I could have my mother's love, but there were terms, the same terms they had offered me three years before: that I trade my reality for theirs, that I take my own understanding and bury it, leave it to rot in the earth.

You can love someone and still choose to say goodbye to them... You can miss a person everyday and still be glad they’re no longer in your life.

You can love someone and still choose to say goodbye to them.. You can miss a person every day, and still be glad that they are no longer in your life.

From the moment I had first understood that my brother Richard was a boy and I was a girl, I had wanted to exchange his future for mine. My future was motherhood; his, fatherhood. They sounded similar but they were not. To be one was the decider. To preside. To call the family to order. Tho be the other was to be among those called.  I knew my yearning was unnatural. This knowledge, like so much of my self-knowledge, had come to me in the voice of people I knew, people I loved. All through the years that voice had been with me, whispering, wondering, worrying. That I was not right. That my dreams were perversions. That voice had may timbres, many tones. Sometimes it was my father's voice; most often it was my own.

It happens sometimes in families: one child who doesn't fit, whose rhythm is off, whose meter is set to the wrong tune.