Your baby is overwhelming and mysterious and brutal, like the ocean. He screams uncontrollably for hours a day, every day. And you bring him to one specialist after another, to be told it’s ‘colic.’ You are advised that only a ‘tincture of time’ will help.

I lay quietly beside you when you tell me that you are the wrong sort of special and the wrong sort of different and you want to die.

If the rest of the world could be more empathetic . . . my son could be this happy and comfortable all of the time — because then my son could be a boy who dresses like a girl and not have to think twice about it.

‘Mom, I think something went wrong when I was in your tummy, because I was supposed to be born a girl, but I was born a boy instead.’ He wanted me to put him back in the womb to right the wrong. He was sobbing.