This is How It Always Is _ 9/9 - 9/16

This is How It Always Is - Laurie Frankel

This is how a family keeps a secret... and how that secret ends up keeping them. This is how a family lives a happily ever after... until happily ever after becomes complicated. This is how children change... and then change the world. 

This is How It Always Is
This week, I read the first thirteen chapters of This is How It Always Is. Author Laurie Frankel builds upon the plot by narrating from the point of view of Rosie and Penn Walsh-Adams, the parents of five boys. Claude, the youngest of their children, struggles with the possibility of being transgender, even at the age of five.

Rosie and Penn aren't opposed to Claude's behavior. In fact, they support it. They want him to be whoever he wants to be. But that's just the problem - Claude doesn't know.

This is How It Always Is shows Rosie and Penn's struggles with adults and other members of their community, as well as other kids. They support his situation, but they don't seem to understand it. The only person Claude can confide in is his grandmother, Carmelo. He asks, "Will you love me even if I keep wearing a dress?" and she replies, "I will love you even if you wear a dress made out of puppies." Carmelo was the one who first supported Claude's preferences by buying him a bikini, even though everyone else was opposed to it at first.

Unfortunately, many transgender children and teens don't have parents as supportive as Rosie and Penn. Even if they do, there are still people out there who don't always support transgender people, and in the book, that becomes clear. Claude's kindergarten teacher, Miss Appleton, becomes skeptical of his tendency to wear a dress to school and tries to discourage Rosie from letting him go with a purse as a lunch box. Claude's friends suddenly don't want to play with him anymore, and their parents even went as far as threatening him with weapons. As Claude becomes Poppy, he, even as a small child, understands that there are some things that are okay, and some things people consider to not be.

The book also shows Claude's older brothers, Roo, Ben, Rigel and Orion. Roo and Ben are in middle school and are old enough to worry about what other people will say, but they don't mind. Rigel and Orion have accepted it and see no reason why anyone else shouldn't. Rosie and Penn silently agree with Roo and Ben's worries, but try to keep them hidden in the hopes that they won't becomes problems. Later on, Claude has started to wear dresses and skirts to school instead of changing when he comes home, and though he has to use the nurse's bathroom, he hasn't experienced much separation. The other kids are curious but stop asking after their questions have been answered.

The book is an accurate representative of what happens in real life, and though it's fiction, Claude's situation is similar to many others. Sometimes, transgender children or teens are afraid to show it, or they don't know whether they feel transgender or not. Part One of This is How It Always Is shows what a family of that size and mind would go through on such a journey, and what they might come up against later on.

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