When I agreed to do a This I Believe sermon, T was kind enough to inform me via e-mail that the next scheduled one was on Father’s Day. She suggested that my speaking on this day would be "provocative."

Provocative? More like "perverse" I responded. Still, I agreed; if for no other reason than I am a sucker for irony. I think it’s why I like the Hebrew Scriptures so much, because they’re full of it. "Plus," I replied, "it should be good for a laugh or two."

T, being the thoughtful, kind and sensitive person she is, replied, "Look, Meredith, if you aren’t comfortable with this or think it is in some way laughable, we can schedule you for another day."

I replied: "Laughable? What’s wrong with laughable? Beats the hell out of tragic, and as for comfortable? Comfort is something I have rarely enjoyed living as a transsexual in a society that deems me a freak, or, for that matter, even in my own skin, since I often feel like one."

The belief about which I speak today is best illustrated if I tell you stories about my children, and since today is, after all, father’s day, I hope this is an indulgence you will allow me if just this once.

In the interest of full disclosure: While I will be talking about "my" children, they are, of course, not just my children. They also have a wonderful biological mother whose name is Marsha. We separated shortly after moving to California when Marsha met a man --finally. At that time Lia was two and Caleb almost five, and from that point on we put aside our differences in order to share the care and tending of the children equally.

Also, the stories I will tell today are my version; the children have their own versions that differ in some ways from mine. For instance, my version does not include the word "ogre," nor will I use the "B" --itch word; or, at least, not in reference to myself, though I am one of the few people who take no offense at this insult, since it tends to include me in the group to which I have always most wanted to belong.

Furthermore, I would like to apologize to those of you who have read my memoir, since many of the stories I will be sharing today appear there, and you will, therefore, be required to hear them again. Jodi was kind enough to read my memoir and afterward said she lived with my voice in her head for the entire next week. I told her I had the same problem and that I sometimes found that large quantities of alcohol helped alleviate the worst of the symptoms.

So it’s true: I fathered two children.

It was a bad idea.

It was a bad idea because probably the only thing more unforgivable than being born with a penis is using the accursed thing for Nature’s intended purpose. Now, for the record, I have nothing against penises or those who possess and treasure them. If you happen to be born a boy, a penis is a wonderful little thing. If, however, you are born a girl, they are a birth defect --and not an insignificant one at that.

Also, I agreed to children out a sense of shame and guilt, and shame and guilt are bad reasons to do anything.

And then, there was the obvious problem that I did not want to live my life pretending to be a man, and (in case you haven’t noticed) there’s a rather strong connection in the minds of most people between being a dad and being a man.

Furthermore, I was not too keen on being a parent at all; there were lots of things I’d rather spent my time doing. I loved teaching, so it’s not like I didn’t like kids, but parenting and teaching are two very different things, though, fortunately for me, they are not unrelated. I often reconciled myself to parenting by thinking of it as teaching. My reasoning went something like this: If I do this job of parenting really well; if I’m careful and attentive and raise these children to be competent, capable, independent adults, I’ll be able to get them out of the house sooner and keep them out longer. The empty nest syndrome was not something I was likely to suffer from --that is, until the nest was empty.

Okay, I’ll be the first to admit that these sentiments are not likely to qualify me for either Mother or Father Of The Year, but when you really thing about it, it’s not a half bad way to think about parenting.

There are bad gods. After some 20 years of teaching I have come to believe that one of the worst, most demanding, unforgiving, oppressive and obnoxious gods is a worshiped child. My children were not worshiped.

In fact, when they were very small at random times I would knock them down. Now I didn’t do this in a mean or cruel way. Mostly I did it when they got in my way. I mean, I am very tall and toddlers are very short, and it’s hard to see them way down there, especially if you’re carrying a load of laundry. Also, I knew that at times they would be the victims of cruelty, meanness and plain old bad luck, and that they needed to learn how to get knocked down and then, to get back up, and the sooner they learned it the better.

Now after field-testing this method of parenting on my two, I am prepared to recommend it. For one thing, they learn to stay out of your way. In fact, just the other day I was cooking breakfast and my twenty-three year old son ambled into the kitchen just as I turned from the sink to the stove. Suddenly, here’s this six foot, three, 185 pounds of solid muscle man scurrying to get out of my way, and I thought, Hey, it still works. Plus, I was right: Over the course of their lives, they have gotten knocked down, sometimes hard, and so far, they’ve always gotten right back up.

I also mention it, because I don’t think you’re likely to find this strategy in any of the current parenting manuals. So, I offer it for whatever it’s worth: probably what I’m charging you for it.

Then when they got older I did things with them. I taught them to play sports. I did not, however, encourage them to play winner-take-all team sports wherein children get to ape the behaviors and adopt the values of egomaniacal, drug abusing professional athletes. That was their other mother. But when they decided to play, I agreed to support them, but I wanted two things: I wanted them to do it for themselves, not me and not to please anyone else. And when it stopped being fun, I wanted them to stop doing it. Whenever I asked about a particular game I had not seen, and they replied, "Oh, we won." or "We lost." I would say, that’s not what I asked. I asked how the game went. Did you play well? Were there any exciting moments you want to tell me about?

Eventually, I was very grateful they both became swimmers on the Petaluma High team, since the intensity of competition for these minor sports is much less than for the big ones.

However, in Caleb’s senior year in high school, he announced his intention to go out for the football team.

"Caleb," I protested, "You know you can’t go out for football your senior year and expect to play."

"I know," he replied matter-of-factly. "I just want to do it for the experience."

And so he went out and made the team.

Eventually I mustered the courage to go to one of the games --Homecoming, I think it was. (As testosterone fests celebrating the macho, football games are not exactly friendly territory for transsexuals.) It was one of those games where the other team was getting trounced so thoroughly, the second and third strings got to play, so all of a sudden, there Caleb was on the field, all tall and lean and gladiatorial in his royal blue football uniform.

Watching him out on that field, I had a sudden realization, one that still brings tears to my eyes. As he bounced up and down on his toes like a colt with energy to burn, I thought: he plays with heart; my child, he plays with heart. And in that moment the parents of the starting quarterback couldn’t have been prouder of their child than I was of my third stringer; for to play with heart, is it not always to win? And then --to top it off --the little stinker went and caught a touchdown pass. It is and will always be a great family story.

As a child, having found sanctuary and sanity in the out of doors, I early on took mine camping and canoeing. One particularly rich time was the summer we went on a four-day canoe camping trip on the Russian river when Lia was about six and Caleb eight. Away from the demands and distractions of work, free from the roles and expectations automatically imposed by others, we spent long, slow hours simply enjoying one another’s company. While we had canoed and camped before, it had rarely been just the three of us, and I made special preparations for the time. Drawing from memories of my own childhood, I brought along rubber soldiers, the kind I had played with, and we made up an elaborate war game using stones, slingshots and even the pellet gun. It took us several hours to mostly annihilate the other’s army, and I think we were eventually forced to conjure up some natural disaster to finally end the game. (My children, I am glad to report, seem not the slightest bit inclined toward violence, military service, or NRA membership as a result of this warlike exercise.) I borrowed a friend’s 22 pistol, and we target practiced against a high bluff. I can still remember little Lia, the gun clutched tightly in both hands, blasting away at a boiled egg. The hillside began to give way with the weight of lead by the time she gleefully blew the thing to smithereens. We camped for two of the three nights on a gravel bar where a small tree jutted out over the river providing a perfect four-foot high diving platform. We’d throw these foot-long colored rods weighted on one end into the water, then dive off the platform trying to gather them all up before surfacing. Given the current, it was no small task, even for me. We cooked over an open fire, slept under the stars; we even made a sweat lodge, in which I led them in a simple ritual that I regrettably can no longer remember. Diving with masks and snorkels, Caleb and I discovered a submerged canoe, which we managed to free from its captivity and, with Caleb solo in the stern, bring home as a prize. With an extra craft, Lia was forced to paddle the little kayak (more like an oversized piece of Tupperware than a real kayak) rather than ride like the river princess in the bow of my canoe. I still smile remembering her morosely slouched down inside it, a large straw hat protecting her face from the sun, paddling down the river whining, "My arms hurt."

I even taught Caleb to hunt; I mean, how much more manly can you get than to kill small animals with large weapons. Now I don’t oppose hunting. In fact, I think everyone who eats meat should at least once in their lifetime experience the entire process: the predatory stealth of the hunt, the thrill of the kill, the agony of watching the light in a wounded animal’s eye fade into the opaque mystery of death, the feel and stench of bloody entrails, the savory tang of wild meat. It gives a whole new meaning to the word ‘food.’ I tried to teach Lia, but she adamantly refused and by then, my predatory instincts, never very strong in the first place, were all but gone.

When I could no longer perpetuate the lie of manliness, and, by extension, fatherhood, Caleb was poised to begin his sophomore year in high school, while Lia was entering ninth grade. Marsha and her boyfriend Tom were at the time living in Sonoma where the children also attended school. I had just been fired from teaching and --no longer with a job to lose --had decided to make a break for it and come fully out of the closet. That’s when Caleb decided he wanted to switch schools and attend Petaluma High.

By that time I could not have crammed myself back into that closet had I wanted to, and I told him this in no uncertain terms. I said, and, as I recall, these were my exact words: "I am coming out of the closet, Caleb, and I won’t go back in for you." (Our children rarely enjoyed sugarcoated versions of the truth.) I reminded him that he had a perfectly normal mother, and he might seriously want to reconsider staying in the high school where she lived, since going to school in the same town where I lived could prove tricky, to say the least. Still, he persisted. I pressed him. "For instance," I said, trying to paint the picture for him in horrifyingly graphic terms, "One day you’re going to be standing around with your buddies when someone walks up and says, ‘Hey Caleb, I saw your dad downtown in a dress.’ What are you going to say then?" He looked annoyed at the question and answered, "So," in one of those semi-intelligible grunts common to high school boys.

"So? Is that all you can come up with?" I protested. "How about, ‘Oh, my God! She wasn’t wearing the mini-skirt was she? I hate it when she wears the miniskirt!’ or ‘And you thought your parents were weird.’" He was not amused, but I forced this sort of conversation on him more than once, and still, he enrolled in my town’s school.

Since boys are arguably more homophobic than girls, I expected it to be harder for Caleb, but that proved not always so. Lia had her own times of difficult misgivings. (In a classic case of insult added to injury, Lia reported that the most annoying thing she had to deal with was, once she revealed that I was transsexual, not only did she have to explain what that meant, but that then she had to assure her friends that I did NOT dress like a hooker.)

While there were moments of discomfort for everyone --the children, their friends and me --it went much more smoothly than I think anyone expected. While it was odd that I was their father and dressed and lived my life as a woman, once their friends got to know me, I was not particularly odd. While I was a little funny looking, I was likewise, just plain funny and friendly and more interested in them than I thought they should be in me. And while dressing like a woman was strange, I did not dress strangely for a woman. (Truth be known, I dressed a good bit more like the traditional image of a mother than most of their mothers did.) And how can you feel too badly about an adult who, on the sole condition you surrender your car keys, provides a safe place where you can hang out with your friends, drink beer and smoke pot and then, the next morning medicates you with liberal quantities of water, ibuprofen and homemade buttermilk biscuits? Okay, maybe she’s weird --but she’s cool.

Don’t get me wrong; I did not try to be cool. While I definitely appreciated their acceptance, I did not approve of their drug use. I particularly didn’t like that drugs and alcohol seemed to be prerequisites for fun, and I said so many times. If I’d had my way, they would have sat around chatting, drinking soda, eating popcorn and playing Twister. But given that they weren’t about to surrender their social lives to my wishes and given that we had always promoted curiosity coupled with lavish permission to explore, I knew that regardless of how we felt about it, they were eventually going to explore the world of intoxicating substances. I simply wanted to make sure that their first experiences took place in as safe an environment as possible and before they left home. That way we could talk about it, reflect on it, debrief it, critique it, and by relinquishing attempts to control, I hoped I might be allowed influence and thereby, help them avoid abuse and addiction. So far, it seems to have worked, though I am not yet ready to recommend it. It is perilous strategy.

I tell you these things, because, as I said in the beginning, I think they illustrate and incarnate a belief I hold dearly and deeply. So, This I believe: I believe that the staff work of the Divine is redemption. For, you see, this should never have been. I should never have fathered children. I mean, what was I thinking? And once here, my anger, resentment and consequent depression at being sentenced to a lifetime of being a dad should have poisoned my relationship to them. When we moved from Maryland to California, I left behind everything and everyone I loved save for Caleb and Lia. At that moment I had the perfect opportunity to escape, but I didn’t, and I didn’t for one reason and one reason alone: my children. Then, when I came out of the closet, their anger, grief and resentment at my taking away their father should have poisoned their love for me. Plus, just the embarrassment factor alone should have sent them screaming in the opposite direction. Our relationships should either not exist or be fraught with resentment, pain, struggle and dysfunction. Yet, nothing could be further from the truth. The truth is, that by all accounts (not just my own) the relationships between my children and me are some of the most healthy, happy, intimate and loving to be found anywhere, thereby illustrating to me that if we are but open and willing, the Divine will take our bad ideas, mistakes, follies and failures and in her hands form, shape and remake them into that which is beautiful, loving and --to borrow from Genesis --very, very good.

And so with this assurance, I wish you a happy fathering day.