If you only knew…
…what it is like being told by your adult child that he believes the horrible is possible. That he was born in the wrong body and is going through treatments and procedures to right what he sees as wrong and fixable.
If you only knew…
…how it feels to listen to your child read a prepared script outlining the new rules for being his mother, telling you not to use the name you so lovingly picked out for him to honor loved ones who have died and are now established guardians over their namesakes. Telling you that this name, which rolled off your tongue like a song, is now a “deadname” and you must use another one, which sticks in your throat and cuts like barbed wire.
If you only knew…
…how it feels to watch your son take drugs that are harming him in the long term even as they falsely uplift him in the short term, how he has already altered his body and mind, in a charade of repairing what is not broken; how it feels to know each poison pill he dissolves under his tongue could be rewriting his destiny and shortening his lifespan, and you know it because there is scientific evidence - the same science that determines him as male - but that he shuns as summarily as he rejects his biology.
If you only knew…
…how to learn to hide the daily silent tears with a forced smile, to silence the growing screams, to pray that your broken heart will not someday just explode from the anguish, to watch your child self-destruct into a delusion that society has shaped him to believe, and how society has embraced him even as I, his mother, am thrust into a void, a macabre version of “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” while friends, family, and casual acquaintances celebrate and glorify this new twisted iteration of the miracle that was my son.
If you only knew…
…how it feels to dread weddings and family celebrations and events and even funerals, because you have somehow developed a sense of shame; you feel the judgment of those who will whisper and gossip and pity and blame you for the unwitting indoctrination of your son, the left-field new reality that has been foisted on you, and though you pray every day that it will change, you still feel that this is somehow your fault, and you are found lacking in the eyes of those who are looking in.