What Happened to Daphne? by Daphne My name is Daphne Garrido and I am a homeless trans mother who doesn’t get to see her child. I was never anything but the best parent to my daughter. Before my journey to homelessness, I was an audio-visual professional that worked on both Microsoft and Salesforce campuses for contractor companies. That was the work I did for over a decade. When I was younger, I made films. That’s what I was known for in my high school, apart from being a mean wimp and recluse. Immediately after, I took off to Vancouver Film School and then rejected the idea of becoming a film industry union employee. My independent filmmaking went nowhere after I headed home and decided to work restaurant jobs and try my hand at making something that could get into one of the ‘big festivals’. Eventually, I started doing the audio-visual work—because it paid far better—and became a tech company meeting babysitter before long. My final position on Microsoft’s campus was as an equipment manager for a live broadcasting team. During COVID times, I was given a great deal of freedom during quarantine. Microsoft paid its vendors to ensure their employees continued to receive income for the better part of two whole years while staying at home. The first thing I did with my time was write a book. Afterwards, I began meditating and sharing guided meditation creations, hosting group meditations, and eventually co-facilitating group ceremonial spaces. I was most often the opener and the closer for those. One year, I even hosted a retreat. I found myself through ceremony with people, mostly women. I spoke openly for the better part of a year before my trans ‘egg cracked’ about being amidst a feminine awaking. It took me leading meditations on authenticity where people were often sharing and crying, while feeling oddly disconnected, then returning to my sorrowful nights staying up late and making prayers that I might wake up a woman (as a married adult), to realize I was spiritually bypassing the earnest depth of my feminine awakening. For most of my youth I had made those prayers nightly. It was in a movie theater at the age of seven that I realized what I wanted to be—a mother someday—despite the lack of understanding I had of transgender people. It didn’t make any sense to share it. So, I stowed my heart’s great desire and lived a life of lamentation and longing. Most nights as a teenager were spent making prayers to wake up in a different body and life. Even though I knew they wouldn’t work, a part of me couldn’t help but make the prayers—it just felt good to set honest intentions and make requests for what I really wanted. After holding many ceremonies to set intentions for embodying my most authentic self, including two winter solstice ceremonies in December 2021 where I spoke openly about wishing to embody my natural feminine nature more fully, I stayed up until 2 a.m. on Christmas morning, crying in the bathtub and deciding I had to be honest. My wife at the time and I had been trying for a child already. So, I made a prayer to not wake up the next morning and lose the conviction I had finally found after a near entire lifetime repressing my desire to live the life of a woman. I sent emails to therapists who I hoped could simply help me muster the necessary courage to tell my wife before going to bed on that early Christmas morning. It was a few weeks later, in January, when I told her. She supported me through the shock. I had been very honest with her for a long time about many things that made my confession less than entirely surprising. After a few more weeks we decided to keep trying. She wanted to hope it would work out between us but said she couldn’t know if it would. Still, it was a joint decision to “say yes to it all”. A couple of months after she became pregnant, I began hormone replacement therapy. That was April 1st, 2022. In those first months, I slowly came out to close friends and family. Then I pulled the band-aid off, deciding to be brave and not transition in secret. I posted on Facebook that June, informing everyone in my family and spiritual community what I was doing. My goal was to transition as smoothly as possible, and to adjust clothing and styling gradually along with the changes to my body from my hormone replacement therapy. Yet my body didn’t change quickly, not in the slightest. I had begun when I was thirty-five years old. It was late that September, a month before my daughter was born, when I let people know my name was Daphne. My mother’s response was, “We’ll see.” In late October my daughter was born, and after years of hosting weekly meditation calls and group gatherings and constantly creating guided meditations, I was approaching a much-needed hiatus. That December I hosted one last winter solstice ceremony. We rented a big gathering space and about thirty people joined us. My parents came and looked after my daughter with my wife’s mother while I led the ceremonies centered on spiritually preparing for the themes of winter. The idea was that our restful time of darkness was ideal for inventorying the past year and seeing into the hidden places we all stow inside. It was a powerful event, intention wise, even though my makeup was awful and I was making folks uncomfortable with my early transition presentation. The next day, I began to receive a troubling message from my subconscious: “I don’t want to be in this marriage anymore.” For years there was one fight my now-ex and I kept having. I would ask for what I needed: more affection given freely. It was an escalating argument that continued throughout the final half a decade of our relationship. I would constantly be met with a sorrowful story of her inability to do that naturally and accusations about me needing too much. All I was really asking for was a hand on the shoulder now and then, to not go weeks without a hug if I didn’t ask for them or initiate them myself. The giving I performed in that relationship felt distinctively one-sided and had been the crux of our problems since long before my transition. Yet after my hormone transition began, and then especially through her pregnancy, my needs in that regard were altogether forsaken. It was a self-sacrifice during that time I felt right to make, supporting our growing child through the abandonment of my own needs. Still, I didn’t feel hopeful that our new pattern of lacking affection would ever change as parents—my attempts to start conversation on the matter led to fights, almost every time. One fight, just before my daughter arrived, began when I revealed that her pregnancy had been hard on me. Since I was in a hormone transition, I found myself needing even more affection. All I had said was honest and forthcoming—it was hard, I was sacrificing, and the lack of affection wore on me as always. She left in her car that night after berating me while I was standing in the kitchen flabbergasted. I had been icing cookies with tears running down my cheeks after she left. I knew the expectations of needing affection felt burdensome to her, yet I was being very gentle and making no demands. Still, getting married was a commitment we had made to each other, and I fought for our marriage with everything I had through summer 2023. There were attempts to go on first dates again. There were ongoing fights about my needs being too much. There were many conversations about separation. Eventually, that August, we separated. I had called it. It was agreed upon as a trial, but I was honest: I needed to find some affection and was going to start dating right off. For years I had been crying myself to sleep at night, in bed beside her, and felt alone in my need to reignite the passion. There was a distinctive sense that our relationship had turned into a naturally platonic friendship strained by each other’s expectations we couldn’t meet. My dating experience was mostly awful. I was primarily looking for friends, but also a lover, and seek… Get full access to Of Darkness & Light at www.ofdarknessandlight.net/subscribe
