The Cycle of Tears

The tears come without warning.

They’re never far but they pour out unpredictably.

That’s when I must give into them. Locked in a bathroom where I can cry without anyone knowing. Keeping them silent so that they remain undetected.

They come with great, heaving unending sobs that physically hurt as I try to keep them whisper quiet.

They are accompanied by the jumble of emotions I carry in a tight knot in my stomach, or the ones that come with migraine intensity pounding mercilessly at the back of my skull.

They come with no discernible sentences, only random words and feelings that tumble through my mind:

Guilt: how could I have done better? I’m his mother. Where did I go wrong?

Helplessness: will I ever not cry daily? I crave, but cannot envision, not experiencing these tears that have become part of my everyday life for the past eight years.

Despair: how can I fix my fractured family, torn apart by the tsunami of gender ideology that slammed into our happy home?

Anxiety: what will happen when he makes the ultimate, catastrophic decision to have his body mutilated, and the imagined magical, yet unattainable cure to the mental health problems he suffers doesn’t manifest itself?

Pain: through addiction to wrong-sex hormones, and his planned surgeries, my child is hurting himself and I am experiencing it in some esoterically generated osmosis.

Turmoil about an unknown future: what do I do when he has the surgery? How can I visit him in the hospital? How can I not? What do I do?

Anger: at every person who has ever affirmed, validated, groomed my son and insisted I am somehow wrong for not doing the same.

Conflict: how can I be true to my conviction not to affirm a delusion while not hurting my son in the process?

Envy: of normal parents who don’t know what estradiol and spironolactone are, or how dangerous those are in a male body… and never will.

Fatigue: the deep mental fatigue that manifests in days of cocooning alone with only mindless Netflix fare and iPhone games to fill the passing hours.

Fear: of the future, of my son’s path leading him into darkness, of how I will keep myself together as the inevitable unfolds.

And the questions with no answers, without even words to form them.

Until finally, I take a deep breath, cork the flow that is exhausting itself - for now - and get into bed, where - hopefully - my dreams will not be tainted by the waking nightmare of my life.

But the tears will return. And the cycle will loop again.