Trouble begins in fifth grade with the debate about what to do with Poppyâ€™s upcoming entry into puberty. And for several years the family is happy. She is popular, where Claude had no friends. She is confident and talented, where Claude was clumsy and withdrawn.

They let his classmates and teachers assume he is a girl. They donâ€™t tell most people that Poppy was once a boy. In the process, they inadvertently give Claudeâ€”now Poppyâ€”a new start. But eventually the family ends up moving across country in response to some peopleâ€™s intolerance. His kindergarten class is briefed and is, generally accepting. He gets to go to the bathroom in the nurseâ€™s office. By the time kindergarten starts, Claude is convinced that he wants nothing more than to dress as a girl, which he begins to do after the first semester of his kindergarten year.Ĭlaude is treated immediately as a transgender child. He begins drawing himself in dresses and heals. But Claude begins to want to wear the dress outside, to preschool. Any parent can tell you of the obsessions and fetishes of our preschoolers. His parents accept this without much thought. In the year before kindergarten, he gets obsessed with a dress-up gown that he wears constantly, though not usually in public. Claude is the youngest of five boys, a quiet, serious, highly precocious baby and toddler. This is the story of a family coming to terms with and learning how to deal with the practical realities of their son wanting to becomeâ€”or realizing he isâ€”a girl. I had this experience recently with Laurie Frankelâ€™s This is How it Always Is. Through the encounter with characters and their stories, my heart is stretched and I feel I often walk away from a great book with a profound experiential knowledgeâ€”a connatural knowledgeâ€”of moral and theological truths, a knowledge that is emotional but something more significant than a mere feeling. I am a huge fan of reading fiction, not only for the pleasure factor, which is high for me, but also because of the way fiction has formed and continues to form my moral imagination.

This is how it always is book