There Was No One

(also-known-as When the Sight of a Progress Flag Didn’t Feel Like a Knife Wound)

Do I remember how it used to be. Before. Before this. Sort of. I remember a sense of control. I remember the world felt rational. I remember believing I was a good parent. That I understood what was right and good. That I had done my duty. That strange things happened to other people. But not our family. We were plain people. We had never asked for much. That fairy tales were quaint and antiquated. The Ghost of Bobby Dunbar¹ Fascinating but in the past. A society would nevermore combine efforts to take a child from their mother. I believed in the bend of that arc. I believed in public schools. I trusted doctors.

It came all at once in a way. Eliza Mondegreen/Sarah Mittermaier used Dante’s Inferno to describe such a fall. That seemed right. But not at first. When it came it came all at once but not at the very beginning. At first, I was still in and of my world. I was using what I knew to figure it out. I knew my daughter had tipped over. Had been radicalized and I couldn’t reach her. I googled radicalization and came up with far right and Islam. Far left was not in the mix. But the solution would be the same. They talked about time and building a relationship. I couldn’t. She was of majority age and lived away at college. I was in a state of personal desperation. But I still had my world. My world was sane. My world had experts. My world was careful with such things as young people and fertility. My world had a compendium of knowledge on child and adolescent development. There were guardrails in my world. They would help me get her back. They would help keep her from harm.

The crash came when I saw no one was there. No one was going to help me. The therapist. The other therapist. My family, the school. They pushed my daughter right along. Everyone was doing their very best to push me along too. Facts could not penetrate. An exponential contagion was somehow justified. You could be plastered with a label and then safely ignored. But wait - doctors. My doctor. Surely someone in my doctor’s practice would speak straight with my daughter. Speak with authority on the health consequences of these treatments. No. No one. There was no one. Their concern was directed back at me. If I wanted the best outcome for my trans child then I needed to support “him”. That is when I fell. That is when I saw the world open and invert into darkness.

1. The Ghost of Bobby Dunbar. A beautiful story about a love that never ends, resiliency and forgiveness. And a child - though posthumously - finally coming home.