells
crisp and fresh as advertised.

One Christmas, my husband and I
sniffed sample fragrance cards
until we both had headaches,
looking for something woodsy
and masculine. A rite of passage,
we thought, our son’s first cologne.
We didn’t know that it would sit
unopened in the drawer,
eventually disappear altogether.

The shop-person says, You’re a good mom,
and I tear up, accepting that gift
during this first year of missteps,
an entire adolescence of missed cues
and misunderstandings. I secure
the pretty bottle in bubble wrap
and send it to my son daughter in the mail,
no pressure on her/them to be appreciative.
But they call me later, not a text,
and say the scent is perfect, they love it.

Soon, we are both crying
with the understanding that something
has shifted, not kidding ourselves
that we don’t both have a long way to go,
but embracing the moment, the possibilities
now open to us through knowing.

* 

Deadname

I need to tell you, I wasn’t listening
the night you told me your new name;
with your slipping grades, my own shortcomings,
I was too wrapped up in our family’s rage.

The night you first told me your new name,
I didn’t understand what you were saying.
I was too depressed by our family’s rage,
don’t remember the angry words I said.

I didn’t embrace what you were saying,
pushed you further into that space so alone,
didn’t know those angry words would pave
such a crooked road between you and home.

After pushing you into a space all your own,
when I was ready to hear you, endure your cry,
the road was so crooked between you and home,
I had already lost you; you wanted to die.

When I was ready to hear you, we both cried,
as you expressed your truth—authentic self,
an entire adolescence spent wanting to die,
when I had no idea you needed help.

Although I now accept your truer self,
as a mother so sure of her choice of naming,
I admit, I too, have needed help—
it’s true, at first there’s loss, a kind of grieving.

As a mother so sure of her choice of naming,
I thought I knew who you would always be;
it takes a year to work through all that grieving.
Habit sometimes calls you that deadname, but see,

I always thought I knew who you would be.
I am slipping past my own shortcomings,
lifting you up—setting that deadname free.
I have to tell you. Now, I am listening.

*

Hayley Mitchell Haugen is a Professor of English at Ohio University Southern. Light & Shadow, Shadow & Light from Main Street Rag is her first full-length poetry collection, and her firsr chapbook, What the Grimm Girl Looks Forward To is from Finishing Line Press. Her latest chapbook, The Blue Wife Poems, is from Kelsay Books. She edits Sheila-Na-Gig online and Sheila-Na-Gig Editions.