Reflections on Love and the Power of Growing Together
Reflections on Love and the Power of Growing Together
by Oscar Oliveira Soens
Part of growing up is realizing that your parents are humans, too. It’s coming to the understanding that there is both good and bad that exist in all of us, and that the most common and important thread that binds us together is love. Not romantic or passive or selfish love, not love-love, but LOVE. To LOVE is to accept someone’s shortcomings, to forgive them their imperfections, and to create the space necessary to grow together. I’m going to tell you how I learned to LOVE my parents.
It is pertinent to my story that I tell you that I am the child of two women — two imperfect and beautifully human mothers. They raised me in Massachusetts, in a suburb outside of Boston, alongside my three siblings. I spent many of my childhood days attending marches and protests at the statehouse, fighting for my parents’ right to marry. At a very young age it became clear to both myself and my family that I was not straight, and to this my parents did not bat an eye.
My transness, however, was a little less straightforward. I like to think that in some way I had known I was transgender my entire life. I always knew that I was a little bit different from the people around me, and by the time I was twelve, I had found the language to describe how I felt. These words, whispered in confidence to my closest friends, felt freeing: it was as if I had unlocked a cage and I knew it to be a matter of time before I stepped out.
I assumed that coming out as transgender to my family would be a breeze, given that I had been raised by gay mothers and had met their transgender friends in the past. Still, I bided my time, planning and waiting until the words uttered in secret could no longer be a whisper, and by the time I was fifteen I was ready to scream.
When I finally sat my parents down to talk, I was buzzing with anxiety and energy. I had rehearsed what I was going to say, and had mentally prepared myself for the inevitable line of questioning to which I had no answers. How long had I known? What might my transition look like moving forward? How was I going to navigate a world that was not designed to accommodate people like me?
As soon as the words left my mouth I felt a weight lift from my shoulders. A few seconds later the weight came crashing back down as my parents told me in no small words that they were shocked, disappointed, and angry. They said many things that I know now they wish they could take back. I could feel my heart breaking and yet I remained as composed as possible, determined that my parents’ distaste would not be the defining characteristic in our relationship.
To their relative relief, I told them not to worry — I was not coming out entirely just yet. I was going to wait until I had finished my first year of high school, and then I would begin to live as myself. I had given them a few months’ notice with the intention that they use the time to get accustomed to the idea of their youngest child becoming someone for whom they were not initially prepared.
As two people who had fought tirelessly for their rights, how could having a transgender child be a point of so much conflict? My parents were fine with the concept of transgender people, but when it came to matters that involved their home and family, they clearly felt differently. I realized fairly quickly that an explanation to this dissonance would be a complex one.
If you can get to the root causes of a person’s emotions, you can unearth a common kernel of humanity, no matter how hidden. And so, after the initial anger had cooled, I asked my parents what exactly it was that they were feeling.
Their driving emotion, like so many of us in any number of situations, was fear. They were afraid of losing their child. Like many parents of transgender children, my parents believed that in changing my gender (or, as I like to call it, my process of Becoming), they would lose the child that they had known and loved. This fear, this sense of mourning, may be founded on false pretenses but it is still a potent feeling and as such cannot be ignored or discounted entirely.
My parents were also afraid of what being transgender would do to me. Both of my mothers knew firsthand how difficult it is to be gay and were terrified of how the world would react to me as a transgender person. They were afraid of losing me and they were afraid of me being hurt.
Once I realized that the anger and disdain that I had initially been met with was nothing more than a reaction based in shock and fear, I was able to work with that. I reminded them of who I am, who I have always been: their youngest child, a twin, baker of mud pies and builder of fairy houses, lover of animals, passionate about life and the great outdoors, a writer at times, a painter when I wanted, and most importantly, a person capable and deserving of love. I told them that these things would not change because of my gender. I reminded them that a person’s gender was only one facet of their humanity. And most importantly, I told them that if they wanted to talk about things, I would be here to reassure them.
Because coming out is such a personal and often painful process, the immediate reactions of those who we come out to can set the tone for those relationships for years to come. As difficult as it is it is imperative that we remember that a person’s initial reaction does not necessarily dictate their ongoing attitudes towards something. This is why it’s crucial that we do not allow those to whom we come out to usurp our agency in defining what coming out means for that relationship. Had I stayed quiet and received their reactions passively, I would have lost any power that I had in that conversation. When I came out to my parents I told them that I would not compromise on who I am but that their acceptance and support was more important to me than ever.
It’s also important to consider the ways that we engage with those who we come out to. It’s easy to react to anger with more anger, but this only escalates the negative energy present. When the conversation ends, this energy does not dissipate — someone may forget what you have said but they will remember the stress associated with the experience and it will impact their ability and willingness to engage with the new information. I think of us like water: the harder and faster you hit someone’s surface, the stronger the tension and the more resistance you will encounter. Instead, my goal was to gently submerge myself, to examine the depths of my parents’ feelings and to heal alongside them. To do this requires more emotional energy than one should have to spend defending their claim to humanity, but if you are able, it is worth it to try.
Many transgender people who I have known who have felt rejected by members of their family or friends have cut out entire swaths of people who they were previously close with. This is often for good reason, too. I cannot tell you that every relationship is salvageable, but I have seen people walk away from those who love them simply because the people who love them have not yet learned how to love them properly. My parents were not perfect but, if for no reason other than the sake of allowing them the privilege of a (more or less) happy family, I was determined to help them learn.
My relationship with my parents was strained, to say the least. Many arguments and tearful nights passed and it seemed that we would never come to a place of understanding. But hard work pays off, and three years later one of my mothers suggested that she and I get matching tattoos, so that she could “accompany [me] on [my] transitional journey”. This marked for me the moment in which my parents decided that they wanted to accept and know me fully. That was when I was newly eighteen, and in the five years since then I have watched my two mothers take massively impressive strides in not only their understanding of my transness but also their advocacy for me and the members of my trans community.
This is not, however, without compromise. My parents still struggle with pronoun use, for me and for the transgender and gender nonconforming friends of mine that they meet. There have even been a few moments, when the family is all together, that my parents revert back to using my old name. Instead of reacting with anger I allow myself time to breathe, think, and then discuss. When confrontation looks more like a conversation than an argument and comes from a place exempt of judgement, I have found that my parents genuinely want to listen.
My advice to those coming out to their families is this: do not let their ignorance define them. If they have loved you before, then there is reason to believe that they can learn to love you again. You deserve to be accepted, to be wanted, to be loved. Do not sell yourself short by not fighting for these things.