I love my gay mom
&#;Adolescence is a confusing hour for everyone. It’s a time in everyone’s lives where we must, for the first time, figure out what we favor, who we like, and what we want to be. It’s a hour where we must identify our true selves. My adolescence was all of those things&#; and more.
Like most teenagers, I was moody and sometimes sassy. I remember wanting to sleep ALL of the time. Luckily, I had a good relationship with my mom and dad. In fact, I could always confide in my mom. Whenever I did something stupid or felt like things were falling apart, she’d always be there for me, cheering me on. My whole childhood, I was attached at her hip. She was my best friend. I didn’t know the second for me to be there for her would arrive so quickly. The roles entirely reversed.
I was thirteen years old. I still remember the conversation like it was yesterday. My mother, my brother Jacob, and I were sitting at the dining room table. It was a regular afternoon and Jacob and I had just returned from university. My father was asleep because he had worked his third shift at the hospital pharmacy. It was always just the three of us after school.
At first, we were talking about normal t
“You want to shove those words back in and put the lid on. But you can’t. Your child is gay. This goes against everything you’ve been taught. It was not what you had in mind, and you instantly wonder where you went wrong.”
When you grow a parent, you realize to expect the unexpected. But for many Christian parents, nothing can plan them to hear that their beloved child is gay. This is the child you have cradled, spoon fed mashed bananas, and dreamed a stunning future for. How could this be? What will the church say? What will your friends say? What does the future hold? You can’t even get your head around this.
If you are a Christian parent, family member or friend to whom your loved one has come out as queer or lesbian, then this is for you.
I ask you to sit down, relax, maybe get a cup of tea, and soak in what I’m about to tell you. My hope is to guide you as we walk for a bit through this maze of confusion, to help you find your way to wholeness. In many Christian circles, this is not good news, and you may begin to spiral into reflection and self-searching. We’ll get to that. But at the bottom of it all, this is not about you. Most parents’ first mistake is to mak
I Was Married, Divorced and a Mom Before I Realized I Was Gay
But the truth is, our marriage had already been unraveling — slowly, adv, and for reasons that had nothing to perform with my sexuality. We were growing in alternative directions. There were patterns we couldn’t break, confidence we couldn’t rebuild, and hard moments I didn’t want my kids to grow up thinking were normal. By the moment we ended up in couples therapy for the second time, I told him it would be our last try — not because I didn’t care, but because I needed to be proficient to look my kids in the eye and say I had done everything I could. And I did.
Ultimately, I wanted my children to possess two happy, healthy parents. And the truth was, the healthiest version of our family no longer included us being married.
I got married young, fresh out of college. A big part of that decision was my dad: the one who adopted and raised me after my biological father passed away… and who was sick with cancer. I wanted him to stroll me down the walkway. I felt this urgency to hit all the milestones I thought I was supposed to. At the time, I believed that was my job: go to college, join a good man, assemble a family and produce it all work.
And
What PRIDE Month Means to a Mom
A Mom&#;s Perspective of Pride
For me, Movement Month is a hour to reflect on a journey that I grab as the mom of a gay son. Belief me, it is a journey like no other.
The journey began the morning my child came to me and shared a deeply held secret that he had attempted to hide for his entire life. I felt shocked at first. Shocked that there could be something so BIG that I didn’t know about my own child. I interact with him every diurnal, I lived with this person, I raised him, I thought I knew every… single… thing there was to know and then BAM, he tells me he is male lover. The initial shock knock like a freight train.
Soon, the shock subsided. It happened rather quickly. Next came remorse. Not remorse that he is queer, that part changes nothing of my love for my child; but remorse for all the years that I didn’t grasp. How much pain had he endured all those years? Was he fighting it? Was he praying that God would alter him? Did he deliberate it would change my love for him? My beautiful amazing son that God himself made exactly as he was, was he feeling that I might think less of him? Remorse hit complicated and I had to learn to forgive myself so that I could move on.
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