I came out to my mom when I was 23.
I showed her a picture of a girl I was dating who could pass off as a male at times. She exclaimed “He’s short, but pretty good looking,” and jokingly, I replied “She’s cute, right?” Her eyes grew wide, and I could almost hear her heart rate as it skyrocketed.
“She? Leave this house, and never come back.”
She locked herself in her bedroom shortly after throwing up from the sheer disgust of it. She thrust her body in the corner of her room and cried, thinking that she had failed as a mother.
I then agreed to an unfair promise I’d since broken, knowing that she would take back the words that meant to cast me out of the house if I did.
Since then, every time I spend an extended period of time with her, she’d bring up my sexuality — how I should keep it secret and tell no one; how her sister and mother would judge her as a failure; how it was a sickness; how I should find a man that would accept and love me despite this; how she tried to accept me as I am but couldn’t; how she would be rejected from her friends and support system if anyone in her local Korean community knew she had a queer daughter.
I don’t allow her to deny who I am, though I don’t confirm nor deny anything when she asks me questions that I know she wouldn’t want to know the answers to. Each time she talks to me about this, I come out, over and over. This is who I am.
She hasn’t told me that she loves me in a while. And, that’s okay. I know she does when she calls to check in on me or packs food for me to take home when I visit, or when she tells me to come home to keep her company.
There’s been progress in being able to talk about this with her, and I think she’s slowly coming around.
— Ellie S