The Song of the Eastern Phoebe

I used to write about my children a lot. They show up in narratives and photographs everywhere, from my long-ago bi-weekly New York Times column, “The Parent-Teacher Conference” to my books.

The Gift of Failure is dedicated to them. The Addiction Inoculation is about my efforts to change their odds around substance use disorder. I talk about them on stage all the time in front of other parents, teachers, and kids.

I used to, anyway.

I stopped writing and talking about my children for a few reasons. I started to understand the damage I was doing to their privacy and my youngest, the one who appeared in my work the most, needed the time and silence and space in order to make it through adolescence.

I’ve never been a fan of writers publishing work as therapy. I believe most writers also need time and silence and space to process the big events in our lives, so I take notes while it’s all happening, but I refrain from writing about it for public consumption in a real-time, raw-footage emotional management strategy that could have benefitted from perspective. And therapy. As Lori Gottlieb writes, maybe you should talk to somebody.

The piece I write today is the product of that aforementioned time and space, lots of conversations, mutually agreed upon privacy parameters, therapy, and because this is Jess Lahey writing, animal helpers.

In 2003, I gave birth to a child named after an Irish giant and nordic fair-haired warriors. It’s strange, naming whole entire human beings before we have any sense of who they are or might become. We summon traits we wish for them, try not to name them after bullies or characters in popular culture that come to bad ends. We analyze possible nicknames and “sounds like” potential to save them from ridicule and reserve family names for the middle to honor their ancestors. Some cultures wait to bestow names on children, taking time to get to know them, and I like that tradition. In any case, I took the information I was given during my final pregnancy and did the best I could.

When, seventeen years later, our fair-haired warrior (that hunch was accurate, at least) came out to us as transgender over a dinner of roasted vegetables and herby, oily flatbread, I behaved exactly as I’d rehearsed in my head back when I was sure she was going to come out to us as gay. Our kids do not like for us to make a big THING out of things, so I kept my emotions and my tone level, told her I love her and support her and asked what she needed from us. She said she was not sure yet but she’d let us know as events warrant.

Bing, bang, boom. I was pretty sure we killed it, parenting-wise.

From my journal, February 2021.

There’s a pronoun jar in the kitchen and I just stuffed a $20 in because that seems easier than finding twenty singles to account for all my mis-gendering. Despite being all in, despite loving her more than I can bear and relishing the emotional and physical changes in her since she came out, I’m not as good at this as I thought I’d be. I’m supposed to be an expert at this parenting stuff not to mention a champion for knowing and seeing and loving the kid you have and not the kid you thought you had or the kid you wish you had or the kid you were when you were your kids’ age and yet I mis-gender my child so often she could purchase a nice used car with the contents of that jar. A friend with a trans kid who came out years ago has reassured me that eventually I won’t make these mistakes with her name or pronouns because my daughter will just be my daughter, but I’m not there yet, especially when I think about her in the past as a (from my perspective) unquestioned he, not yet imagined as a she.

I live in constant fear of disappointing her, of not being the mother she wants or needs, and I can only hope she does not view the riches in that jar in an inverse reflection of my love for her and the path she’s on. I’ve asked her to do better, be better, so many times, I guess it’s my turn now. Her therapist says I suck at this, she reports back on our drive home from town. She may have not used those words but that’s what I understood.

After I had no choice but to introduce her to some people her age using her birth name, she finally revealed her new name, the one she’d chosen: Phoebe.

My daughter’s name is Phoebe.

I could never, not in my most inspired moment, have discovered such a perfect name for her.

She went off to a college under her new, if not yet legal, name, delighted her hair had grown to her shoulders over the summer. We dropped her off in a tiny dorm room with far too many musical instruments and books for the space and hoped the world - not to mention her roommate - would treat our precious child with the love and respect she deserves. We held our breaths in the long silence between text updates to our family chat, hoped people would get her, that her professors would judge her on the contents of her formidable mind and character, that she would find everything she was looking for in the place and experience she’d chosen for herself based on a two-hour visit the year before. We hugged her hard and long but did not make our goodbye a thing, as promised ahead of time.

I took the label off the pronoun jar and used it to keep cereal from getting stale in the waning days of summer.

Tim and I practiced in her absence. We talked about her more than she’d have found appropriate. We gently corrected each other when her birth name accidentally slipped out, wondering how our tongues and our hearts could still, a year in, fall out of step.

Tim and I spend most of our quiet empty nest evenings in a wood-fired hot tub, and before the sun falls behind the forest canopy I prop my phone on a log near the tub, recording and identifying our backyard birds in Cornell University’s Merlin app. I know how to recognize the cardinals (if it sounds like a Star Wars laser, it’s a cardinal), robins, chickadees, and wood thrushes, but I wanted to learn to recognize everyone who hangs around our house. I had no idea how many others there were: pee-wees, tanagers, blackbirds, sparrows, catbirds and finches, just to name a few. The bird I was hoping to see or hear, though, was the Eastern Phoebe. I’d already purchased a watercolor of one to hang in my daughter’s newly redecorated room, but I’d yet to see one in our yard or woods. I garden for bugs, pollinators and birds, practically send them personalized invitations, so I hoped it was just a matter of time. I’d used my app to get familiar with their eponymous call and I was ready.

We started hearing them in spring, off in the trees to our west, but never managed to catch a glimpse. Fee-bee, fee-bee, they called to each other, back and forth, male to female, female to male in their little bonded pair. Sometimes it sounded like they added a bit of a question mark, looking for each other. Fee-bee? Fee-bee? He asked and she’d reply, reassuring, Fee-bee. Fee-bee. Other times they simply proclaimed their presence, as if our backyard emcee had retired for the night and they’d taken on the job themselves.

Then, in early summer, I noticed a new nest at the top of our second floor downspout, a particularly sturdy one made of twigs and moss. The occupants were elusive until one day I spotted two adult phoebes flitting between the downspout, my garden fence, and the wildflower amphitheater I’ve cultivated between our yard and the woods. While I was dying to get my ladder out of the woodshed and peek in for updates, I did not make it a thing. I gave them their space and left them to do what nesting phoebes do. The adults took turns in their parenting duties, setting out to catch flying bugs, then returning to feed the babies in the nest. As the three hatchlings got older, we could hear their high-pitched shrieks for food as mom or dad approached the nest with another tender, juicy fly.

Just as we had watched our human babies make those sleep smiles “just one more time” and then just one more, and one more, we spent hours watching the phoebes make just one more food delivery. The babies got bigger, their shrieks became louder if in no way similar to their parents’ proclamations. One evening I looked up and the nest was positively overflowing, as if they were so many hatchlings crammed in that tiny nest they had to take turns sitting outside on the terrace.

I kept my camera on me at all times, hoping to catch the moment the Phoebes fledged. It’s an all-or-nothing proposition, fledging. Some birds, like the red-tailed hawks that nest in our woods every year, use the nest from time to time after fledging but for most of the birds in our yard, that’s it. You can’t go home again, little birdie. They fly - well, fall - out of the nest into the yard, and if I’ve put the dogs in quickly enough, they don’t end up damp from from a quick trip into Luther’s mouth before they fly (hop?) another ten feet to the relative safety of the wildflowers. This year, only one spent their first day of independence covered in dog spit before I rescued it and moved it to dry on the clothesline.

Now, as we move from midsummer into August, there are three additional Eastern Phoebes flitting about in my garden than there were last year, flycatching, resting on the fence posts while their tails do a very phoebe tail-wag, as if they are constantly working to regain their balance.

Today, August 7, 2024, I watched my daughter raise her right hand and swear to a probate judge that she wants to change her name because she is transgender and simply wants to live her whole, fulfilled life as Phoebe Marie Lahey. I’ve heard her say her name thousands of times over the years since she first announced her intention to live a life very different from the one we envisioned when we saw giants and warriors, but it was different this time.

Forevermore a proclamation, never in question.

For Abigail Thorn, who went there first and taught our family so much.