When I first came out, I didn’t understand the whole “we feel like you’ve died!” argument from my parents, or many parents who knowingly or unknowingly tell their children this transphobic phrase. How could that be? We’re right here if you get to know us! We’re still the same.

But after a rough conversation with my Christian parents about pronouns, mental health, and their stance on the LGBTQ+, I felt it. That snap of the branch, the separation between reality that is, and the hope of what could be. What I was losing from that conversation was hope that they’d understand me, that they’d want to, not them. It is sad to know that this might be how they felt when I expressed who I was to them several years ago.

I’m an adult living in their house due to going back to school late, autism, and other factors such as the economy. Overall, we co-exist relatively well. My parents are not abusive to me, nor I to them, and we keep up our ends of the house as best we can. They don’t invite me to church, and I don’t invite them to pride celebrations. All good there. In general, we respect each others’ space. They are kind to allow me to stay here, and even help me with medical bills and food while I finish school. I appreciate them for quite a lot of things. In return, I clean, I do my best to help out around the house, etc. We live in a sort of symbiosis. Neither purposefully antagonizing the other.

But after that conversation, it seems difficult to progress beyond our mutually beneficial relationship. We don’t hang out unless we have to. We make conversation, but it feels like talking to strange coworkers that you’d rather not be around. We have game nights occasionally, and they always leave me feeling strange. I feel like I have to slink in and out of the house, and despite the fact that they love my fiancee, neither he nor I feel comfortable hanging around until they’re gone on business trips and vacations.

During the conversation, I felt the branch snap when my father described to me his process of finding things out about transness. Mostly, his information comes from things like the Mayo Clinic and medical journals. That is better than nothing, but he seems highly concerned by the medical side of things. What he lacks is the ability or want to look into the qualitative, the stories of others. He also said something that made me realize how far down the bar is on his knowledge about the LGBTQ+.

“I don’t understand why you as a trans man are with a man who identifies as a man. I’d think, to feel more manly, you’d want to be with a woman. Why can’t you just be a masculine woman?”

In that instant, I knew it was over, somehow. I could see the future between me and my parents sort of shrivel up into a husk and dry out. The possibility of them congratulating me on big trans milestones, or being happy for this part of my life that is slowly panning out to be the right choice, gone. My questions from teenage-hood quickly came back into focus. Would my father ever call me the right pronouns? Would my mother want to hug her own child after top surgery?

It made me realize that I don’t have the energy to teach them, specifically. I have taught classes on the LGBTQ+ in the past. I have taught on pronouns, and identities, and statistics. But none of that truly prepared me for the emotional toll it would take on me to try and teach my parents. Especially when they don’t want to ask anything. They say they’re not uncomfortable around the topics that surround my transition… but it’s easy to tell when discomfort is present.

So far, I’ve been working through this grief much like one would for a physical person. When you grieve a person, you mourn not only the lost past, but the lost future. And in this case, I definitely feel both. I feel the pangs of loneliness that might come from the lack of their support, or the quiet shutting down of our possible relationship. I feel the deep ache of knowing that those days I longed for may never, ever come. The possibility of a “maybe, possibly, could be” is shrinking each and every day, and I am struggling not to hold onto hope. I have done that with this before… and it hurts.

The hardest part of all of it is that when grief hits, it doesn’t really stop until its run its full course. I can be happy in a moment, but the depression from the first stage of grief has taken a proverbial sledgehammer to my mental state- as if it wasn’t hard enough to deal with. Energy is sapped. Depression is high. All the stages of grief seem to be melding together all at once.

I’m hoping, if you are going through this, you’re reading this and feeling like someone understands. Like someone is going through what you’re going through. I’m sorry that we have to take this journey, but at least we are taking it together.