In the early days after my son Leo came out as transgender, I spent a lot of time thinking about how I no longer had a daughter. I need to explain here that in 2016, I didn’t yet understand that I never actually had a daughter, I only thought I did. So when Leo told us he was transgender, my heart broke over the idea of no longer having a daughter, which was a dream I carried from the time I was a little girl who never had a sister.
As I grieved the loss of this daughter, I would eventually come to understand why it felt so painful (see above re: never having a sister), and why I was struggling to let go.
What I never struggled with, for even one second, was loving my child.
From the time Leo told us he was transgender, my heart was full of love and support for him. I may not have known a lot of things about being transgender that morning (or any, really), but I did know this: I had a child, and I loved him. I didn’t know what the future looked like, or even the next week exactly, but I knew it wasn’t going to be easy for Leo.
As parents, we want what is best for our children, no matter how old they are. But when we don’t know what ‘best’ looks like, we can just keep loving them.
When our kids come out, they often don’t know what their next steps look like. They are just excited to share information they have been holding inside themselves for what may have been years with the rest of the world. Imagine what a relief that must feel like. I can’t imagine carrying that weight around and not being able to share it with anyone.
Sometimes our children know what they would like their next steps to be, but aren’t sure what kind of support they want from us. Or, they are older and want to take those next steps on their own.
Love sometimes looks like stepping back and letting your child move forward without you.
This can be hard for us as parents, especially if our children are young adults. We are still working out how to let our children fledge the nest, and now they are embarking on this grand adventure, and we want nothing more than to help them along the way.
Support can look like a text that says, “I’m thinking of you today.” Sometimes it’s a care package with fun socks, their favorite snacks, or a new gender-appropriate hygiene item. It’s also respecting their boundaries when they ask you not to ask any more questions, or to give them space if that’s what they ask for.
Often, we think about loving others the way we would like to be loved, because that comes naturally to us. However, we need to think about what it looks like to love people in a way that makes them feel most loved, even if it doesn’t seem intuitive to us.
Loving our kids doesn’t have to be complicated, even if figuring out how to be the parent of a transgender child feels that way at first. We’ve been loving our children right along; we just have to keep doing it.
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