Understated Ideas

The first place I learnt that telling the truth has consequences was at home.

When we got engaged at the end of 2023, we decided to wait a few weeks to tell anyone. We wanted to have the happy news to ourselves for a while, but I was also apprehensive about sharing the news with my family.

Why?

It has been over a decade since I first told my parents I was in a relationship with a woman. Since then, my relationship with them has deteriorated. Each trip home is a tense mission for them to convince me that I am sinning against God and that the only explanation in their mind for my queerness is that I must have been hurt by a man.

When my partner and I visited, we used to stay with my parents at my childhood home. Every waking moment, we had to remember to completely remove any physical, visual, or verbal form of affection to each other lest we receive a reproachful glare. Meals were tense affairs. She was and still is referred to as my friend. The toil it took on her, and myself was immense.

On one of these trips home, my father sat me in my room for an hour with a bible and a portrait of Mother Mary and insisted I listen to his cautionary tale of an old gay friend he had who he claimed was lured into a homosexual relationship that changed him for the worse. He intended to dissuade me from being in a relationship with my partner, and from a deeply sinful life. During the same trip, my mother angrily lamented I was determined to ruin the life she envisioned for me, and that I was causing her tremendous grief. I sat at the dining table alone quietly, my heart breaking, absorbing her tirade.

On another visit, my parents escorted me to a healing mass to atone for my sinful relationship and brought me to see priests on separate occasions to pray over me and convince me to change my ways. A few years ago, well over six years into my relationship, my parents wrote me a four page single spaced letter, handing it to me just before I flew out the country, informing me I was condemning myself to hell for choosing to be in this relationship that they refused to acknowledge. The language they used was more strongly worded and intolerant.

After that, we no longer stayed at the family home when we went to visit.

When I finally told my family I was engaged, my siblings were thrilled. Their response was heartwarming and encouraging. On the contrary, my parents read my message and ignored it. They never responded. An aunt who I consider a mother figure cried in disappointment. She told me it was against the church's teachings. We stopped talking.

All of this repeated rejection stung. It stung more when in the same week, my brother told us of his intentions of becoming a priest and my parents shared the news proudly to everyone they knew. It stung the most when my sister got engaged a few months later and my mother immediately launched into wedding planning mode. As with most of my life since coming out, I balanced the happiness I felt for my siblings with the hurt of being ignored. I got on with life.

The thing about getting on with it, is that eventually when you least expect it, whatever's simmering below the surface catches up with you and then you have to deal with it. Time doesn't heal all wounds, it simply distances the trauma from your present self.

There are deep and broad beacons of light in my life; there are wonderful supportive people who love me. I am endlessly thankful for them, for seeing me and for sitting beside me in this journey of life.

There is no profound act of unlearning a deeply held prejudice in this story. There has never been an apology nor do I expect one. I accept that my parents are complex people who love parts of me in their own way. I've learnt that the depths of my love for them do not depend on how they treat me.

I have many deeply religious friends and loved ones who have children of their own now. My question to you is this - how will you treat your children when you disagree with a fundamental part of themselves that they cannot change? What will you do?