She hasn’t been asked this question for at least a year. We assumed they’d finally sorted out that I’m a girl. Sadly, no.

Which reminds me of something my therapist said years ago, “You know you present as the boy in your relationship, right?”

I present as the boy? Are you fucking kidding me? Here’s the thing: You are speaking from your stereotypes. Short hair + agency = masculine. How old are you, brother? We are more complex than our haircuts.

I once spent an afternoon with a buddy and her friends, and they told her later that they were baffled to learn I’d had a son. How did that happen? they wondered. How is a butch a biological mother?

First, I’m not butch. Second, you’re demeaning my power. You’re suggesting that I can’t be powerful and a woman. That I must be one or the other. Either she’s boyish or she’s maternal. (Inherent in this stereotype is the ridiculous assumption that I will hook up with feminine women — motherly women — and let them do my parenting for me while I continue to play the masculine role of pants-wearing provider.)

Nobody benefits from these assumptions. You are assuming that mothers come in one particular size and shape. You are assuming that men don’t nurture. You are assuming that women have to wear lipstick to be feminine. In fact, everything about this is assumption, and it demonstrates our feeble concept of family and gender. It speaks poorly of motherhood and power. Nothing I have ever done has made better use of my power than being a mother.

That I get better at it all the time is just proof of how much work is involved. It doesn’t start at birth. It doesn’t end at death. Our power is like our love, it adapts.

There is purpose to our lives. I’m not always sure we know what that purpose is, but there is purpose. And I object to this notion that anyone lives for art. That art, in itself, is worth our lives. The truth is, art is essential to living, because it translates our experience. It makes sense of happenstance and mess. I seek art the way that I seek sex. To experience joy. To break in half and ache. To feel.

What the Fang parents do to the Fang children in the name of art is hard to experience. It actually made me queasy sometimes. No one thrives in a closed system. In a family where outside influence is not tolerated. Where debate is not fostered. Where you are not allowed to feel what you feel because your feelings don’t matter.

Maybe I am not ready for a particular story. Maybe it speaks to an earlier version of me. The girl who thought my old thoughts, the girl who spoke with my old mouth. I think sometimes that stories wait for me, the way people do. They approach with enthusiasm, and then convince me that I have more options than I realized. What about this? the stories say. Have you thought about it this way?

Not until just this moment.

She’s in sandals and checking along the bank for frogs. “I love to catch them,” she assures me. She is a girl who asked for a snake for her birthday. She is unusual and bright in the way that Gavin is. And to see them together, scouting the bank, whistling with cattails, is something more than gratifying. In the middle of her siblings, she is a lonely child. Psychologists would label her the family’s lost child. What is overlooked is her ferocity. The keenness of her mind.

That my son has picked her in particular is encouraging. He prefers bright girls with power. Hermione. Princess Leia. Every girl in the Miyazaki oeuvre. He is drawn to friends he can converse with.

When I was a child, we would have gone to the river alone. Probably with the same agenda: frog catching, rock throwing, negotiating walking sticks, exploring. My parents missed all this. The shale skips 14 times before the reeds swallow it. Twilight our only witness. The kids laugh, scrambling up the trail.  They’ve found a rock shaped like a heart. “Not a real heart,” they tell me, “the imaginary kind.”

And we decided to eat inside. Sad outfit and all. I would leave in the morning for New Orleans. I would leave in the morning. We walked up the hill and you told me about punk shows you saw as a teen. How raw Spokane had been. You were wearing ballet slippers.

You kept laughing and looking away and I resolved to burn my running shorts. My running shorts were ruining everything. You were telling me the story of how you found your birth mother. After years of searching with only her name to go by. At the dawn of the internet.

How mysterious we are. Your hair so short it jabbed at your ears. And I had so much affection for you that I couldn’t speak. In the morning I was leaving. And you’d already written me two letters, to be delivered to my hotel. They arrived the second day, after I’d come back from a run.

I read them and thought of your ballet slippers. Your weird little toes. I read them and believed you were magic. Somehow. In this lonely place. At this lonely time. You’d appeared to answer all calls. Spoken and restrained. Urgent and sleepy. Mary DuChene. First mother.

My stalker is so this person. Panicked by everything. The inevitable falling sky.

Angry at health and happiness.

It’s impotence. Stalking. Sitting at the computer, scanning through my old blogs. Reading my Facebook. Calling it research. I’m the scary tree. I’m the dangerous canopy road.

The monster in your head. Sad for you.

I sneaked out to the pool at 3:43 a.m. and called her. “It’s a tragedy,” I began. “It’s meant to be tragic.”

“How could you write this book? It’s so mean. Are you mean?”

“No. I’m not mean. The characters are dishonest. I’m not the characters.”

“You wrote them.”

“That’s true.”

“How could you write this book? It must have been so hard.”

And then I told her how hard it was. How long it took me to get them right. To give the possibility of happiness before crushing it. How I let a child watch it happen. How I let him love them. How I let everyone love in their imperfect ways. Like we do. How I sat at the desk and wrote toward a terrible conclusion. One I had seen and could not escape.

Am I talking about fate? No. I’m talking about collisions. The inevitable wreck. I’m talking about the way we charge into them as though we must. I’m talking about acceptance. Like that beautiful line in Long Day’s Journey into Night: “… I fell in love with James Tyrone, and was so happy for a time.”

What we have is ours. Whether or not we want it. Whether or not it poisons us. What we have is ours. I marked all my tragedies. So I don’t have to go back that way. I know what’s behind me.

The little girl’s face scrunches up. “Is that the face you make when you’re upset?” Mary asks her.

The girl nods.

“Why are you upset?”

The girl glances at her mom. Then shrugs. Everyone in the room is ignoring tantrum-mother.

“Do you want stickers?” Mary asks.

“Oh yes!” she says, the scrunched face vanishing.

It has become legendary, this story, this face one makes when one’s upset.

“What does your mom look like when she’s upset?” Mary asks G.

He starts giggling. Then they’re both giggling.

“Yes,” I say, long suffering. “You’re both hilarious.”

“She looks like this,” he says and then does some vaguely monkey impression that involves a lot of rapid spinning. Apparently I look like Kermit the Frog.

“I’d be so fit if I got upset like that.”

“This is what I look like,” he says, “like an otter.” And then he makes a face that isn’t remotely like an otter. And I can’t really imagine how you’d do an otter impression in any case.

We agree Mary channels baby orangutan when she’s upset.

The important thing is that you have a character. An upset character. You look like this when you’re upset. Not like you but like this version of you. There’s a strange freedom in that. Once we get too big for our feelings to fit on our faces, they have to push all through us. Like method acting.

I have learned to love this stupid creature I become when I’m upset. This laughingstock. I have learned to feed her a snack and nod while I listen. It’s cool. I hear you. That’s totally upsetting. Yeah, it is.

And then she’s OK. And we can get back to whatever we were doing before she came busting in.

I was so busy watching myself that I began to invent a character. A girl like me but with better intentions. A girl a little more honest. A girl a little more agile. A girl without any scars. And she said the perfect things. Briefly, and pointedly. She was exactly what you expected, and never boring. And then I imagined her grown up. An inventor, probably. Or a veterinarian. Something spectacular. And good at love. She would be particularly good at love.

As children, that seems easy. Love is as easy as pouring milk over cereal. People love you and are kind. Consistently. Lather, rinse, repeat. And diligence is rewarded. Like homework. A neat row of gold stars.

At some point, you break the mirror. You shatter the reflection. You become your practice. The clothes you wear fit you. You stop rehearsing. And you begin to love your scars. You begin to love the ache in that one finger. The weird little bump at your elbow. The way your one nipple points in an entirely random direction. You turn inside. You look there, and concentrate on your breathing. The way your chest fills with air as though you can keep this — exactly this — forever. And then you breathe out and are grateful. I am not an instrument of karma. Thank god. I am not an instrument of karma. I am running beside a boy, the back of his shirt tucked into my fist, his bike swaying precariously. I am chanting something to him. Something encouraging. He bikes uphill. We are nearly home. Inside, a woman is knitting another hat. We can never have too many hats.

I am not an instrument of karma. And love is easy. As easy as milk poured over cereal. The weed whacker deadheading tulips. The woman leaning over to kiss me. Both hands at the back of my head, as though I were a book. Opening. Opening.

“No. It isn’t. There’s nothing wrong with me.”

But she went on saying it. And then we finished packing G in his stroller and we went for a walk to the park.

“Which child in the family were you?” Mary asks sometimes.

“The one who disappointed them.”

This woman sat on my couch yesterday and told me that her Mormon father had said, “I think God is probably like me. You are gay but he continues to love you.”

My parents are not that parent. Nor are they that god. They cannot even conceive of that god. And I tried to imagine being Bechdel’s mother. The methodically transcribed conversations between them. The notes on manuscripts. The horrible scene where she tells her 7-year-old daughter she’s too old to be kissed. How do you read such a thing about yourself? How do you remember?

We go on looking for mothers all our lives. I have any number in my circle at the moment. What would it take to draw them, as Bechdel has done? What would it take to make the relative distances between us into a comic?

My mother crying on a staircase. “It’s my fault you’re like this.”

Nope. It’s your fault you see fault. Other than that, we’re OK.

We’d listen to these awful hair metal bands together. I was a 7th grader, with a perm. My breasts resiliently refusing to return from whence they came. She insisted I shave my legs, and wear socks that matched my shirts. And Guess jeans. She girled me up. Sorta.

The other morning at brunch we were talking about Mary Poppins.

“I had a crush on her when I was a kid,” I said.

And everyone replied: “Of course you did.”

And then my buddy added, “She’s bossy.”

And I see what they mean. We are drawn to attributes. We have a spectrum of love. And in the old days, mine involved people disapproving of me. I wasn’t quite right, and so they’d fix and style.

We all have our things. It takes time to be able to say: I fucking dig this. This is so me. And mean it. And be able to enjoy it — deeply and without embarrassment. It takes a while to figure out some of the shit on your love spectrum isn’t love at all. What is principal though is evaluating this for yourself. Not the ways the other person did you wrong, the other person failed you, but the ways you chose to settle for less than you deserved. And how, by learning to recognize it, you began to seek something else. And maybe it wasn’t quite right either, but it set you away from bad habits and in search of better.