Space to become

If there's one thing I've learned by being a parent, it's that each of us needs the space, support and safety to become the person we were destined to be, NOT the person someone else wants(ed) us to be(come).

just about 5 years ago my son learned, definitively, that I am gay. He'd only been with me for a few months (9) and was not quite 12 at the time. The followed few days were tense with him not even wanting to sit on the same couch as me. This was a stark 180 from him wanting me to tuck him in just the evening before. I let him go through this process on his own for a few days then sat down with him and had a chat. The ultimate lesson was not that he needed to accept, love, and embrace me--that was his choice to make, and his alone--rather it was that the only thing to have changed was how much he knew about me, not who I was, but what he knew. His fear, in his own words, was that I was going to rape him. I let him sit with this and invited him to think about how he'd been treated the last 9 months as a family and I let him come into his own on the realization that this was preposterous.

Fast forward a few years and he's not an officer of his school's Gay Straight Alliance and bought "Love Simon" (the book AND movie) for me for Father's Day and was sad we were going to miss the Kentuckiana Pride Festival due to vacation. After assuring him missing one year would not disqualify me from membership in the gay mafia (I think being the Grand Marshal of the Pride Parade cemented my membership), he he was reassured it was ok.

I could not force him to love me, embrace me, accept me because that's fair to his journey of self discovery. What I could do was create space for him to discover the compassion that was waiting to be unleashed inside himself.

I don't get this parenting thing right very often, but tonight I am going to give myself a pat on the back...on this issue, I feel like I knocked it out of the park.