Lest I give the impression that my husband and I have it all figured out and it's always smooth sailing-we don't, and it isn't. Lately, my husband has been re-experiencing a sense of loss of our "son" JD, in spite of truly loving our daughter, DJ. It's gut-wrenching stuff. You truly miss that other child in spite of seeing remnants of that other child in the child before you.
My husband is a bulldog of a man. Not in stature but in make-up as a person. He is protective and often comes across as stern and bossy-but that is how he loves us. Vulnerability is NOT something you think of when dealing with him, yet this challenge has rendered him as vulnerable as a newborn baby. He is literally stripped raw of his defenses. He shares this with me, but certainly not with DJ. In fact, he continues to adore her and interacts with her in his playful way, much to his credit. Nonetheless, he has lost the son, JD and he misses him terribly. He keeps looking for signs of the lost son, and he's having a hard time remembering the lost son. Doesn't this sound like a death in the family has occurred? In a way, it has.
My approach is different. Quite by accident, I must state. I think of JD as DJ's twin brother who is away at school. The fact that there are so many similarities naturally makes sense in light of the fact that, in my mind, they are fraternal twins. Granted, I don't see JD at holidays, or any other time of the year anymore, and looking at pictures of JD as a little boy is hard, at times, but to me, JD isn't "dead" so much as just not living here anymore. It doesn't make much sense, but who says coping mechanisms have to make sense? Neither my husband's way nor mine is right or wrong, just a different path to the same destination: processing the change.
If you have more than one child, and one of them died, desperately missing the one that died does not mean that you love your living children less, or less than the child that is gone. So, in my mind, you are not doing a disservice to your trans-child in missing their other-gendered "self"-but that doesn't mean you have to share that with them, because they may misconstrue.
I made that mistake once in stating to my daughter how much I had loved her "twin" brother. I thought I was stating the obvious, that certainly I loved her, but I somehow managed to make her feel that JD was more special and more loved than DJ. Luckily, I was paying attention to her reaction. She explained her feelings and I reassured her we love DJ the same as JD, but that DJ certainly had more courage than we knew anyone was capable of.
It's worth thinking about-the courage your child had in being true to his/her self. I frankly can't imagine it. My own courage paled in comparison at first. I actually thought about and worried what other people would think of us as parents: what did we do "wrong" in raising this kid. I worried, selfishly, about the friends we would lose. Yup- my daughter had more of a backbone than both of her parents combined, at first. We just were good at giving the impression of being strong-at least at first. It's the real thing now, but it wasn't always. We grew into our backbones. You will too. As always, hang in there :)
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