For Our Lost Children
I am the mother of a troubled adult daughter who started trans identifying - out of the blue - three years ago. She now has a beard, a deep voice, and a flat and hairy chest. She rejected me because I advised her not to rush into medicalising, but I have kept trying to show her my love, and to mend our relationship. She lives in a different city but we have ongoing phone contact and visits every six months or so.
My heart breaks every time I see her. I try to look past all the physical changes to find the sensitive, gentle, caring person I knew for more than 20 years, and who was once so close to me; but I struggle to find her or connect with her.
I wrote this song to help me, and others all around the world, to bear this gut wrenching grief and anguish. I sing it as a prayer for her and for all our lost children.
FOR OUR LOST CHILDREN (LYRICS)
Oh, where have you gone, my darling?
Where are you now, my love?
I'll follow you down to the depths of hell
To bring you back up above.
I search for you in your eyes
And long for the person inside
I weep for your gentle soul
Whose protection was to hide.
Who has stolen your mind?
And how did they deaden your heart?
And why were you, precious darling
A victim of their cruel art?
Oh, where have you gone, my darling?
Where are you now, my love?
I'll follow you down to the depths of hell
To bring you back up above.
I see glimpses of you quickly fading
So others don't see your truth
But I know who you were in your childhood
And the struggles of your youth.
I will never give up, my beloved
I will search for you night and day
I know you are there softly trembling,
Vulnerable and afraid.
I know you are there, my darling,
In dreams you whisper to me
I’ll love you always, my precious child
And pray that you’ll be free.
Hi Vivian
I deeply resonate with your grief albeit for a different set of circumstances, but I also 'lost' my daughter in a way, to a different kind of transformation she endured, because her mother and I separated and divorced. Her mother was very bitter and punitive, and my daughter, who had the noblest, most generous soul, who was so very close to me, was steadily poisoned with a spirit of victimhood and blame right in the heart of her most vulnerable years as she was moving from young teen to young woman, a very formative time, and I had very little recourse to fight the enormous tide of animus and vitriol that was poured into her and directed at me.
I processed a lot of my grief, but a love for a child means that the grief stays with us. What broke my heart again and again, was not just her learned defiance, but that her light had been diminished by the learned unkindness and that I had no way of providing love and support.
LOST CHILD
I wanted to say
how my light had gone out.
I wanted to speak
of the dust I had collected on the hard road.
I wanted to recall
the flower I had brought to bloom,
cradled in broken hands,
and the blows I had shielded it from,
with my own back,
I wanted to recount
the small but fierce fire of courage
I had kindled in myself with the last gathered sticks of my own nobility.
but all I could do
was listen to the axe blows
of misplaced defiance
and the sound my heart made as it broke,
and the woeful voice of life
resound its terrible lament
as its fading echoes
closed around me,
and went silent.
__
I hope this touches you in some way.
As for your own child, I am sorry for the sense of enduring loss and pain you must feel, given the rawness and depth of the connection you must feel to someone who appears to no longer be there. My business is philosophy and pyschology and very specifically I am a strident voice of sanity against the madness of emerging poltically motivated ideologies, but also I am highly neurodivergent and for my sins, I am capable of stepping through insights that ellude us, just below the surface of our grief, which allows us to be transfigured by our griefs to more expansive paradigms of perspective, and deeper places of understanding, acceptance, appreciation and generosity. I would love to speak with you if you feel so called.
Beautiful song. I’m sobbing. Miss my baby too. I hope our daughters returns. Can you share the song separately so I can put it on my Instagram story? Thank you.