My 7-year-old son never listens.

Do your chores. Brush your teeth. Put your clothes in the hamper.

He doesn't listen. I find socks, T-shirts, and shorts dropped in a line from the back door to the living room, where he's lying on the couch in his underwear watching Scooby Doo.

It's like I don't even exist. And I know parenthood means 18 years to life, but it's frustrating to be telling someone something, over and over again, and to have the words mean nothing at all.

Then I think about the first time my son told me he was a boy. I didn't listen.

I think about the second and third and 100th time he told me he was a boy. I didn't listen.

I listened to the doctor, on the day they laid him in my arms and said the words that would set us up for six very heartbreaking years: "It's a girl!" You build on those words; you expect certain things. You expect to watch Disney princess movies a million times, and braid hair, and talk about periods and bras and having babies one day. You shouldn't, but you do.

I remember his third birthday. He wanted a Thomas the Tank Engine and Toy Story theme. I got him a Thomas cake and Woody goody bags, with plastic sheriff badges and whistles. He asked me to go as Woody, with cowboy boots and hats. I heard him but I didn't listen.

Courtesy of Pamela Valentine

I found boots, brown and ligh- up, with Woody and Buzz on the side. And then I forced him into a red dress with white tights and pink cowboy hat because that's what I thought a 3-year-old girl should wear.

I even felt proud that I was raising a daughter who flew in the face of gender conventions. That it somehow made me a better mom or more admirable person.

I don't know why that was so important to me, what other people thought. Why listening to them was more important than listening to my child and his needs and his thoughts on who he was. In all of this, in supporting my son through his transition, in making the choice to share our story and risking discrimination and judgment, caring about what other people thought was my biggest struggle. And learning to no longer care what anyone else thinks has perhaps been the greatest, most life-changing lesson of all.

Now that doesn't mean that I don't discourage my son from farting loudly in public and then announcing it to the room at large. But it does mean that when someone apologizes to me for my child and our situation, I'm going to speak up.

Nobody needs to be sorry for me or for my son. He is healthy, intelligent, courageous, and nearly perfect. Yes, he's loud and sassy. Sometimes downright disrespectful. And his feet stink to high heaven when he takes his shoes off. He also has a bad attitude about math. And doing chores. Or any kind of work at all.

And yes, sometimes he doesn't listen.

Like when I tell him to close the back door when he comes in. Or like when I tell him to put away the clothes that I spent hours washing and folding, instead of leaving it where his baby brother is going to throw it all over the floor. Or like when I tell him not to eat something that has fallen onto the ground, because there is no such thing as the two-minute rule, it's a five-second rule and that's still questionable when its pizza, cheese side down.

Or like when his mother and his father told him he was a girl. His grandparents and his doctors and his teachers told him he was girl. His red dress and his white tights and pink cowboy hat told him he was a girl. His whole world, everything and everyone that he knew and trusted and loved and believed in — we all told him he was something that he knew he wasn't.

But my son, he never listens.

Pamela Valentine Pamela Valentine writes and works from home, on the far FAR south side of Chicago, as Affirmed Mom for ChicagoNow.

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