Our kid will grow up and get married and have children, and we will be doting grandparents in our old age. Our children will feel connected to our religious community and raise their own children in our faith.
My son will share my love of comic books my daughter will have my literary sensibility. My daughter will be a doctor like all of the strong women in our family. My son will take over the family business. My child will be outgoing and social like I was in school. My child will love baseball as much as I do, and I’ll coach his teams and we’ll go to games together. They’ll say this repeatedly, to anyone and everyone, and as with “I just want my child to be healthy,” they’ll believe it in every fiber of their being.īut there’s a fine line between a parent’s happiness and a child’s: It can be hard to tell the two apart when the story developed before the child was born diverges from the story of who the child actually is.Īnd it will almost always diverge in some way.Ī parent’s story may look like this: My child will excel academically and attend my alma mater. And once that healthy child of the hoped-for or not-hoped-for gender or features makes an appearance, the next thing these parents will say, with just as much conviction, is, “I just want my child to be happy.” These sound like trivial preferences, but remember, they’re part of a long-standing fantasy, a powerful script embedded in a person’s psyche. I hope that the baby doesn’t have my partner’s flat feet, or Aunt Henrietta’s funny-looking ears. Though they may keep it to themselves, they tend to hope for more than good health. “I just want a healthy child,” most parents say as they await their baby’s arrival. And most of the time, parents-to-be don’t realize how specific these expectations they’ve been carrying around really are. Most people who want children have certain ideas, developed over the course of years, about what it will be like to raise a child, and who that child will be.
It started where most parent-child relationships begin, which is to say, in your parents’ fantasies. The truth, Normal Son, is that the story of your parents’ reaction began long before you were born. Instead, I’d like to shed some light on what their internal experience might be like, so that no matter how you decide to move forward, you’ll be coming from a less injured and more centered place. I’m in no way condoning their hurtful and intolerant behavior.
You see, just as they don’t understand you (why can’t you just be straight?), you don’t understand them (why can’t they just be supportive?). But you might not have to lose each other over their terror and your pain. I’m sorry that your parents are struggling so hard to understand you, and that you’re internalizing their struggle (by, for example, calling yourself “abnormal”) even as you rail against it.
Some men are attracted to men, some women to women, or any combination thereof. You’ll notice that I’m addressing my response to “Normal Son” and not “Abnormal Son,” because there is nothing abnormal about you. Are parents that see their son in this way worth holding onto? They recently found out about my significant other and told me that my happiness is not worth the price of giving up being normal, and how little they love me. They’ve asked if I have AIDS, if I was molested by a priest, and other questions far too graphic to go into. I am 18 years old and in need of advice and insight. My parents found out I was gay almost three years ago. Ever since then, they have berated me for it - either that, or they’re outright ignoring it.