As I was looking for something to write about, I came across this article, “Just Because He Breathes: Learning to Truly Love our Gay Son” by Linda Robertson. It’s worth reading.
Rejected
The long and short of it is that when her son came out, while she continued to love him and openly expressed that love, because of her religious beliefs she said things to him like, “…since you want to follow God, embracing your sexuality is not an option.”
In reading her story, she didn’t reject him, she rejected who he was, who he was born to be – a gay man. Rejection comes in many forms but it attacks the soul no matter how it is delivered, even with love. It teaches that young person that he or she is not okay, that there is something fundamentally wrong with them that they have to fix.
According to a study published in the Journal of Pediatrics, those who reported that they’d experienced high levels of family rejection as adolescents were 8.4 times more likely to say they’d attempted suicide, 5.9 times more likely to say they’d suffered depression, and 3.4 times more likely to say they’d used illegal drugs.
Her story teaches us a valuable lesson. Acceptance must be unconditional. We love our children and that love must also be unconditional, no matter what.
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