There was once a young girl who had been born in the wrong body. She was assigned male at birth. She was our second-born. And her entire life was a struggle to define herself, who she was, what she wanted to do. The lows of this electrifying journey were as bad as the highs. She had already attended rehab for a gambling addiction in 2017-2018. We had been tormented by her running away, not knowing whether she was alive in the twenty-hour interim, when she had failed to contact us. She had also overdosed in January, 2019, when we thought we would lose her. In coma for a week, she ultimately emerged to join us in Thailand; a blessed beginning to a new life. Or was it perhaps just a false start to put off the inevitable for a while longer?
Over two years ago, I finally conceded that I must seek a therapist in order to emerge from the rabbit hole I was fast sliding into. I lucked out with someone great. She grasped the situation right off the bat and decided to work with me.
Setting the Scene
When it comes to therapy, we hesitate in my country. We think twice, perhaps thrice, before seeking professional help. The very word, ’therapy’ is heavily stigmatised. But it is nothing short of a miracle that I am sitting here and writing about my healing experience with a professional psychotherapist. Ironically, she came into my life thanks to the very person who kindled this urgent need to seek help, my second-born.
I placed the insides of my being on the table between her and me that year. It was also the year that I permitted myself to formulate the unimaginable, the unsaid. The process began with putting my feelings to words, out loud, in my head, until I was singed enough to cast out the unmitigated sorrow that was eating into my soul. It sounds easier than it is, and I’m not nearly done.
Here’s the one thing that I have understood: it’s not enough being a mother. And it is certainly not a smooth ride into the heavenly spheres where mothers inevitably find a spot reserved for them. I was nothing if not a mother, especially to my second-born, who was errant from the word go. I choose to wear the mantle of motherhood like an epigraph emblazoned on my skin, reflecting boldly in the mirror. But I am also more.
The Child
At the time a boy, (today a trans-girl), s/he only ever wanted to “chat about stuff,” or to bake through the night, and I would be right there, watching, aiding and abetting the process of their madness. S/he wrote reams of papers to a girl in her/his class, on her birthday, telling her what a wonderful person she was, when s/he had just joined the new school. S/he took off on the bicycle in the middle of the night and rode to the airport (35 odd kms from our home). S/he chatted about these incidents with pride and a sense of grandiosity that confounded reason. If s/he wanted to do something, s/he made sure she did it. I recall with horror how she had walked to school once, a 25 km trek, after missing the bus. There was very little that one could do apart from listening to her/him rant on about what an achiever s/he was, and how easily s/he could fool people, especially us. And s/he would constantly boast about this to us, the very people s/he thought s/he could fool.
As a mother, I was frightened for the child. She constantly put her/himself in harm’s way. Who was s/he? And why did s/he constantly need to challenge authority, especially ours? The gleam in his/her eye when s/he watched us gasp seemed unhealthy and made me question myself. Was I imagining it? As a mother, I could not doubt my child, or doubt myself in the understanding of my child. I always believed what s/he said, whereas a lot of what s/he said was his/her projection of an event, and they were outrageous claims to elicit some sort of reaction from this naïve mother.
Therapy helped me acknowledge parts of myself that lay concealed, under the tremulous fear of losing my vagrant child unless I was constantly vigilant. It was depleting, morally and physically.
Sibling Love
My firstborn, my caring elder daughter, turned into my confidant quite early on. She barely ever caused us any worry. She climbed the regular and steady ladder to academic success. She wanted to become a scientist. But she kept looking over her shoulders to watch over us, her parents. When she found us in complete and utter disagreement, arguing endlessly about the whys and wherefores of her sibling’s behaviour, she diffused the situation by rationally explaining both sides of the said situation, never belittling either. Going on a walk, or composing a piece of music with her sister, so that we got all the time that we needed to find a way out of our confusion. We were often conflicted about what was and what might be. I was unable to see the manipulation, whereas both the father and the elder sister saw it. My elder daughter didn’t call it out because she was scared of being told that she was imagining it and was being over-reactive.
Instead, she held out her arms to embrace us as we stumbled and fell repeatedly. Sometimes she hurtled down with us, hauling us back up, steadying the ladder and herself, in the process. When the younger one confided in her about certain unacceptable events, the elder was conflicted. On the one hand she needed us to know, but she also didn’t want to break her word to her sister, on the other. When it got out of hand (as it often did), she took us into confidence and then, mayhem broke out. The elder was cornered either way. She endured a lot but in silence.
Recent conversations have revealed how affected she was, and how much of her life was about standing back, in order to allow us the time to move from one painful incident to another. She did not want to draw undue attention to herself. She carried the mantle of the stable one in the family, never failing to achieve what she set out to do.
So when she moved away to attend college, she received some respite from it all; from keeping vigil for both her parents and her younger sibling. She could begin to lead a life for herself, but she was scarred already.
And later, she moved farther away for her post-graduate degree. Gradually, as she moved into adulthood, she was able to see our lives from a distance, which allowed her a modicum of peace from this crazy family of ours, from this life she had been leading, one that was dominated by her younger sibling’s moods and general attention-seeking behaviour.
Leaving Familiar Terrain to Start Afresh
We moved to Thailand in 2019 with our second-born, our now transgender daughter. We were excited to be travelling to a land which openly encouraged *Ladyboys to roam around at ease. We had heard of many Indian transgenders travelling to Thailand for their reassignment surgery. We were going to live here and help her through the transition. How fortuitous! The signs were all positive. It would be a new beginning.
But our twenty-two-year-old wasn’t ready to settle down and transition smoothly. Oh no, far from it!
The only way she could stay with us in this land was after acquisition of an education visa. She was already twenty-two by this time, so she was an adult, not a dependent child. We wanted her with us. We wanted her to receive our care and love and find a way forward to heal together.
With a major payout, we found a private university which would take her. So, with an education visa under her belt, our little one could live with us, and complete her undergrad studies. I held her jubilantly and announced, “Now no one can take you from us!”
We celebrated this event with gusto. It had not been an easy road.
A suitable course having been chosen, we equipped her with a “female” uniform, books, lunchboxes—the works.
She started attending University in July 2019.
Mid-September 2019, and the first term exams arrived all too soon.
One warm September afternoon, our house-help discovered our daughter roaming the main Sukhumvit road in the middle of the day, and whispered this to me, alerting our parental antennae. On being questioned, she informed us that she would not appear for any exam because she was required to don a “male” uniform. She refused point-blank. So, she had not attended most of the sessions. What had she been doing?
She had been going to student dorms, smoking up and looking for sexual escapades. We were dumbfounded!
What did she want to do going ahead? What more could we possibly do to help her? I could hear the casing of my brittle heart crumbling.
Fear churned and curdled within me. If she didn’t attend university, the Ed-Visa would be cancelled, and she would be ‘deported’. The thought of being separated from this child who needed constant care was like a monstrous tornado. It would destroy what we had been building. Being able to see her and look after her in every possible way was my raison-d’être.
Even as routine tasks such as caring for our home, conducting French classes online, attending Thai language classes and writing stories kept me grounded, my younger child was never far from my thoughts. She was never distant from this mother’s heart. I seemed to be addicted to caring for her.
Yes, a new life was unfolding rapidly, but its script transcended any imaginative spark we might have been gifted with.
November 2019—A Start to an End
I needed to survive in the face of this terror, this uncertainty. This is where therapy arose as a tool that was imperative for my survival. Our child had herself always gone to therapy, and it had intensified during the hormonal intake period. It was intended to help ease her transition. Soon, our second-born, a son, would be fully transformed into our daughter once the reassignment surgery was performed. Two daughters, how wonderful, we had thought.
But now, the unthinkable was happening: soon after all of this, she stopped attending university. So, we were forced to send her back to India, which she said she was delighted about. She wanted freedom, and a life where she wasn’t answerable to anyone. She would work and earn her keep. We would see her settle by aiding her financially for the first five months.
She moved back to India in the end of October 2019. And another year of terror began. That’s another difficult story.
I crashed and I burnt. Unable to cull any meaning from a routine which seemed pointless, I turned into a zombie, acting out my daily chores. My life-support system had come undone. The core reeked with the stench of failure. When our younger one had gambled, it was money she stole, a loss that could be made up. We paid back some of the money she had borrowed from money-lending sharks, to assuage our own pain. She had lied repeatedly. It was an endless cycle of wondering whether what she did matched what she said to us. But I never lost faith that she would stabilize once she could be convinced that the reassignment surgery was visible down the road. I was wrong.
Even after having lain in a coma, she was back with a bang; conniving and employing calculated moves to outwit me from a distance, but never her father, for fear of being caught out! Her addictive personality that consistently sought pleasure and instant gratification, had gotten worse. I did not know it then. I continued to rely on the power of a mother’s love. If I supported her and gave her what she needed (not wanted) she would settle down like most of us do. She even appeared to for a while.
Every time the kid was caught lying or stealing, she came clean. She would apologise profusely and look me in the eye and tell me only I could help her move away from such errant behaviour. It was heart-wrenching and I fell for her pleas – hook, line and sinker. She had indulged in self-harm and shown (only) me the cuts. She had over-dosed earlier with her psychiatric meds, and we’d run hither and thither. But we don’t really know if all of that actually happened, because we always reacted quickly in order to “help her” and we never ended up asking her what happened. There are too many incidents that cannot all be enumerated. The nightmare of sudden surprises that caught me in the gut, they continued for a long time. They were meant to cut me.
It had been manipulation all the way, which I only learnt about much later while undergoing therapy. Is this motherhood, or is it a deep-seated desire to believe that after all, one’s kid is one’s kid, and they can’t be so far removed from the values one has instilled in them? After all, the elder one had adhered to them, hadn’t she? The younger one would surely come around too, right? But that’s not quite how it works, and I have learnt this the hard way. I admit to it today.
In Bangkok, I had ticked the two basic boxes: my child was well within my reach, and she was fruitfully occupied at university. Naïve? Hell yeah! I didn’t want to believe that a child would put herself in harm’s way just for momentary pleasures. It did not add up. What were we doing wrong? Then I realized our little one could not love us back. She didn’t know how. She swung off an ill-balanced pendulum, her impulses misguiding her. Her IQ had been tested at a much younger age, and found to be rather high. Was this the underlying cause of such great imbalance in her nature? Was this why humanity suffered, as a species?
Somewhere along the line, the father chose my way, and from then on, he just lay low. He would wait and see if the power of this mother’s intense faith in the foundational goodness of her child could actually effect transformations in the child’s troubled life.
Therapy-Time
As I broke down, and lost faith in myself, I began to see how I must express myself in words, not just in hapless tears, and voiceless grief. The father shut out the child and nurtured a deep-seated anger towards her. It was a form of pain. We shut each other out. We couldn’t bear to talk about our unnamable child. Our elder daughter suffered greatly, both as a sister who had been her sibling’s friend and confidant, and as a daughter watching her parents come apart at the seams. There was confusion, followed by tears, followed by anger.
I am compelled by a force beyond myself, to share the bludgeoning experience of an addiction which might not be as uncommon as one might believe; that of a mother’s need to care for her child.
I had heard that a good therapist and perhaps even medication could help me. I reached out to the therapist who had helped our child since she knew her well. I met with the woman. She was empathetic, but I still wasn’t convinced that she would be able to gauge the enormity of our loss and actually be able to mend this broken mother’s heart and convince her to stay alive.
But somehow, I persisted. I had nothing more to lose. And in the third session I saw some light. She called it out – she said that she had also tried to help the child and given her certain tasks. The kid had done none of them. These tasks would have helped in checking the impulsiveness of the child, who was on medication in any case. In fact, the child did not want to get better, nor was she willing to render our lives any easier. She thrived on shocking her parents, hurting them repeatedly. Manipulation hand-in-glove with brilliance beyond my mind’s grasp, that was what was in play constantly. Because I could not conceive of such an attitude for myself, I did not buy into it when I was the victim of it.
Therapy blunted the sharpness of my hurt. It helped me overcome the severity of the impact, the years of acute unease and distress. It takes time. Awareness has been activated and one must be patient with oneself.
The Time Factor
Let’s talk about how therapy saved my rowboat from capsizing.
As I lay battered, the universe responded.
Every session with the therapist helped clear. the fog a little bit and the inflamed and frail deck of my being received light and healing, bit by bit.
As we progressed, I came up for more and more air, till my lungs began to breathe on their own.
Some key features that helped me on the path of recovery:
I found myself in a safe space (the body language and eye contact with the therapist established this soon enough);
“How do you feel now, after you’ve purged yourself?” with a warm smile and a box of tissues at hand. It lent succour to my being.
She listened. I talked more than her. She waited till I was done weeping, nudged me along to express; some of the questions she asked to egg me along: “What do you think she wanted when she told you “the truth”? You say she always apologized, “Sorry Ma, I didn’t mean to hurt you.” So, think back to when she apologized, at what point?”
I said, “Yes, she knew exactly the moment when I would be exhausted and thereby at my most pliant. She always caught me at a weak moment,”
I never felt attacked or judged for feeling the way I did when I talked to my therapist. I never shied away from saying what I felt. She told me that I had done nothing wrong.
That every time my child needed me, as I saw it, my protective instincts kicked in. That it wasn’t my fault that she was the way she was. If I needed proof, I had to just look at my other, wiser daughter. I had raised them both.
The therapist recycled my own words, re-presenting them visually to me, saying, “Reach within, and go to the source of your anxiety. Where does this acute anxiety stem from, again and again?” My response would be the usual. “That she’ll die, or be raped, or …I don’t know. I am in constant fear of losing her. I need her to be well.” “You cannot hold yourself responsible for your child’s behavior. She’s an adult, and chooses to be who she is,” was her wise response.
I expressed needs and desires I didn’t know I harboured. For instance, “Yes, I’d like to be able to holiday without her, to be able to live a day without wondering what she’s up to, and if she’s safe. But I’m unable to let go. To not think of her.” She helped me seek out my own solutions, and thereby gain self-confidence; “Why was this bond so vital to my well-being, I asked myself. How did I visualize it?”
Self-doubt was wrested out of me with gentle prodding over the length of a year. One of the biggest outcomes of this yearlong bout of therapy was being able to grasp my husband’s reaction to our child’s conduct. It was imperative to our continued partnership. Watching me in the state I was made him angrier and more volatile. Whereas I only wanted him to weep with me. The therapist was able to make me empathize with his violent reaction. We learnt to respect the differences in our grieving practices, and thereby arose a deeper understanding of essential disparities. The shattering life experience, parenting, unearthed both tangible and intangible reactions.
The therapist gently led me out of the dungeons of despair. I flung out the raw pain as it was: ugly, contorted, slimy, filthy, violent, threatening—all of it. In life, I carried on functioning as a perfectly capable and normal human being, my tormented insides bleeding, but no one could tell. That’s how it is with depression. Was I in denial because I deemed my child to be a reflection of me and my faulty parenting? No. It was because I thought kindness and compassion are one sure-shot way of making her see how much easier it could be, only if she made an effort. Therapy helped me see that kindness is a multi-faceted thing.
As I would sit at dusk, and it’s the trickiest time of the day for me, recalling some happy moments in time with my children together on holiday in Bhutan, for example, certain moments of despair arose. But they were accompanied by a gradual understanding of my child’s behavioral compulsions. Being able to see her more clearly helped me feel less torn about my own instincts and feelings. Every time I thought of her, I was able to separate the wheat from the chaff clearly—the impulsivity from the manipulation, the apparent goodness from the need for attention at any cost. That helped me heal. What also dawned on me was an acceptance that I did not create her in this form, to become this person—that I did my best to instill in her the values I hold dear, along with a healthy family life. This thought still gives me relief, it provides me the impetus to keep living a good life, even if it is without her. To be tormented thus, and in constant fear, are the unhealthiest forms of maternal love and many still engage in it. I spent time with other parents at the rehab and learnt that I wasn’t alone. Scores of parents are subject to manipulation in varying degrees. Kids always know the weaker parent’s pulse.
I recovered. I healed.
Why Professional Help?
I cannot emphasize the importance of talking to someone other than your friends, your spouse and especially your other child/ren. It’s a heavy burden for a child to carry, and an unfair one at that.
On the therapy boat, I was handed an oar, while my therapist rowed with the other. At a point in time, I discovered that I was more capable of rowing my own boat, than I gave myself credit for. It took all of eight months of regular meetings before I became conscious of my own power.
One must follow and practice the tools she hands over, otherwise once you stop seeing your therapist, it is easy to fall back into old patterns, i.e.: anxiety and depression.
She helped me own the power to heal myself.
Make notes. I still read my jottings, and they continue to guide me.
If sought out on time, the therapist can arrest the tainting effects of a life-altering experience upon your psyche; you learn and move ahead with a newfound self-confidence, that you have the power to heal, and believe you me, you always do.
*Ladyboy: Ladyboy is the (not so literal) English translation for Kathoey. It is a Thai term that is very close to being the equivalent of a transgender woman.