Support, family and belonging

January 22, 2020

Dear diary,

Mom is going to a trans parents support meeting today. Mom says she feels like crying just thinking about going to this meeting. Somehow, being with people whose goal is to JUST SUPPORT YOU—this is a concept that was very foreign to mom when she was growing up.

Family. Home. The place where you go for sleep, nourishment and shelter—for mom this came with a price. The price was fear. Fear of judgment, scoldings, and a never ending list of all the things mom was doing wrong. Or not enough of.

Home. Family. This was a hostile place, where you had to defend yourself from the “rules of the parental units.” They were right, you were wrong. Compassion was for stupid people who were not up to par and had to resort to kindness for survival. If one of mom’s parental units were to be kind, it was used as a device to pity people, and make the parental figure feel better about themselves.

Mom hated all of this. And mom thought this was wrong. But mom didn’t have the words to explain herself. Because she was a child. So she learned to keep it inside. But by keeping it inside, this idea turned into a knife. A knife of vengeance. A knife of: you are so wrong, therefore I must be very right. I will guard my righteousness with my life. Because if I am wrong, humans all suck, there is no hope and I have to die.

Mom lived with this knife for many, many years. She grew up into an adult and everywhere she went, mom carried this knife around. And somehow people knew about this knife. They knew. And they also knew that mom would not hesitate to use the knife. On herself, on others, all in the name of righteousness. Mom was, for a very long time, a very scary person.

One day mom realized that if she wanted to live harmoniously with other humans, she would have to do something about the knife. The knife that had protected her. The knife that had protected mom’s ideals of humanity. And mom started to put the knife down.

It took a lot of practice. Almost twenty years. But mom is now the owner of strength and might, but without the violence of the knife that she used to wield. And this is because mom has found compassion for humanity. It started out as pity for humanity. But the pity became sympathy, which grew into empathy and compassion.

Mom is going to a meeting today. To be supported. I love my mommy so much. I’m going to give her an extra hug today.

Love, Bob