Family

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Sorry it has been so long since my last post, we were out-of-town for the long weekend in a remote spot that had no internet connection and to top it off I left my phone charger at home so no connection with the outside world.  (this is both good and bad!)  We were invited for my husband’s 45th birthday to stay with his sister and family up at their cabin in the mountains. 

My husband’s family has always treated my children as their own, even though they are his step children.  That is before this situation became public.  I was a little taken back when my husband and I were talking before the trip about what to do with our son, when he said to me, I talked to my sister and she said that she also talked to my Mom, (who was going to be there for his birthday as well) and they said they would be ok if he came with us, that they don’t mind.  (OMG!!)  Of course I set him straight and told him that he’s family and that being allowed to come with us should not even be an issue – it should be a given!  I can see if he wanted to bring a friend or a girlfriend where confirming if it’s ok to bring him would be an appropriate conversation, but not in this context.  (Perhaps I’m just too sensitive!)

My sister-in-law is one of those Mother’s that should win the “Mother of the year” award.  Not only is she a great Mother, but she is a very giving, loving person who is selfless.  She has been inquisitive and accepting of my son’s situation and while she approached it cautiously with her two young boys being unsure how to explain the situation she has never made him feel unwelcome or out-of-place.  Fortunately her son’s are young enough that they are completely accepting of their cousin and make no judgments.

His Mother, the stubborn old German woman that she is ~ she’s another story.   My husband warned me that if my son went that his Mother would not call him by his new name and that she would refer to him as ‘her’.   I remember telling him that once she sees him she’ll change her mind and accept him.   It nearly broke my heart when during the card ride up I mentioned that this might be an issue to my son and he asked us both; “You mean she doesn’t accept me?”  My husband went on to explain that she was “old school” and that she just didn’t understand these types of things.  He indignantly said; “if she calls me by my old name, I’ll just correct her and tell her my new name.”

I just thank GOD that I was the one who was at the front of her wrath and not my son; although the unspoken truth is that we both were shunned.  To say that she ignored me is putting it mildly and it seemed like nothing I did was right or good enough.  She wouldn’t make eye contact with me and couldn’t stand to be alone in the same room with me.  Not once did she engage me in conversation and when she did speak to me she bit my head off, if this is what she did with me then I’m heartbroken to ask my son how he was treated when I wasn’t around.  Looking back I should have sat down with her and forced her to talk about the situation and asked her if she had any questions, but we were around family and had other extended family show up so it didn’t seem like the time or place.

I talked to my sister-in-law about it briefly while out on a walk one morning and her response was that she was raised in a family that wasn’t very accepting and that she thinks it’s just a phase that my child is going through.  I have found some great articles that give good insight into the reality of being transgender and has some good tips for family, I’ve saved a few to send to my child’s Father in an effort to help him with acceptance, perhaps I’ll mail her the same ones. 

I’ll be working over the next few months to find ways to communicate with her and try to find tips and helpful ideas on approaching older family members who aren’t accepting of our children.  Stay tuned.

Our children need our love and attention!

I came across someone’s post about “What Parent’s Should Know” about their transgender and I’m not copying it here, but their post inspired me to share this with you today.

Every day I see my child do everything he can to be masculine and to ensure that when you look at him you see a boy.  Not a tomboy, or a girl trying to look like a boy, but a boy.  Knowing this, I am constantly thinking about what I can do to make life a little easier for my child, because I know that at school he’s being rejected by the girls he most wants to be with because they don’t want their friends to think they’re lesbian.  The baseball and lacrosse coach are adamant that they can’t be a part of their team and that no matter how good he is or the fact that until he was 9 he played baseball with the boys and only stopped when his Dad forced him to play softball because he was a girl and needed to “grow up and face the facts.” 

Every day he is rejected by someone; a peer, a really good-looking girl, a teacher, a coach or even unfortunately someone in our family.  Perhaps we justify it as “doing it for their own good” or “it’s the right thing to do.”  We may see it as something trivial or insignificant, but in the life of a transgender, its huge, it’s crushing and it can drive them take their own life. 

Things that happened long before my son came out often make me feel horrible.  I think back to all of the times that I forced him to wear a dress or lectured about taking more time to get ready for school in the morning and encouraged makeup to enhance “her” features, not knowing how my child was really feeling or knowing that he was suffering inside the body of the wrong gender. 

We were at a BB informational meeting at our high school when we were playing on the ‘feeder’ team, before he came out and I had left the meeting to use the lady’s room and while I was in there she came in with a friend on the team.  I sat quietly in the stall, as any Mother would do, and listened.  I overheard her tell her friend; “My Mom won’t allow me to wear makeup, and she’s always nagging about it.”  I remember being angry that she lied to her friend and being confused about it because I had often encouraged wearing makeup.  I should have seen it then. 

As she started going through puberty she must have started feeling more awkward and uncomfortable with her body.  Every girl feels uncomfortable in their own skin and very awkward as things start to change, but can you imagine what it must have been like for her?  How depressed, trapped and scared she was?  Scared because more than anything she believed that she should have been born a boy and wanting more than anything for girls to see her as a boy and the tragedy of the reality?

 Love your child, accept them and talk to them, don’t let them slip away in their own private hell and agony.  If you find resistance or you two just can’t communicate effectively then steer them to a support group and make sure that even if you disagree or don’t approve that you are still loving your child and taking care of them by getting them help before you come home one day and find that they committed suicide because the sadness, the lack of acceptance and isolation became more than they could bear alone.

Related Articles

• A transgender journey: part one (guardian.co.uk)
• Combatting Transphobia 101? (ask.metafilter.com)
• Transgender teens (guardian.co.uk)

Looking back

I was looking through some pictures on a few of my memory cards around the house and came across several “photo shoots” my at the time daughter was holding in the basement of our house.  It made me feel so sad, she was such a beautiful girl, she had finally started losing her baby fat, had started experimenting with makeup and these were some really nice pictures.  Even now as I write this my eyes are tearing up and missing the daughter I once had. 

Sometimes I wonder if I’d have done more girly things with her, or paid more attention to this or that if I could have made a difference in her choice.  The answer most likely is no.  I wonder why she can’t just be happy being a lesbian – and I wonder why this idea is totally off-limits to her.  (She told me that she didn’t believe in it and that while she knew what she was she would rather be a boy with a girl than be a lesbian.) 

I have not been in her shoes so I don’t’ know how it feels, I know that for her to put everything on the line and risk losing family and friends, (I’m not sure she realized the extent of the loss) it only further proves to me that if she were willing to sacrifice all this for being true to herself then I should trust that the choice that was made was the right thing.

It doesn’t stop her Step-Father and I from sitting around and wondering if this was all due to a head injury she suffered and if one day she’ll ‘snap out of it’, so to speak.  Somehow I doubt that the words – “Mom, I changed my mind about being a boy” will ever come out of her mouth.  Please don’t think that this means that I don’t love or accept her the way she is.  If you read everything I’ve written so far you’ll know that not to be true.  What it does mean is that I’m human and when I see the pictures of my beautiful girl it will sadden me and I will always wonder what her life would have been like if she’d have gone on to be a woman.

The girl I wish he hadn’t found

Image by World of Oddy via Flickr

My son found a girlfriend that knows exactly which parts are under the clothes and has been accepting of the situation, but she is constantly playing head games with him and I can’t stand her!  At first I was thrilled that he found someone who he could connect with and that loved him for him, but as time has gone by I see how dangerous she is for him. She’s depressed all the time and suicidal and has some major family issues that I would rather my son not have to deal with. 

They’ve broken up several times in the last few months and I’ve heard and watched him cry and I hate it that he hurts so much over her.  He actually broke up with her once because she was so depressed and as hard as he tried to cheer her up – it was never enough.  We would take her with us to the lake for a weekend and I’m not sure I saw her smile even once.  She isn’t polite to me, doesn’t try to talk to me and I don’t think she’s the kind of girl he should invest time on.

I know he keeps going back to her because they’ve already established themselves intimately and  he feels like there will never be another girl who accepts him as he is like she does. (I don’t believe that, but try to convince a teenager of that!)  Forbidding him to see her as we all know will fail, because oftentimes they see each other just to spite the parents.  I have spent hours trying to encourage him to see other girls and to put her behind him, there are a lot interested and with school having just started I would think it’s a good time do so, but how do you get an attention starved teen to focus his attention elsewhere? 

I would welcome ideas……I know this is an issue that many parents of average teenagers deal with – we all know though that having a transgender teen adds an additional layer of complication.  I don’t want this girl bringing him down, his life is hard enough without her – any suggestions at all????????

Related Articles

• Supervising Your Teen’s Relationships (lifescript.com)

Peaches & Cream

I don’t want you to think that my son’s life is all peaches and cream because Mommy accepts him.  Prior to his coming out he had a mediocre to poor relationship with his Father.  His Father is Bi-Polar and very tall with an ugly violent temper and when my son was little and his Father and I were going through our divorce he saw his Father hurt me physically, mentally and emotionally and was the one who would try to stand between us in order to protect me from attack.  So to say their relationship is strained would be a nice thing to say. They haven’t spoken for months now and the few times they’d seen each other before that it ended in screaming matches and early termination of their visits.  My son keeps going back to him and trying to reach out to him to have a relationship and that stupid moron of a Father he has just can’t be nice.  So to say that I feel badly for my son and that I’d wished I’d have been able to give him the Father he deserves is an understatement.  

His Father, Step-Mother and half brother who is 4 live just 13 miles from us and my son is dying to see his little brother and they won’t allow it.  They are extremely judgmental and embarrassed by of him.  We tried going to counseling to no avail – turned into a nightmare for me since apparently I’m a terrible Mother for allowing him to be open and not forcing him to be and act like a girl. 

I don’t think I’m wrong for being totally accepting of my son and doing all of the things I do for him and allowing him to live fully in the gender of his choice.  It has only been 14 months since he came out and many question how I could be so certain that I’m doing the right thing by letting him take hormones.  I’m so sure because I’m the one who’s been there through all of the psychiatrist & psychologist visits, support groups, gender confirmation specialist appointments, doctor’s visits and right here at home and besides that……… a Mother knows what’s right for her child.  Mother’s who are truly connected to their children anyway.  I admit I’ve been wrong a few times, but I’m talking about affairs of the heart here, we know if our children are unhappy inside.  We don’t always know to what degree ~ but we know.

Give your parents the opportunity to accept you!

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I wanted to share with you the short version of the story of my daughter’s coming out.    I knew as a girl she was very insecure and didn’t always feel comfortable in her own skin, but I chalked it up to her being a little chubby, (baby fat really – not heavy) and her feeling different from the other girls.  I knew she was a tomboy and honestly it was a relief to not have her dressing in short skirts and wearing some of the risqué outfits the other girls were wearing.  My daughter was active in school, was in all the school plays and had a lot of friends.  The part that scares me the most is that I never saw it coming – I thought I knew my child pretty well and it was devastating to find out I didn’t know her really at all. 

It was in June and we arrived home one day to find the house broken into and that she was missing along with one of our cars.  I  NEVER in a million years would have thought that she ran away, it was staged to look like someone broke into our house and abducted her.  Turns out that she was so afraid that her family wouldn’t accept her wanting to be a boy that she faked her own death and was running away to California, to live with a girl she met online ~ who thought she was a boy.  I couldn’t believe it!!  I wish she’d have given me the chance to help.

I’ve since accepted him and I’m his biggest advocate, but it took me time, time to learn about what I was dealing with and time talking to other parents who had gone through the same thing.  I didn’t just bring her home and say –“ok, whatever you want”, it was a process ~ for all of us.  Today we’re closer than ever and I’m grateful everyday that he’s here with me and I’m constantly checking in with him to make sure nothing like this ever happens again.

If you are a transgender or you think you might be and your parents don’t know yet ~ please, please, please don’t resort to running away without giving your family a chance.  Remember to give them time to adjust to the news and to become educated about it.  Don’t give up on them if they resist initially or don’t understand.  Your family loves you and while I can’t speak for everyone I’d bet anything that they’d rather have you home safe with them where they can take care of you than wonder if you’re lying dead somewhere.  Even if you face resistance initially being true to yourself and communicating with your parents will be the best bet in the long run.  It’s a cruel world out there and life is hard on your own, as an adult, let alone a child.  You are going to need a lot of care and access to resources that would be hard for you to obtain if you’re out on your own without your family.

~ Please take care!

Gender Neutral

We aren’t taught in school to be considerate of gender issues or to be gender neutral – we are taught early on to label everything masculine or feminine, male or female.  Being exposed to this lifestyle change through my child has made me much more conscientious of my speech. 

Keep in mind that I’m still fairly new to all of this and that when I first found out not only was I somewhat resistant but I still called my child by the girls’ name I gave him at birth.  He tolerated it because I’m his Mother, and when we were out in public I was always sure to call him by the name he had chosen for himself and to use the right pronouns, but at home I felt I had a special right to continue to call him by the name I had selected.  When his older brother adopted the new name I knew I needed to as well.  It was just a name right?  It took some concentrated effort on my behalf to use his new name regularly but it soon caught on.  Speaking solely for me it felt like my daughter was gone, but in her place was this young man that was now my son.   This new son needed me, needed my acceptance, love and my guidance, more than ever

I’m tickled pink, when I see him interact at school and the carefree attitude that he has now that is due to the acceptance he has found there.  All his friends call him by his new name and he’s rather popular.  A few of the kids know about his situation and for the most part they are accepting, thank GOD!  They have made special arrangements for him to use the faculty bathroom and when he wanted to go out for the football team I was shocked and amazed when this burly big black man informed me that they had a place in the equipment room where he could dress and that they were happy to have him on their team. 

This is a long complicated process, making the change entirely and then pursuing surgical gender reassignment and the issues that are yet to come from this are among the contributing factors to my acceptance.  I have such a short time that he is with me as a child and if this is the price ~ being gender neutral, accepting and helping him in his pursuit of happiness ~ sign me up.

Embracing change

When our child wants to change the color of their hair, pierce their ears a few more times or even pierce their face we chalk it up to them growing into their own and trying new things.  But when they come to us and tells us they want to change their sex do we know what to do?  I didn’t have a clue – didn’t know where to turn or what I should do – for them or for me. If you establish that this is the right change for your child, like there were hints all along the way like finding your girl dressing like a boy – all the time, or your little boy is forever trying on his sisters clothes or his mom’s, you probably want to take them very seriously that this is something they’ve been feeling for a while.  If you are totally clueless then you still want to take them seriously but dive a little deeper to explore what makes them think they are in the wrong gender….and listen to them, take them seriously! 

Everything I have found, read, talked through with counselors is that your normal everyday rebellious teenager isn’t going to come up and tell you they want to change genders, this is something on a much deeper level that isn’t a phase.  Rarely if ever does a child change their mind, unless they are forced to by a parent and they often live in agony and may be more suicidal than you want to believe.  If they are forced to live in the gender they are born with and they feel it’s the wrong one they will find a way to make it happen or they will suppress it until they feel free to express themselves.  Until that time you will only be living with a shell of your child and missing out on the joy that they bring to our lives each and every day!  You should embrace this change and help your child work through it by getting them connected with a counselor they trust and can openly communicate with. (this is an incredible feat in itself, I have personally found that gender confirmation specialists make the best resources for your child and often come with an MD behind their name so you can trust they have the training your child needs!)  Get them connected with a support group, here locally there is an organization called Youth Pride and they were a huge resource for me in the beginning and I was able to attend a parent support group while my child attended his own support group where he was able to freely express the gender related concerns that they often can’t talk about with anyone else.

You have to remember what a scary time this is for your child, there are so many things they can’t talk about even with their best friend, (and we know how open they are with them) so imagine how cut off and alone they are feeling.  If they have talked about it with friends it’s likely they’re getting mixed messages and at the point of disclosure it will change the way your child’s friend looks at them forever.

Our job as a parent is to provide a safe, loving environment for our children, a home where they are not harshly judged, but instead embraced for their differences a place where they know that it will always be safe to be themselves.  The world is a cruel and scary place, it’s our job to prepare them for it and to provide that safe haven for them to escape to where they find love and acceptance.  I hope you’ll agree with me and do everything you can to show your child how special they are, today and always.

Accepting and loving your teenager

I wanted to share a piece of my life with you and my experience with my teenage transgender.  It has been an experience that has changed the way I think and opened my eyes to a world that existed all around me that I was completely oblivious to.  When I first found out about my child’s choice, and me being completely ignorant about what it meant, how it happened and what I should do I reached out to the internet and the library for information.  I was disappointed to find that the resources available were so limited and there was nothing I could find that was written specifically for the parents and gave them solid, helpful and comforting advice on how to cope with this type of discovery.  Please understand I’m not saying there aren’t some out there, but I had such a hard time getting my hands on any information at all that it seemed like this condition that no one wanted to talk about.  How could something like this not be available readily and did this mean that it wasn’t normal or that it didn’t happen that frequently and there was something wrong with my child?  It was a very frightening time since it wasn’t something I had any knowledge of whatsoever.  What I discovered is that people don’t like to talk about it and when they do they make it sound like it’s an affliction, or perhaps just a phase. 

I wanted to share some of my experiences because I want to provide parents with advice, comfort and a place to ask questions or to vent.  For those of you who have experienced this in your home know that there is some grieving that goes along with this lifestyle, on the parent’s behalf.  We have just lost the child that we knew, for those of us who find out when our children are older, (my daughter was 14 when I found out), I think it’s a little harder or there’s more of a grieving process than finding out when a child is much younger and you’ve spent less time with them, but I don’t know that for sure.  What I do know is that my daughter, my little girl that I dressed up in pretty little dresses, put ribbons in her hair, took her to have her nails painted with me, played Barbie dolls and had tea parties with had cut her hair, gotten rid of all of her girl’s clothes and moved out of her pink walled room into the blue guest room because she so desperately wants to be a boy.  It was absolutely a grieving process, one that even today makes me misty eyed to see pictures of my beautiful young girl that I have in my bedroom away from public view in the house. 

My child, (whose name I’m omitting will be left out for now for the sake of his safety and my piece of mind), has never been one that liked to have a lot of attention drawn to herself and can’t stand for you to be angry with her has risked everything by coming out.  I admire her courage, imagine putting everything on the line, losing valued relationships with friends, love and acceptance of family members (we’ll talk more about the insanity of the family that is pushing my child away as if she should now be discarded because of her choice at a later time), imagine everyone’s reaction to this and then imagine what it would take to face this.  In my eyes, if my child is willing to put it all at risk and stand strongly by this conviction it better be something I pay attention to. 

 In a day and age of alternative lifestyles being so prevalent and part of nearly every one’s lives in some way how could my child be judged so harshly and face so much ridicule?  Through these posts I’ll share with you some important things I learned to help myself, my child, my spouse and our family and friends to understand and accept my child’s choice.  Some of it will be an ongoing process and I hope that along the way someone will find comfort in my words or will help me to see things from a different perspective through their own experiences.  I know that together we are much stronger than if we stand alone and try to manage the storm.  I hope to find additional resources for all of the families that are affected by this, the kind that I so desperately sought out when this first happened in my home

Introduction to the world

Hello!

 

Some people ask me why I only show half of the face in the picture, it’s simply explained this way; when you look at something no matter how complete it looks, you’re usually only getting half of the picture.  I start out by telling you this since my story, (his story), is one that will take me a lifetime to tell and a heart to understand.  Please join me as I share with you the struggle of my darling child and his search for us to PlzLoveMeAsIAm.