On Muses, Guppies and Prudence

I know I've used this one before, but it's true and it fits. Sometimes.

Q: What do you get when you have 1 male guppy and 5 female guppies?

A: 5 pregnant female guppies.

Guppies bear their young live and have sex the way God intended, not with all that writhing in the water and squirting eggs and milt willy-nilly. Nope, for guppies, it's Old Alabama and a waterbed.

Q: What do you get when you have 1 male guppy and 20 female guppies?

A: Nothing but a worn-out male guppy.

When you have too many irons in the fire, you don't get nothin' done. At least I don't. That's where I've been for the last few months. In funding terms, I've got 2 customers now, working full time. In reality, I'm engineering ten or so different webby thingies. On top of that, I'm hunting for an Alabama respite location, working my marriage through that purchase, doing various things at church, writing a novel, trying to powerlift my way to preposterous goals for a man my age, haunt Twitter-X, monitor our funds, take care of a brood of children with varying needs, fight my Irishness and its need for a drink, blog here and ... oh heck, I don't know. Wash and wax the car? Replenish the raised beds for my wife's 'maters?

Add a few more to that list. Why not? I'm that exhausted male guppy, but in my case, it's by my own choice. It's all good.

Anywho, that's what's behind my lack of ranting here. Oh well. I thought about hanging up the whole blogging thing, but it hurt to think about that.

So here I am and the muse has struck.

Tonight, I'm giving a personal testimony as a part of a meditation on prudence. Prudence is something I can't recall my Cursillo homies ever talking about, but it's at the heart of this blog.

How do you handle situations with ambiguous moral choices? What do you do when, no matter what choice you make, there will be a world of hurt coming down on everyone around you?

What do you do when your daughter comes out to you as trans? What do you do when your child has emotional disabilities and could burn down the house by accident, but needs you around? What do you do when your wife is slowly going mad and has become violent? When do you finally put your aging, demented wife in a home and stop taking care of her yourself? Confronted with multiple treatment choices for your wife with cancer, what do you help her choose? If your relative is a recovering addict, do you take him in, knowing he may end up robbing you for a hit?

God is love, don't judge just don't cut it.

So I need to give a testimony and it can't be my normal "our bishop is a moron" sort of thing. I know I rant here, but this needs to be, unlike my typical essays, Christian.

Here we go.

God made the world out of love for us. It's a highly improbable thing, this world of ours. The origin of life, the universal constants, the wild discontinuous steps in evolution, it's all crazy - crazy with love for us. It's a world of adventure, of danger, of choices, of free will.

God is love. Don't judge. Those are the things we get fed every Sunday. They're true and valuable. It's important to keep them in mind. However, there are lots of things we face that don't reduce to that kind of page out of a coloring book. Sometimes, in important ways, life is much murkier, more complicated than that.

5 years ago, give or take, my daughter came out to me as trans. It was just her and I in our kitchen. She had been a normal girl in high school with a couple of boyfriends. I had even caught her once in the garage, making out with her boyfriend. We even went out to dinner with a boy she liked and his parents because he was 2 years older than she was and she wanted to date him. He was a nice guy and his parents were lovely. They respected my old school ways, which were culturally Southern even though I wasn't yet a full-on adopted son of the South.

Something happened when she was a senior. Her teachers were far-left and who knows what they taught. She decided she was lesbian late in that year and her mom, my first wife, sent her to Pride Week in San Francisco that year. It was almost certainly flipping me the bird. She found every way she could to hurt me. I don't think my ex had a plan other than that.

Anywho, a couple of years later, there my Russian, adopted girl was, in my kitchen telling me she was actually a man.

This was pretty early in our societal madness. Far enough along for me to know that I held almost no cards at all. My HR would call me in if I asserted that girls could not become boys. Our corporate comms was all in on affirmation and inclusion. I knew enough science to know this was total, sadistic insanity.

God made biochemistry, too. Our moral code lives in that world - the world of physics, chemistry, biology and mathematics. All of those sciences are acts of love just as much as Jesus living as a man. Everything is predicated on that science, even the God is love part.

In that moment, 5 years ago, I could see the choice I was being offered. Agree with her or she'd kick me out of her life. At her age, parents have very little power. I was given a moral choice with no good outcomes. I told her not to do anything that couldn't be reversed. I didn't understand it all yet, but I knew some girls were getting their breasts cut off. You can't recover from that.

My Church preached affirmation, inclusion, love, acceptance and forgiveness.

She started on her testosterone treatments. When I would ask him about it during office visits, my doctor would close the door and talk in hushed tones about it. I knew why. His HR would flay him alive if they heard what he was saying. He said the whole thing was madness.

My bishop wrote an essay about "radical inclusion." From the pulpit, I heard, "God is love" and "Don't judge."

Meanwhile, there I was, holding firm. I never called my daughter by her new name, Luke. I never used he/him. I never used a name or a pronoun on those rare times we got together. I kept telling her not to go through with the surgery. She knew I didn't support her transition and saw less and less of me.

I saw her a few months ago. She really wants to have a relationship. We were very, very close when she was growing up. It hurts us both to be apart. She won't have a relationship with me if I don't call her Luke and agree she's a man.

She's had the surgery. Her breasts are gone. She's been taking testosterone long enough to have destroyed her voice, but worse, she's gone mad.

As any guy who went through puberty can tell you, testosterone is a psychotropic. You do crazy things under its influence. Suzy may have been a 3 or 4 at best, but by God, she was HOT in high school. Imagine what it does to a woman when given in doses 100x or more what her body can handle.

That last time she came over, I pushed back on her demand to call her a man. She started shaking and saying she felt threatened. We were just talking. All I could think of were all the trans shooters we've been seeing lately.

Did I do right 5 years ago when I didn't embrace and support her transition? What I did made no difference at all. She ended up with the surgery and the testosterone injections anyway. Now I don't have a relationship with her at all. On the other hand, had I gone along with it, I'd have been an accomplice in the Mengele-level destruction of my girl.

More importantly or not: I'd have lied about God's reality. Biochemistry is just as much a constant created by God as "God is love" and "Don't judge."

Is it blasphemy to lie about the things we know about reality? Do her feelings trump endocrinology?

Our Church is obsessed with hope this year. It's the "year of hope" or something like that.

Wanna know what gives me hope?

I believe that Jesus gave us basic metrics by which He wanted us to make our decisions. Love, charity, humility, sacrifice and more. I believe that as long as I make my decisions informed by those virtues, He will forgive me even if I make the worst decision possible.

Maybe I did. Maybe I didn't. 

Maybe what I did was to fight the good fight against impossible odds. 

Maybe what I did was not recognize a battle that was already lost and fail to pick the pieces up on the far side of biochemical collapse.

Beats me. I'm just an old man who did the best he could with what he had on hand 5 years ago. That's all He asks of me.