Chris and Me

It is the second day of a new year and I sit here with tears streaming down my face.  I am remembering how the past year was for me and my family and I feel blessed to have survived so much of it.  You think you have control over your life until that day when your life takes control of you.  We all try our best to plan and predict what will happen, but sometimes we are our worst enemies because we lose focus.  I pride myself on my ability to control my life, and yet, in 2015 I lost control and found myself almost losing things and some of the people that I love the most.

I lost faith in people in 2015, in many ways.  And people lost faith in me.  I'm not sure that has all been repaired yet, but I forgave a lot and I was forgiven a lot and because of that we are mending our lives together.  I never meant to hurt Chris with the sadness and fear that controlled my life for so many months of last year, but now that I am able to look back on all of it, I realize I had to go through those months to get where I am now.  I also realize the chain of love that lives in our family; of how it was Chris's twin, Courtney, my daughter, who kept the bond between Chris and I from breaking.  Because of Courtney's commitment and love for her twin - because she was and is Chris's greatest friend and advocate - because she was and is willing to lay herself down for Chris, she showed me how to do it, with grace and compassion and truths and hope and faith and trust and love. There were times when Courtney scolded me.  There were times when we fought vehemently.  There were times she said things that pushed me further away, but then came back to reign me in.  She knew, as I know now, that Chris needed me - not just as his mother, but as an advocate, as well.

When this all started with Chris after Christmas last year, I was consumed with so much sadness and anger and filled with so much resistance.   It took me a long time to where I could call him Chris - refer to him with male pronouns.  I swore I would never be able to do either.  I swore we'd never help in his transition by way of paying for any surgeries.  I swore I'd never be able to let Chloe go and call Chris my son.  I swore a lot of things, as did my husband.

But ... here we are, on the second day of the new year - almost exactly a year later from those days when I was blinded by hopes and dreams I held for a little girl I thought was being stolen from me. Chris said once in a video he taped this past year that he spent a lot of years protecting Chloe, but the day came when he realized that it was Chloe who was protecting him.  I guess you have to be living this kind of trauma and pretense to truly understand how hard it is and then how hard it is to come out from under it.  I still struggle with wondering how and why it all happened, but I understand more of it now.  Mostly because I see how happy Chris is and that has made a lot of difference, as he spent many years in a darkness I really knew nothing about, but saw manifested in depression and self-hate.

Chloe wasn't stolen from me.  I still have her in my memories and in my heart.  I remember everything about her.  I loved her for so many years and I am so fortunate to have known her and had her in my life.  Now I see and know that she was and is so much of Chris's strength - that person who led him to the point where he found his truth and then he laid down her life so he could be who he was meant to be without her.  Even though she is no longer who we see, she is inside of Chris and inside of me.

I am finally there, I think.  That point where I am completely prepared to know who Chris is besides Chloe.  I never thought I'd be here, honestly.  I guess after you cry the tears and mourn for long enough you begin to see that you can survive your own sadness if it means ensuring another's happiness.  I knew I did not want to live my life without Chris and to have him in my life I had to embrace who he was meant to be and not who I thought he was meant to be.

You can control some things in your life.  Chris is proof of that.  I am, too, I guess, as I consciously made the choice along the way to remove focus from Chloe and me ... to Chris and me, and that has made all the difference ...