I am a grandma of four grandchildren and among them, my eldest granddaughter was the most beautiful. You may say ” for grandmas all their grandkids are beautiful.” Sure . But listen. With her luxurious, lustrous hair and beautiful, delicate features on her smiling face she was a joy to the beholding eyes. What gave me most satisfaction, though, was her qualities. Academic excellence apart, her unusual kindness and concern for the underprivileged in society and her sincere efforts to solve their problems or help those in need using her leadership qualities or with whatever capacity she possesses were most exceptional.
I used to notice that Sweetie (this how I called her) during her teenage years was not showing any interest, like other teenage girls did, in dresses, jewelry, hair style, makeup and so on. And I also noticed with a little worry that she was becoming kind of quiet and sometimes some sort of sad expression came into her eyes.
One day my daughter called me and told me some thing that struck me like lightning. She told me that Sweetie had firmly decided to go for gender change. She said I believe, that for a long time she had been wanting to be a boy and now she no longer was able to keep silent about it. The shock of it hit me. I felt a tragedy befell in my life.
I ran up to the corner desk in my room where I have kept the picture of my God and cried before Him like a child. I begged Him humbly “Please dear God. Please make the child change her mind please.” The next moment I accused Him. “For all your injustice to me in the past I was silent with calm resignation. Now enough. Enough of your testing my patience. What harm did that innocent child do to you? Why do you do this to her? What have you in place of heart? Wood? O, such cruelty.”
God was not so cruel after all. He comforted me by giving me the realization that it is ridiculous to think that what happened was anything disgraceful or scandalous. It is the most natural biological change in the body sometimes and it is as natural as once in awhile birth of twins or triplets and so on.
Now I am not sad anymore. With my mind calm and tranquil I began to learn more about the topic of gender change and the very important points I learnt is: Never make the child feel that she or he did something wrong or shameful. Then the child will live through out with the burden of the guilty feeling. Secondly, never stop loving the child as before. This will make the child suffer low self-esteem throughout. And may even lead them to take tragic steps.
Oh my dear GOD. I never stopped loving my grandchild whatever happened. At this thought I felt a sudden desire to see my Sweetie and tell her that I never stopped loving her.
At the family reunion the next Thanksgiving time, I had a chance to have a heart to heart talk with my grandchild. (She had changed her name into a boy’s name by then but it did not matter to me at all).
She seemed very happy and full of life. It was quite a long time since I had seen her like that, I thought. She said she was experiencing some sort of inexplicable, profound relief inside her. Her eyes were not sad anymore. This was a sight that made me glad that I was alive to see.