Benjamin Law

I moved to Sydney when I was 16. It was like I was being pulled by a magnet to explore a future I had in my mind at school: to venture into the city, as a country boy, in the search for a music career.

I liked the whole variety of Sydney: the trams; the double-decker buses; people from all walks of life. There were about eight cinemas in the city. I’m a movie buff, so I had all these movies to go see. And I’m a big milkshake drinker, and there were milkshake bars everywhere. And hamburgers! So all of this was tripled and doubled and you-name-it, especially when you come from a town where you had one or two cinemas, and one or two milkbars.

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Dear Future Daughter/Son/Non-Specific-Gender-Identifying Trans Child,

Take a seat. Daddy has some things he’d like to get off his chest. And no, it’s not just the piles of festering plates and clothes that have piled around him over the years, because boy, parenting sure does lower your standards over time. No, the things Daddy would like to get off his chest are more philosophical and emotional than that. I would like us to have a heart-to-heart—even though, over the years, you have slowly broken mine.

Oh shut up; you so have! And before you continue on with your terrible whining (a noise that has always made me gag), go out and ask any mother or father out there and I guarantee they’ll say the same thing: All children break their parents’ hearts. It’s just what children do. In fact, it’s what Daddy’s own mother continues to remind him still, to this very day, every time they speak on the phone. (Will she never die?)

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Edited version originally published in frankie #42 (July/Aug 2011)

Some time later this year, I’ll turn 29, which is a funny, nowhere-ish kind of age. In fact, all of the late 20s are this entirely non-remarkable, in-between phase of life: old enough to horrify teenagers, but still young enough to be envied by the elderly, who demonstrate this by groaning in an almost sexual way while touching your face.

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