Recently, I’ve been thinking about my identity as a parent. Yes, as someone who has a child I am responsible for, I am automatically deemed a parent. But what does that actually mean for me as a person? What does it mean to identify as a parent? How does this new part of my identity mesh or clash with other components of who I am?
As a queer person, I have an understanding that identity is fluid, multifaceted, and individual. I have had the experience of exploring new aspects of my identity as a gay person and as a nonbinary person. In drawing parallels with my new experience as a parent, I had a bit of an ‘aha’ moment that I wanted to share with you.
STAGES OF QUEER IDENTITY DEVELOPMENT
For me, discovering and exploring aspects of my queer identity followed a similar process: from unaware/baseline, to awareness, resistance, exploration, acceptance, immersion, and finally, integration. My process of moving through these stages was different when I was discovering my sexuality vs my gender.
Before figuring out I was gay I was assumed to be straight but really I didn’t have much sense of my own sexuality. Figuring out I was gay involved very little resistance for me because of the liberal environment I was raised in. I went from awareness to exploration to acceptance very quickly. I was still in early high school at that point with little autonomy for accessing the queer community. But as soon as I went to university away from home, I entered the immersion stage and became involved in the queer club, went to all the queer events, hung out with primarily queer friends, and went to queer bars. I always had something rainbow on, hung my rainbow flag on my door, and talked about queerness every chance I got. Over a couple years, this faded to being just one component of my identity (integration).
Figuring out I was nonbinary went through the same stages but at a very different rate. Despite having a gendery experience in high school, I remained unaware of my non-cis gender identity for years after and probably would have said I was a woman. During my husband’s transition I became aware of nonbinary identities and developed an awareness of my own but did not feel like I had the energy to explore it or deal with the consequences that exploration might bring. I remained in the resistance stage for at least two years. By the time I finally got the space and courage to explore my gender, I already knew that I was nonbinary and had accepted it, I just didn’t know what to do about it. So I immersed myself in this part of my identity for six months to a year, figuring out all the different facets of my gender, how to explain it to people, and connecting with a gender diverse group of friends. This has slowly faded to a more integrated level but remains a larger part of my overall identity than being gay did.
The ‘coming out’ process started at different points for these two identities. I came out as gay immediately after the acceptance stage, before immersion. I am still working on coming out as nonbinary despite being somewhere between the immersion and integration stages.
HOW THIS RELATES TO MY IDENTITY AS A PARENT
Because of the external and concrete nature of being a parent, the first couple stages don’t apply as much. I wasn’t a parent, and then, suddenly, I was. However, the process of resistance through to integration is more about the emotional and personal relationship with this new aspect of my identity, so I think it still applies.
So where am I at in the process? At this stage of things, four and a half months in, I’m still not really sure what it means to be a parent. I’ve been resisting my new parental identity because I didn’t want to lose the rest of who I am. If I lose who I am, all my emotions will be tied up in how well I feel like I’m doing as a parent. And since there are many aspects of this parenting thing that I have no control over, that seemed like a dangerous game.
Then I realized that ‘losing who I am’ was part of the process – the immersion stage. I had been too scared of what that would feel like to allow myself to move through the stages of exploring this new identity. Since making this connection, I have quickly moved from exploration to acceptance and, a bit nervously, into immersion.
It definitely feels different to allow myself to become immersed in an aspect of my identity and existence that is so strongly dependent on something external to myself. I feel like I have less control over my exploration process (and therefore, how it will integrate with the rest of my identity in the long run) than I did with the queer aspects of my identity. Add to that the fact that we are in the middle of a global pandemic and therefore have limited access to the social activities and groups that I might engage in as part of the immersion stage.
Needless to say, exploring my identity of being a parent will be different from exploring my queer identities. Regardless, I can’t jump straight from acceptance to integration. But maybe, since the identity of being a parent is a more external one, so too is the immersion process. Who I am internally, all those pieces I have fought to understand and accept, can stay where they are. I’m not going to ignore my experience as a nonbinary person while figuring out what it means to be a parent. I’m going to figure out what it means to be a nonbinary, queer parent.
What stages did you go through in exploring your queer identity? How did you feel in your role as a new parent? Leave me a comment to share your experiences. I’d love to know how you navigated these transformational experiences.