Every morning for many mornings now and many years I awake in a feeling of fear and overwhelming brokenness as I begin to navigate my day.
It was getting late last night when I finally sat in front of the TV and researched a few names of public personas mentioned to me in several conversations over the last few days. In my “wind-down” time I was in-and-out of some Google searches and thoughts, and in-and-out of some news stories and such.
At some point a phrase came to mind of something disturbing one of my sons said to me awhile back and I began trying to search my text thread, messenger chat, and then a certain email folder to find this communication.
I have periodically tried to locate it and cannot (I want to re-visit it word-for-word apparently…) and for some reason I gave it another shot last night. Ending up in the email folder with this son’s name where I had saved some communications going back to 2012 (but mostly within the last several years) I became further set upon despair and thrown off-kilter.
Though it was getting later and I was getting more depressed, I continued clicking on through messages until I came to a communication from 2019, and a communication from September 2012. Neither was the specific thing I was looking for, but it re-opened yet other wounds and lines of difficult thought.
It was exhausting and dizzying and upsetting and hurtful and piercing and… and… confusing…as I re-lived the seemingly endless loops in my head trying to analyze, make sense and wrap my head around even things that happened 11 years ago.
I pulled myself into bed around 2:15 a.m. and then picked up a book that I’ve been reading, for about a half hour. And then I tried to go to sleep and felt restless and disturbed and so very very heavy and utterly dismayed at the brokenness and the seeming irreparability of not just one thing, but the entirety of all things that are ultimately overlapping and interconnected.
I managed to imperfectly sleep probably five or six hours and then I’m starting my day into one of what will undoubtedly be the next series of late-loop-patterns that will probably persist until I have a night I’m so exhausted I go to bed at 9:00 or 10:00 p.m. .
In this current life season of unending distresses this is just the way these things are. And it feels like these moments will never come to any full thriving, normalcy and life-giving health and resolution. I am pressed by battles on every single front in my life, but the very deepest battle a mother/parent can face is that which concerns the rightful heartbeat of our lives: our children and our family.
__________
I am part of an online community support group of parents who are facing what I have faced and continue to navigate–through the deep ripples of the destructive wake that is called “transgender,” that has rip-tided through everything I thought I understood about my family and personal world during the last 11 years.
Most of us these days turn to our smartphone as soon as the blurriness is away from our eyes. While we brew coffee or whatever our morning routine involves, we glance at our “notifications” to get our mind up and running, for better or for worse.
And this morning, after the return in full force of these terrible weighty distresses, I clicked on this article (Back from the other side) shared by a parent in the group and was reading some of the personal comments and responses.
I had to provide my email to read the entire Substack piece, and it was well worth it. There was one thing a third of the way through I never saw coming, so-to-speak, and I slowly and carefully took in pretty much every single word and thought of this writer.
There is something said toward the very end, that when I got to that part, caused the floodgate of dammed-up tears to burst, and what I would categorize as weeping, suddenly overtook me. It was as though this writer-stranger out there gave me a small sip of water in a battle that feels like some unending hell.
And once I composed myself after 30 seconds of spontaneous weeping, I thought about it all. Again.
__________
And I thought about the fact that for many of these parents (but not all), they at least still have their husband or wife to come alongside and help, comfort, and shoulder the pain and the exhausting day-to-day navigation (even when there is little-or-no-contact, the parent is waging an unceasing private war inside, on the back burner of every immediate thought and task…) and how extra difficult it is for the divorced or widowed parent in these scenarios.
My ruminations within several minutes took me back and back and back until conceptually, I was thinking about things that are “swallowed up and gobbled up.”
- Difficulties from my childhood (and that of my first husband’s childhood) were gobbled up into my first marriage.
- Difficulties from my first marriage and divorce were gobbled up into the section of my life where I was a divorced, single-mom.
- Difficulties from being a divorced, single-mom were gobbled up into my second marriage, along with the issues on that other side that were gobbled up into that marriage, which ended in a second divorce.
- Difficulties from my second divorce were gobbled up into my post-divorce situation which was almost immediately gobbled up into a worldwide pandemic.
- Difficulties in the post-second-divorce nuclear family landscape from the first marriage, with particular expression in one member’s transgender ideation and the various responses to that and allegiances drawn up, were gobbled up into a hellscape scenario that I have difficulty fully articulating.
It is too much.
It is so much that it has seemingly and immutably intensified my feeling/recognition of being too much.
It and myself are now so much that seemingly all hopes of meaningful redemption of the entirety of these scenarios are simply insufficient and not enough.
Not enough (because of being too much to bear and to navigate) to seemingly ever bring some happy ending, some “happily ever after.”
Some form of general Shalom in my personal world, or my ability to bring that God-desired Shalom into someone else’s world.
Like any battle, the soldier fights to survive a hellish landscape with little hope or understanding of when the war will end, how the war will end, and what the post-war landscape will look like.
I don’t think the average person understands that like the release of that atomic bomb in World War II, this transgender cult arises from a Pandora’s box of evil that will forever change the world and all families, either directly or indirectly. This thing has been released, and we will all need to be forever ever-diligent and on guard to protect ourselves and our loved ones from this tremendously damaging weapon.
If you and your family have not yet been touched and harmed, I ask you to listen and to hear.
Like War, when we read of the sufferings in some faraway place we might think, “that’s a shame.”
But until it comes to our own front door, we maintain the false sense of having the luxury of many indifferent or otherwise wrong/uninformed/unhelpful responses.
_____
Chant from NYC Pride Parade: “We’re queer, we’re here, we’re coming for your children.”
Thank You For Reading
Please Feel Free To Express Your Thoughts Below
