Why Can't You Understand? A Conversation.

Me: “I’m sorry I don’t feel too good at the moment ….my daughter died.”

A Friend: “Oh my god…what happened?”

Me: “I have no idea!! I must not have been paying attention, I don’t know how I could have been so careless.”

A Friend: “Was there an accident? Or was she sick?”

Me: “No, no accident, and she wasn’t sick.”

A Friend: “I don’t understand, did someone hurt her?”

Me: “No, I’d never let anyone hurt her—it’s my job to keep her safe.”

A Friend: “Did she hurt herself?”

Me: “I think that’s the best way to describe it, but she is still breathing, she is still here I even get glimpses of her all the time, but she tells me that she’s gone.”

A Friend: “I don’t understand—you’re talking in riddles!”

Me: “She died because she said she did. She was there one day, and gone the next. Without warning. Now there is this other person who resembles her but isn’t her and ‘he’ has replaced her. He has gone through her things and thrown them away. He has taken her life by deleting her memory and he is angry and sometimes rude. We are helpless and we mustn’t offend him; he gets very angry when he feels offended. He has cancelled her warmth he has cancelled her sensitivity; he has cancelled her connection to me. She used to tell me things, we used to talk about stuff and now I miss her so much it hurts. Our friendship was taken away without even discussing it with me first. Because of him I question everything I thought I knew about her. I watched her grow since the day she was born, but now he has made me question whether I ever even knew her all. Does this make me a shit parent? What the hell did I miss?”

A Friend: “No that doesn’t make you shit but maybe you’ve not been as present as you should have been? Your son is Trans, right?”

Me: “It’s so easy for others to empathize, understand and accept that someone is Trans, isn’t it? All my life I have tried really hard not to judge other people’s choices. I have friends who are gay and I have never been in any way transphobic. Now it’s happening to our family it’s not so easy to accept that my child needs to change sex to be happy when every fibre in my body is screaming “NO”!!! This isn’t right! My child never expressed a desire to be a boy during all of our intimate chats. She never intimated that she was identifying as the opposite sex but she was a bit of a tomboy. You know, liked to wear jeans and sneakers. She did have mostly friends that were boys which happened when her group of girlfriends all started to approach puberty way before she did. I certainly never in my wildest imagination could have predicted this.”

A Friend: “Why can’t you accept it if it makes your son happy?”

Me: “It doesn’t make my child happy; it makes ‘him’ profoundly sad; it makes ‘him’ feel excluded and it makes ‘him’ feel discomfort in almost every situation. The most devastating thing is that my daughter is stunningly beautiful exactly the way she is right now. If only she would give herself a small chance. She never got to experience the world as a female. I want to shake ‘him’ I want for ‘him‘ to wake up from this psychosis and realize that ‘he’ doesn’t need to change to be happy and accepted. I’m helpless! I can’t talk directly to her anymore. ‘He’ is the gatekeeper now, ‘he’ won’t let her speak to me, ‘he’ has silenced her—forever it seems.”

A Friend: “But your child is still here fit and healthy; some people would take that instead of a child that had a terminal illness or a disability.”

Me: “I do my best to count my blessings most of the time and of course if I were given a choice, I would choose this over a terminal illness or a disability. Let me try to explain…my child died…but I can’t mourn, I have to simply accept it with a smile, be happy that they are here at least. The daughter that I gave birth to, the one I longed for my whole adult life…She no longer exists…she has been replaced by a person that keeps upsetting me with this unfamiliar attitude and strange behavior. Each day is a constant reminder that my daughter is gone as I watch ‘him’ pretend to be someone else, someone that I don’t recognize. I’m constantly living with a ghost; a ghost that allows me to see glimpses of her every now and then just so I don’t lose hope that one day she might come back.”

A Friend: “Can’t you explain this to your son?”

Me: “We try to talk things through but I say the wrong thing and then ‘he’ gets mad and then I feel bad and then we have taken two steps backwards in our relationship building efforts. ‘He’ feels betrayed and I feel that I’ve let ‘him’ down again. It’s a vicious circle. I really don’t know what to do. I’m exhausted because I’ve tried everything, I try to help but nothing I do now seems to have a positive impact on ‘him’.

A Friend: “What can you do to make things better?”

Me: “I have to stop trying to fix or control what happens, I have to let my child go and do what they want after all its their life, not mine. I have to take care of me which means I have to try to find some peace in spite of the things that my child decides to do. I have to stop allowing my child to draw me into their problems because it only makes me sad and frustrated. I have to stop letting this dominate my life and accept the things I can’t change, before it’s too late.”