Dream to Nightmare

It’s been about eight months since I dropped my son off for his first year in college, and it’s been about seven months since I had the strange dream that has turned into my nightmare. My son started questioning his gender the week before his senior year in high school. My wife and I did what so many parents in our situation often do, we reached out to the psychiatric experts, spending thousands of dollars talking to whomever we could to try to get our son help. After meeting with one of the “top gender therapist", who works only with the parents of gender-confused children for liability reasons, we decided to allow our son to push the limits of being a senior in high school by taking an unsupervised camping trip with his friends. This involved skipping school for a weeklong trip to Puerto Rico; flying across the country where he could drink with his buddies, enjoy hot springs, caving adventures and basically anything to let him experience life and be in his body. All of this was, unfortunately, not to be.

One restless night, I dreamed of walking into my son’s empty room. It was filled with all of his soccer trophies, high school athletic awards, academic plaques, and small momentous of his trips across the U.S. and abroad. However, something seemed off. His room utterly abandoned, as if the light that once filled his room with love and happiness was gone. All his things seemed in the proper places but somehow trapped in time. Upon further exploring this eerie room, I remember looking over at the wall and finding another door. This door, which wasn’t there before, did not exist in realty but was suddenly in his room in my dream. As I opened this new door, I discovered a large, empty space with a small, fading light. I screamed out to my son to come back but my voice was lost in all the noise. No matter what I did or how loud I screamed, it felt like something was pulling my son farther and farther away from the door and his room. It almost felt like he went into this newly discovered room to check it out and got sucked into something more powerful than his 18-year-old self could manage. I remember waking up that night and thinking “Thank God it was just a dream”. 

Upon awaking I reminded myself that our son was off at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, seeming to be adjusting well at school with his whole life and a bright future ahead of him. All the gender stuff we faced was behind us now thanks to the advice of the “paid professionals” who helped our son. In fact, as I was lying in bed, looking forward to seeing him during Parents Weekend in a few weeks and hearing about all the wonderful new experiences taking place in his life.

That Parent’s Weekend was the last time I visited my son at college. A few weeks later, our son called all of our extended family to announce that he was now “Trans” and had begun medicalizing with hormones within weeks of being dropped off at school. He ended up calling his mother and I last, after telling everyone who would pick up and listen to his scripted speech. That night, as I laid down attempting to sleep, trying to process how everything in the life that my wife and I had built over the last 18 years had just come crashing down, a shiver came over me. I realized that in some way my dream was come back to haunt me. It was as if his troubled soul reached out to me to let me know that he had left his room of love and happiness. Now, as days pass into months, our family struggles in a devastated wasteland of would if’s and what could have beens. Lines drawn in stone; fighting among affirming and non-affirming factions of our once happy life. I go to bed each night trying to re-create that same nightmare, hoping to find his empty room again and hoping to find the door through which his soul was sucked into. Some nights I find it, but many nights my broken and tired soul can never quite seem to find his room. On lucky nights, I sit in his empty room with the other door open, trying to fill his old room with the light and love of his family. I pray in a melancholy haze, crossing my reality with nightmares, hoping that one day he will be able to see my light, hear over the noise, so I can help guide him back into his old room. May he one day feel all the love and happiness I left behind each night I dreamt.