Finding the Shore

You’re feeling nervous, aren’t you, boy? With your quiet voice and impeccable style. Don’t ever let them steal your joy and your gentle ways, to keep ’em from running wild.

Brandi Carlyle, The Joke

His life laid bare in shreds of paper. A letter to me, his mother, shattered by small shaking hands until they became pieces of his secret, stashed away in a shoebox. 

Tell you
Sorry
All my heart
Love

It made sense now. The torn pieces told me why his clear blue eyes filled with pain and sadness when a moment before they smiled. They told me why he hid at school with crippling anxiety, why failing no longer bothered him. 

My plans for housecleaning long forgotten, I painstakingly pieced together the bits of paper, watching the puzzle of words form sentences that brought me to my knees.

I want to
Letter to you
Secret
Over a year
I’ve known

If he’d been there in that moment of discovery, I would have immediately scooped him up and escaped to somewhere wild and free, somewhere unencumbered by humans. Except anywhere I took him, this life he struggled to accept would follow.

Growing up, my family regularly escaped to the wilderness a week at a time, our bright orange metal frame backpacks loaded with everything we needed to survive twice as long. I can’t say I was always thrilled with these excursions. Secretly I wished we could vacation in hotels like other kids I knew. One summer our family van broke down in a small Idaho town on the way to Glacier National Park and my dad crammed us all into a small room at a motel with a pool and HBO for one night. It was glorious!

After my parents divorced, I kept hiking with my dad. It was then, in my attempt to hold on to the comforts of my past, that I embraced the healing properties of wilderness. After my own divorce, I reached for it again with trail running. Any trail would do as long as I didn’t have to think about anything other than how tripping on a tree root and slamming into the ground still hurt less than what life was throwing at me.

Childish letters painstakingly formed into words, words to brave sentences. My hands shook as I arranged and rearranged the pieces.

scared
can’t tell you
reason I’m sad

I couldn’t take away the pain in his eyes or chase away the anxiety with a hug and ice cream. So, I did the only thing I could think to do. I took him back to the sanctuary of the forest.

When he was little, I’d tell him stories about the forest. How fallen trees become nurses for new plant life, why huckleberries only grow out of stumps, how glaciers deposited boulders larger than our car in the middle of the woods. When he’d had enough, he’d race down the trail ahead of me and come barreling back with a handful of forest presents – a large pinecone, colorful leaf or a heavy rock that he’d insist I carry in my pack. Once, while hunting for Morel mushrooms, he came back with a two-foot-long Elk femur bone.

We took off through the trees, side by side when the trail allowed. We inhaled damp, pine-infused air deep into our lungs and eventually his shoulders relaxed. In our favorite meadow we laid down in the grass, talking about life and losing ourselves in cloud shapes. This was my forest present now.

By the time we got back to the car he was gone, returning to an anxious world that wouldn’t let me in.

Shreds became words. Words became sentences.

Dear mom
Still your son
Transgender

It’s painful to listen to the other moms complain about endless carpools and social schedules. I’d give my anything to shuttle my child to a place where he felt accepted. Instead, he hid the pain of loneliness to keep from upsetting me. I hid my tears until I was alone.

He came back to me for five days that summer on a Salmon River rafting trip. We tackled the rapids with fearless abandon and no matter how tired I was, I never said no when he begged me to swim with him a half dozen times each day. At night, we pulled our sleeping pads out of the tent and struggled to stay awake long enough to watch a meteor shower. I struggled a little longer, just so I could watch sleep settle over his face like a peaceful blanket. It was so magical my heart hurt.

One morning we found a large bullfrog burrowed under our dry bags, seeking warmth in the sand.  I watched as my child gingerly cupped it in both hands and carried it to the safety of the water’s edge, then danced around the camp, overturning every piece of gear to rescue the dozens of bullfrogs that had sought warmth in the sand. My heart caught in my throat as I watched the most vulnerable creature I knew fervently rescuing the creatures around him. I wanted to scoop him up and carry him to safety, but I couldn’t find the shore.

I was doing my best to drag him over the finish line of freshman year when I read a three-sentence description for an LGBTQ Outward Bound trip, happening in less than a month. Inclusivity, teamwork, communication, self-esteem, wilderness – the words leaped off the screen and took hold of my heart.

I gave him the best sales pitch of my life. Then I badgered. I threatened. Finally, I bribed. It turns out bribery works with teenagers if the price is right.

I pulled my child out of school early and when I left the anxious teen at the airport with eight strangers and a handful of counselors, I was hugged so tight I could barely breathe. Clinging to me, all he could say was, “I’m scared and want to go home.”

Every day for 11 days I dreaded getting the call that he needed to be extracted from the program early.

The call never came.

It took me a moment to find him. Surrounded by eight teenagers, I could barely tell which of the laughing, talking and hugging kids was mine. None of them were ready to end the experience. None of them ready to say goodbye. The counselor stood with me, recounting how much he had opened up and faced his fears. How he learned to embrace the people, the wilderness and himself. The bonds created out on the Deschutes River, she said, were the strongest she’d ever seen. I fought back tears as my son was smothered in a group hug.

Like the bullfrogs, he had found his safe shore.