Coming Out to Family

Last week, on April 13th, my wife and I dropped a number of letters off at the Post Office.  The letters were to family around the country telling them of my upcoming transition and the responses have been positive with the exception of a couple of lukewarm but no negative...so far.  Also yesterday, Sunday, I had lunch with my cousin.  He and I are less than three months apart in age, spent a lot of our childhood together and have always been very close.  After lunch we walked out to the parking lot where I got a couple of things I needed to give him out along with the letter and handed it to him.  My hands were shaking as I handed it to him and he started reading.  About halfway through the first page, he looked at me and said, "You know, this explains a lot of things when we were kids."  As he was reading the second page, he said, "Why didn't you do this years ago?" When he finished reading, he hugged me and said, "You've always been a part of my life and you always will be."  Needless to say that was a huge relief to me.  We stood around talking for quite a while and before long, we were laughing and joking like we always do.  I got a second hug and I love you before we headed out.

Lukewarm responses came from my wife's sister who is also dealing with a trans grandchild.  And, to be honest, I was very happy to get a lukewarm response from my brother as I figured I would get a "go away and never talk to me again" response from him.  However, my niece (his daughter) said they called her to come over and read the letter.  She said after she read it, it was, "Okay, so what's the big deal?" and she called me last night just to say she loves me!  We also got a lovely response from my wife's youngest brother but we haven't heard from her oldest (a minister) or middle brother.

Most worrisome, however, is we haven't heard from our son and I'm just hoping that he is taking his time to think about it as I asked.  Time will tell.

We have now heard from everyone.  I got very nice letters from both my wife's oldest brother and her middle brother, both addressed to Bev and saying how they were surprised but understanding.  My wife got an e-mail from our son saying we raised him right and from his work in theater he had been exposed to as lot of diversity.