The Cloak
We watched you flourish into a loving compassionate adult. We thought we taught you how to cope with life's ups and downs. Then Covid came along with a series of other traumatic life events stacked on top of one another. Covid required us to communicate only via text or email. You never were much of a phone conversationalist. Anxiety began to creep into your missives.
Then came the declaration you are now your authentic self. A self we no longer recognized. You began to gather threads of lies and deceit to weave a cloak to cover anxiety, depression and self loathing. The cloak shielded you from us and provided an umbrella to gather a tribe underneath who are just as anxious and fearful as you. I kept hoping to find the thread to pull apart your defensive cloak. I picked at this one and that one with facts and logic. Alas, it only caused more and more layers to be woven by all those gathered underneath. It now shields you completely from us.
My hope is one day the thread will be found to unravel the cloak hiding you from your family. Then we can reveal the beautiful soul that YOU can love again. WE will ALWAYS love you.
Oh wow! You have captured the essence of this beautifully. A cloak. Woven of lies and deceit and misinformation and disinformation and twisted facts and propaganda. To cover anxiety and depression and self loathing. I too have looked for the thread to unpick this deception in my son. Tried to counter with facts and logic. He doesn’t want to listen. Our son is covered by the same cloak. Thank you for this helpful analogy and I pray that one day your child’s cloak unravels too.
Very similar situation with our daughter! The devil was cheering during the pandemic when vulnerable people were isolated with the wrong people. God was kicked out and loving families were pushed away. We foolishly thought our daughter was more grounded in her faith and would be a beacon for others. Instead she was sucked into a Marxist ideology and before we knew it proclaimed herself “neither a woman nor a man”. We were chastised for removing our masks, not getting our booster shots, and using the wrong pronouns. I was blatantly told, “I’m trying to unlearn everything I’ve been taught.” She’s now isolated herself in a “queer collective community” in Brooklyn and refused to give us her address, stating she was “afraid” because we (her parents) are “transphobes” and “homophobes”. We have always supported her in all of her many endeavors while growing up and never displayed bigotry of any kind so I’m calling it as I see it: she was brainwashed.