This is my 8th Father’s Day as a father. I’m sitting down to write this after grabbing toast fixings and passing the responsibility for making it to the kids. I’m hearing chants of “chicken-chicken-latte!” while they battle lego figurines in a complex game of dragon-clones created for nefarious purposes. And I’m looking at a long list of things I’ve wanted to write and hopefully will get to start today.

But first, a regrounding of sorts.

I’ve set aside essay writing for a while. Largely because I’ve felt like I get too wrapped up in my own mind and lose sight of what matters in the moment. I tried to keep up on writing about specific teams, players and games, but I was too inundated with work to do more than see the scores and sigh (seriously: Emelec, Legon, and Ross County seem determined to find the maximum sigh volume in my voice…and besides, if any hard core fans are coming here for scores and analysis…why?).

But I know writing is important to me. And I know that writing, whatever form it takes, helps me to be both aware of the moment, and of the broader world around me. So, I reason, I ought to write sometimes just about myself, my world, and where I’m at.

Without a doubt myself, my world and where I am shifted most clearly a few months ago when Owen (age 5) told us they didn’t feel “like a boy or a girl”.

Before that, I loved Owen totally, unreservedly, and absolutely.

Afterwards, I have continued to love Owen totally, unreservedly, and absolutely.

But the rush of everything has left me little time to really be aware of what this all means.

Part of me feels like it doesn’t mean much. After all, Owen has been insisting on wearing “dresses” (at first long t-shirts, but increasingly Taylor Swift/Disney Princess-style costumes/ballgowns) since they were 2. Owen freely shifts between Darth Vader light sabers and Queen Elsa ice blasts depending on which will serve them best in the moment. In short, Owen hasn’t quite conformed to the “boys wear blue and love trucks” mentality for many years. That has confused some of my family members but has also been widely accepted and encouraged by most everyone we know.

But to label it–to say “mom, dad, I am neither”–has required a bigger shift in thinking than I expected and I need to consider it, thus the writing. I am striving to switch pronouns after five years of ingrained habits. I am unblinkingly answering questions from peers like “how are your boys?” with things like “my son Alex is reading on his own, and my child Owen is super excited to do their Pout Pout Fish dance recital.” I am down to be Owen’s dad and champion.

But part of me worries: I don’t want to co-opt my child’s journey to become a story about me. Nor do I expect applause for providing basic love and compassion to my own offspring. However, in this moment of our lives writing these thoughts down has helped me to realize where the changed happened. Not in Owen. Not in the way I feel or think about them. Instead this has been a clear and decisive shift from a time when I would passively just “let Owen explore” to a time when I MUST say “Owen is exploring and I am going to advocate for them.”

So, I read the literature. I ask questions. I stand side by side when they speak, back them up when they need it, and step up if they’re scared. (Suffice to say, as the kids attend a Jesuit school despite my Lutheran-upbringing and my wife’s agnosticism, we were surprisingly invested in the papal conclave. ) I did tell a principal, “if you’re going to walk with us on this journey, you need to let other families know they should not block the path.” (I did not find the gumption to tell that same principal “you know what would help us on our journey…if you tried saying “they” rather than “he”, you know…just to prove to yourself that you won’t blow up if you use a non-gendered pronoun.)

Moreover, I know I have to I stand by Alex just as much. Both as he grows up answering classmates’ disbelief and navigating a shift in the sibling dynamic, and as he becomes more a more independent young man who makes his own toast and writes his own stories (about nefarious dragon-clones which the more I write it sounds cooler and cooler).

This is my 8th Father’s Day as a father, but it is my first as a parent of someone who openly identifies outside of gender binaries. I am scared of making mistakes (emotional harm is much more impactful than the professional athletes playing in the second division come the fall), I am intimidated by sitting down to write about these thoughts and blasting them out in to the world. But if I intend to be a father to my children in all their ever-evolving glory, I need to be here.

To be here, it helps to write about it.

To write about it, it helps to have a venue to share things. And so…here we are.

This has been the MacKenzie Boys’ Bootroom, but the second word is not only inaccurate, I acknowledge now that it has always been irrelevant. So this is now The MacKenzie’s Bootroom. Long may it be so.