Thank you, PITT
Thank you for the platform you provide. It makes me feel like I am not alone. Although I cry a majority of the time when reading the essays, they keep me from thinking that I am the crazy one. It’s heartbreaking, confusing, frustrating and deeply sickening to lose a child to this cult when I have worked so hard to raise a brilliant, gorgeous and passionate child. I know he is further gone with each passing day. I know it would be easier for me to cut the cord now rather than to pretend and watch his demise. I feel it’s utterly disrespectful for him to tell me that that son I once knew is now dead, when I am speaking directly to him. The daughter who I am now forced to accept is not who I signed up to parent and, frankly, I don’t want to pretend she is. I’m in a perpetual state of sadness and self-blame for not even knowing this was happening. I thought my son was in the good care of Brown University, an institution of higher learning. Who would have thought he was being brainwashed regarding his own sex?
I have recently decided to choose myself over his madness. I have been told to “f***off” for the last time by this person whom I used to love with every ounce of my being. I have zero support from anyone in my family and most of the people in my life never bring it up; maybe because they don’t want to upset me or they also hope it will just go away. I keep hoping for a reset to occur, but in my son’s (now “daughter's”) case, he just keeps falling further into the rabbit hole. The person I once knew since the inception of life I am told is dead, all while I’m still looking straight at him dressed like a freak with red lipstick in a tutu.
Broken forever,
I can’t count how many times I’ve read other people’s stories and felt like they could have been written by me. My experience with my son is so similar, except I don’t even get to see him anymore—not even as the woman he now identifies as. He won’t respond to me at all.
When he left for UC Santa Cruz, he was still the boy I had always known—interested in girls, with the same personality and sense of humor. I truly believed he was just going through a phase or being silly when he first mentioned feeling like a woman. I didn’t think he was serious. But things changed quickly. He began taking hormones and dressing as a woman, and that’s when I realized he was serious about this path.
Since then, he’s completely shut me out. I don’t know what happened at college or what led him down this road. All I know is that I’ve lost the child I knew, and it feels like a never-ending heartbreak.
At this point in my life, all I can do is pray. I carry this pain with me every day, and I’m tired of crying. But I still have hope, and I still pray—because that’s all I know to do at this point. I pray I get to see him again because I’m getting older and not in great health. I could never imagine treating my mother ( who incidentally died suddenly when I was 13) her this way. I would never have hurt my mother ever for any selfish reason as this cult demands. I really thought my son was smarter than this. I guess I’m wrong.
I hate what has happened. Thanks for sharing your feeling of brokenness. I feel that too. Many thanks to PITT