Kintsugi Bowl

Two years have passed since I wrote for PITT about my son’s tragic spiral into a transgender identity. Nearly seven years have slipped by since that first declaration he sent me over Discord in 2019.

Now, we are finally looking at that nightmare period through the rear‑view mirror. He has turned a corner and stopped running from himself. Last week, we even attended the Detrans Awareness Day conference together in DC.

Watching him return - broken in places, yet somehow more whole than he has ever been - has been like witnessing the restoration of a kintsugi bowl: the cracks still visible, but gilded, strengthened, and transformed.

I have been overcome with joy, relief, and a gratitude so immense that it feels almost impossible to hold. This marvel of circumstance has brought with it other unexpected emotions too.

It has been destabilizing, again. While my son pursued a legal and medical “transition,” I coped by holding fast to the belief that he had the sovereign right to make his own mistakes. Extending that grace to him felt not optional but necessary. Everyone has the right to falter, even when it wounds us, even when it breaks us to witness. This is something I just fundamentally believe at the deepest level.

So, I let go of trying to force any outcome. During the months we lived apart, I walked endlessly. I attended online parent support groups and listened to stories of children heading into surgeries or cutting their parents off entirely. I felt I needed to prepare for that possibility. I practiced imagining a life without either of my children, a life without a partner, a life that I would have to make worth living on my own.

I pictured a small house in the woods, with trees, a bird feeder, and a garden. I imagined hosting friends, traveling, reading, sleeping outside sometimes, creating a sanctuary for myself primarily, but also for my son, should he ever need a place to return and recover. I imagined doing meaningful work on my own terms. I planned to learn everything I could about detransition care, both medical and psychological. I didn’t truly expect he would come back, but I wanted to be ready if he did. I was several chess moves ahead, trying to manage the unmanageable.

So, when he told me last summer, in the middle of an emotional collapse, that he had stopped taking hormones, I was not prepared. It was emotional whiplash, and nine months later it still is. For a while I waited for the other shoe to drop, but it hasn’t. Since then, he has thrown out the hormones, cut his hair, and grown a beard. Watching him slowly re‑inhabit himself has been a profound joy and a privilege. He recently told me he now understands why I once said he reminded me of some of my mentally ill patients and also why I couldn’t bring him to the hospital, because there is no help for this particular suffering there. He described how during his teenage years, he felt that his bedroom and his online social worlds were the real worlds, while the outside world became unreal. This has since rightfully reversed for him.

Alongside the joy, I feel overwhelming guilt. It is easing with time, but I doubt it will ever disappear entirely, not while other families are still in the thick of it. At dinner during Detrans Awareness Day, I sat with my son and several mothers. One spoke of her son who went abroad, she hasn’t seen him in over six years. She tried to sound cheerful, but a mother cannot be cheerful amid such a thing. Others didn’t know where their sons were at all. We speak of this as if it’s normal, but nothing is less natural than a mother separated from her children in this way. There is an ambiguous loss shared by parents whose children claimed a transgender identity, one that outsiders cannot fully grasp. I am now an outsider to this group because my son returned, this makes me a traitor of sorts, yet I still understand their grief. I feel some may resent me, even while knowing that they shouldn’t.

People sometimes ask what catalyzed this shift in my son. I could share a few specifics, but I don’t think they would offer what anyone is truly seeking. They are not replicable. Anyone claiming to have the cure for trans ideation is lying. I believe that only the miracle of a psychological awakening can break someone out of the trance.

And so, from the deepest hush of my heart, I hold to this truth: we must never, ever stop expecting a miracle.