Thanks for Staying

When I decided to write about my journey, I deliberately DID NOT read anything that other parents had written about their life/journey with a transgender child. I wanted my story to be mine alone without any subliminal outside influences. 

Suddenly my vision has become my reality, and my book is a real thing.  At least it’s a real thing on the internet, but it will be a tangible real thing that you can hold in your hands in just a few months.  My hope from the beginning of this book thing  is that there are other parents out there in the world who will read my book, When He Was Anna, and find comfort in knowing that they aren’t alone as they struggle to understand the child that they love so dearly. 

Since hope isn’t a plan, I’ve realized that I can’t do this on my own.  I need help in getting the word out there about my book.   People can’t read it if they don’t know about it, and they won’t know about it if someone doesn’t make an effort to show it to them. 

So, I hired some help.  I have people who know much more than I about how to launch a book.  They talk to me about newsletters, podcasts and interviews and all kinds of scary stuff.  And I’ve been told that it’s time to read about other parents and their journeys; it’s time to learn how others have coped in situations similar to mine.  I’m told that I need to be prepared so that I can have an intelligent conversation about a topic that impacts me so deeply but that I really know so little about. 

And so, I read; and sometimes I audible (can that be a verb?).   The goal is to learn, not to judge.  Some of the books are very conservative, some are exactly the opposite.  Some are written by parents; some are written by ‘experts’ in the field of gender.  The ones that are most compelling are the ones written by parents—those are the ones that hit home for me.

There’s a common element in the books I’ve read that are written by parents of children that fall somewhere on the LGBTQ spectrum; that element is loss of friends.  It never occurred to me, as I wrote about my parenting journey for the world to see, that I would be judged by my friends  or that I might lose those friends.  To the best of my knowledge, that hasn’t happened to me yet. If it has happened—if friends have judged me or walked away—it has happened quietly and has gone unnoticed.  Or maybe I just live under a rock and have no idea what’s happening around me.  I’d like to think that I’ve chosen my small circle of friends wisely, and that’s the reason why they’re not running away from me as I publicly spill my guts. To my friends, I say Thank You.