As long as you breathe. Learn to really love our gay son
Reflections by Linda Robertson Published on the HuffingtonPost.com website (USA) on July 1, 2013, freely translated by Silvia Lanzi
On the evening of November 20, 2001, a chat with Instant Messenger changed our life forever.
Ryan: I have to tell you something.
Mom: I listen to you
A: I don't know how to tell you, but ... I can't continue to tell you lies on me. I hid this for too long and I feel I have to say it now. You probably have an idea of what I'm about to tell you…. I'm gay…. I can't believe I have said it.
Mom: Are you kidding?
Ryan: No. I believed I understood because of Uncle Don
Mom: Of course. But what makes you think you are?
A: I know, I don't like Hannah. It's just coverage
Mom: but you don't say you are gay
A: I'm gay
Mom: Tell me something again
A: It's just as they are, it's something I know. You are not a lesbian, and you know. It is the same thing
Mom: What does it mean?
A: That I am only gay. That's what they are
Mom: I love you anyway.
A: I'm white, not black. I know. I am a boy, not a girl. You know about you and I know this
Mom: Thanks for telling me
A: I'm very confused now
Mom: I love you even more for being honest
A: I know, thanks
We were completely shocked. It is not that we did not know and love gay people; My only brother started several years earlier and we love him. But Ryan? He was not afraid of anything, he was a tough and macho. We had not had a hint and the emotion that there survived us awake all night and, unfortunately, fear influenced our way of piging in the following six years.
We said everything that of the loving Christian parents who believe in the Bible, the Word of God, should say: "We love you. We will always love you. And it's hard. But we know what God said about homosexuality, so you have to make really difficult choices. We love you. We could not love you more.
But there are other people who have faced this struggle, and God has operated in them to change their desires. We will give you some books; I may feel their testimonies. And we will have confidence in God.
We love you. We are proud that you are our son. But you are young. The feelings you feel for the other guys don't make you a gay. So, don't tell everyone you are gay. You still don't know who you are. Your identity is not your homosexuality; It is rather that you are the son of God.
We love you. Nothing can change it. But if you intend to follow Jesus, holiness is your only possibility. You just have to look for the way you to choose Jesus, it doesn't matter what it is. And since you know what the Bible says, supporting your sexuality is not an option. "
We thought we knew the greatness of the sacrifice that we - and God - were asking him. And we knew this sacrifice, he would have led to an abundance of life, to perfect peace and eternal reward. Ryan had always felt deeply attracted to spirituality, above all he wanted to please God. Thus, for the first six years, he tried to choose Jesus.
Like several others before him, he asked God to help him feel attracted to girls. He learned the Scriptures by heart, met weekly with his spiritual director, he enthusiastically participated in the events of the youth parish group and biblical studies. And finally he was baptized.
He read all the books that tried to explain where his homoerotic feelings came from, began a psychotherapy to discover the further reasons of his unwanted attraction for the boys, he worked at the resolution of painful conflicts with me and my husband, built strong friendships with other boys - straight boys - just as the experts of reparative therapies recommended.
He also witnessed all his youth group, telling how God had saved him from the traps of the enemy, remembering and sharing the way in which God had brought him back to himself.
But nothing changed. God did not respond to his prayers, or to ours, although we all believed with faith that the God of the universe, the God to whom nothing is impossible, could easily make Ryan straight. But it wasn't like that.
Although our hearts were in peace (we really believed that what we did was right), we do not give Ryan even a chance to fight with God, to try to understand what God told him about his sexuality through writing.
We strongly believed to give our four children time and way of questioning Christianity, so that they decided themselves if they wanted to follow Jesus, and to give them a true faith. But we were too frightened to give Ryan this opportunity when the question of his sexuality jumped out, for fear that he would make the wrong choice.
Basically, we told our son that he was supposed to choose between Jesus and his sexuality. We forced him to make a choice between God and his being sexual. Choosing God, practically, meant living a whole life condemned to be alone.
He would never have had the opportunity to fall in love, there would never have been a first kiss, the fingers that intertwine; He would never have shared his intimacy with anyone, he would not have had a partner or experienced romantic situations.
And so, just before his eighteenth birthday, Ryan, so depressed as to think about suicide, disillusioned and convinced that he would never have been able to be loved by God, made a decision. He decided to get rid of his Bible and his faith and to seek what he wanted desperately - peace - in another way. And the first way he tried was that of drugs.
We have not consciously taught Ryan to hate his sexuality. And since sexuality cannot be separated from being, we taught Ryan to hate himself. So he started using drugs, and did so in such an unbridled way and without precautions for his safety, to alarm all those who knew him.
Suddenly the fear that Ryan had a boy (a possibility that he honestly terrified me) seemed insignificant to me in the face of the fear of his death, especially taking into account his recent refusal of Christianity and his growing anger towards God.
Ryan started with marijuana and beer, but six months later he already used cocaine, crack and heroin. He had already been pulled inside from the beginning and the disgust of himself and anger towards God did nothing but feed his dependence. A little later we had no more contacts with him. For the following year and a half, we didn't know where it was, nor if it were alive or dead.
During that horrible period, God had our full attention. We stopped praying for Ryan to become heterosexual. Instead, we started praying that he felt that God loved him.
We stopped praying because he never had a boy. We started praying to get to know, one day or another, his boyfriend. We also stopped praying to make him return; We just wanted to well.
However, our son called us, after eighteen months of silence. God had completely changed our perspective. Since he had done terrible things while taking drugs, the first thing he told me was:
- Do you think you can forgive me? (I told him that I would certainly have. He would always be forgiven)
- Do you think you can love me again? (I told him that we would never stop doing it, not even for a second. We loved him more than we had never done it before)
- Do you think you can love me if I had a boy? (crying, I told him that we would also love him with 15 guys. We only wanted him again in our lives. We wanted to be with him ... and also with his boyfriend)
A new journey began, made up of wounds that remain, of mutual communication and grace. A lot of grace. And God was present at every step of our journey, guiding us, simply reminding us to love our son and leave the rest to him.
For the following ten months, we learned to really love our son. Day by day. Without "but". Without condition. Just because he breathed. We learned to love our son whoever loved.
And it was easy. The thing I was most sorry became a blessing. The path was not without mistakes, but those who respected and the words of excuse and forgiveness became a natural part of our living together.
Like our son he struggled against alcohol and drugs, we fought for him. God taught us how to love him, how to rejoice for and of him, how to be proud of the man he was becoming. We were all healing and, more importantly, Ryan began to think that if we could forgive him God could also have done it.
And then Ryan made the classic mistake of the toxic recovery: he returned with his usual old friends. And one evening, which should have been a simple evening at the cinema, it turned into the first relapse in ten months.
The first and last. Ryan died on July 16, 2009. And we lost the opportunity to love our gay son, because we no longer had a gay son. What we had hoped for, so we prayed - not to have a gay son - had come true. But not in the way we had imagined.
Ora, quando ripenso alla paura che dominava tutte le mie reazioni durante i sei anni dopo il coming out di Ryan, sono letteralmente imbarazzata dalla mia stupidità. Avevo paura delle cose sbagliate. E soffro, non solo per mio figlio maggiore, per gli errori che ho fatto.
Soffro per ciò che avrebbe potuto essere, avremmo potuto parlare con fiducia e non con paura. Ora, quando Rob e io passiamo una serata con i nostri amici gay, penso a quanto mi sarebbe piaciuto che Ryan e il suo compagno facessero un giro da noi per cena. Invece visitiamo la sua tomba.
Celebriamo gli anniversari: i compleanni che avrebbero potuto esserci, il giorno indimenticabile della sua morte. Indossiamo l’arancione: il suo colore. Teniamo ricordi: foto, vestiti che ha indossato, appunto, liste di cose che gli piacevano, le canzoni buffe che inventava, il suo pupazzo di Curious George, insomma, tutto ciò che ci ricorda il nostro splendido ragazzo, perché è tutto ciò che ci ha lasciato, e non ci saranno ricordi nuovi.
Siamo felici dei nostri figli grandi, e della famiglia che si allarga quando loro si sposano, ma soffriamo per quello della “gang dei quattro” che abbiamo perso.
Datiamo la nostra vita dai giorni “prima del coma” a quelli “dopo la morte”, ed è uno spartiacque, perché ora siamo persone differenti. La nostra vita è cambiata indelebilmente dopo la sua morte, e in un milione di modi. Facciamo tesoro delle amicizie con gli altri che “ci sono dentro”, perché anche loro hanno perso un figlio.
We cry. We ask the sky grace, forgiveness and redemption not to try to feel better, but to be better. And let's ask why God somehow use our story to help other parents really love their children. Just because they breathe.
Original text: Just Because He Breats: Learning to Truly love Our Gay Son
