Ex-Mother’s Day
Ex-Mother’s Day
CW
mentions of suicidal ideation, transphobia, transphobic pathologisation, verbal and emotional abuse
A quiet scene in Belgium
I’ve just quietly locked myself in a single-use bathroom in a private beauty clinic, and I let myself weep for almost ten minutes. The plain wooden panel door, set flush and almost invisible in the sleek walls of this clean, modern establishment, is well suited to my purposes: I wish to be completely unobservable. I am here on my own, and don’t feel comfortable telling the clinicians or other patients why I’m sobbing into hastily grabbed wads of 2-ply. No, it wasn’t the pain of a day-long facial electrolysis session (or that a quarter of my face was numb from the injected anaesthetics). No, I was crying because of someone’s kindness.
Picture this: as I was taking a much needed lunch break from having electrified needles poked into my face, a smart-dressed lady in her 50s or 60s offered and served me food in the clinic’s kitchen. We’d never met before, but I learned from her that she was a regular at the clinic, initially as patient and now more often as commiserator and shoulder to all the dolls recovering from surgery or painful cosmetic treatments. She leaned against the end of the kitchen work surface near the far side of the table, with a stance of self-assured, kindly feminine grace that I instantly admired, and brought soup to me and a Scouse girl sat opposite. I don’t believe she properly sat down at any point, as much as I invited her to: she was so poised to leap to get seconds, do the washing up, to bossily wave us down to sit, or be useful in some small but crucial way to a bunch of women numbed with painkillers and desperate to avoid any reflective surface. When girls with swollen, post-surgical faces and partly mummified heads walked through the kitchen area to get something, she greeted them warmly, and seemed to pivot effortlessly between the needs of different dolls, be they for reassurance or refreshment. I was initially bemused by the over-enthusiastic generosity delivered so fussily and with great, resolute insistence. Yet as I was wiping my mouth, trying to put my finger on the vibe created, the word suddenly came into my mind: motherly.
I excused myself, gently pushed my chair back out and the first wave of tears back in, and made for the aforementioned bathroom. The last time someone had shown me that specific flavor of affection had been before coming out. The person who Fate had ordained to give me that love had willfully abused and abandoned her post, if she ever understood the weight of its responsibility. In response, I cut her off, and have felt like an emotional amputee since. Ironically, while I came there to numb my face, this incident scratched nerves I had thought - I had hoped - had died by then. If you’ve ever had to hide and nurse the absence of something unique and irreplaceable, you may have also tried pretending the severed part wasn’t there, and when you’re confronted with it by the slightest glimmer of hope, it throbs painfully until you’re breathlessly sobbing into tissues and playing catch-up with the many unprocessed bills of agonies small and large.
Of course, it wasn’t just this woman’s kindness, but her position: she was a trans woman, and one who had actually lived through a significant part of the 20th century. In case you’re unaware, most trans people don’t get to meet their elders often, if at all: most of them are either in hiding or have died from suicide, murder or AIDS. This elder had gone through most, if not all, of the treatments we were doing, heck, she even scared us like little girls when she mentioned she’d started electrolysis before the modern local anaesthetic was introduced (for the record, I’ve tried this path and it’s barely tolerable with numbing cream around the jawline, but I was left crying and panting after a single damn hair on my upper lip). So to me, this moment came as an almost angelic revelation - to be given an ounce of pure maternal affection from the average person is already such a gift, but to receive it from one who even partially understands you, your specific pains and what you are going through to make yourself fit the uneasy crux between your mind, your body and your society, is simply not worth dreaming of for how remote it is. Yet when I was presented with the tiniest, most minute breadcrumb of this affection, I collapsed, confronted again with the reality of my own broken heart.
Not to be hyperbolic, but if you wanted to remind the damned that they are indeed in Hell, nothing works better than offering them the most furtive glimpse of Heaven.
What I’d (actually) lost
Now, I didn’t even want a mother who would be that understanding of me as a person (I doubt most cis people have that, and certainly what I’ve witnessed confirms that parental understanding is often poor regardless of your background). I just wanted a mother who hadn’t thrown the words “weirdo” and “monstrosity” at me over a phone call during lockdown while I tried to make myself and my transition understood. I wanted a mom who didn’t react aggressively and grab my tit in horror when she realised I was on HRT1, and who didn’t tell me, repeatedly, that every “real” woman who sees me on the street is terrified, repulsed and rightfully so. I wanted a mom who didn’t emotionally abuse me, who didn’t believe that my journey to understand myself and my gender was a sexual perversion2. I wanted a mother who didn’t tell me that the “only real cure” to gender dysphoria was to “fight it!” and to repress my feelings deep down inside. I wanted a mother who didn’t conflate me wearing a dress with being a transvestite, and who kept trying to “reassure” me that “well there’s a lovely chap who works at our train station who goes out on the town every Friday night dressed like that, and it’s fine because he’s normal in the daytime and if you wanted obviously you could keep your sexual inclinations confined to the bedroom and that would be fine!”. I wanted a mother who didn’t tell me that when I was walking the street dressed as a woman I was literally causing offense to strangers. I wanted a mom who didn’t react to news of me getting a new job or higher salary with a smug, self-assured look and a snide “well, good thing that they were too woke or careless to notice your obvious mental illness”3. I wanted a mom who didn’t think that gender affirming surgery was bodily mutilation and didn’t weep crocodile tears in an attempt to get me to see the (self-made) tragedy of her position.4
Frankly, I could have just done with less emotional and verbal abuse: understanding and empathy seemed like intangible premium services above my emotional pay grade. But it would have been nice to not be driven to suicidal ideation - please note that I am fine now, especially after cutting her off. The fact that lack of parental support is one of the most commonly cited causes of suicide and self-harm among queer youth never fails to both validate and terrify me (The Trevor Project, 2025). I’m ultimately lucky that the critical support came from other people, the vast majority of it from people who are not related to me. For a period of time I regretted not coming out earlier, say as a teenager, and started living my life authentically and having more time to explain myself, until I remembered that I would have had to do that while living under her roof. In all probability, I would have become another statistic.
I hadn’t intended to write about mothers and motherhood until I came across this quote from Shone Faye’s most excellent new book Love in Exile5, where she touches on how her mother had accepted the fact of her transition:
So, too, do we learn who our parents truly are when we come out. I learned that I could finally trust that [my mother’s] love is not contingent on anything: it is, as it has always been, freely given. (Faye, 2025, p86)
I wrote “ouch” right next to this paragraph, and took a reading break to stare at a wall. I do try to be happy for queer people who found their biological families accepting of them, I really do. But I cannot help the painful knot in my throat when I read about Mama Bears and the fact that there are women out there willing to publicly declare their love for their queer child and all others, when my ex-mom has openly called me “mentally ill”. It’s tempting to throw down against life and yell “why not me?” and remember all the times you were promised some vision of the “freely given” love and care. What is more painful is that, pre-transition, my ex-mother had displayed most if not all of the virtues of motherly care and love people aspire to, from my early upbringing all the way to my early 20s. I received all this and probably more affection than is strictly healthy - I was, as a child, for want of a much better word, a right “mama’s boy”. This always tempts me to go down the treacherously dark and agonising avenue marked “What If?”, but that is too painful to even write about. She has also openly stated that she identified as a TERF, and flooded mine and my brother’s inboxes with Daily Mail and Unherd articles during bouts of culture war obsessions. Naturally, it took me a long time to get ready to come out to her, but I hoped, that I wouldn’t lose her love. Yet I didn’t lose that love, no, I just realised how hollow it was. Unlike in Shone’s case, my ex-mother’s love was very much conditional. This was cemented in my mind when, on two occasions, with my brother being witness to one, she revealed that it would have been easier to love me if I was completely passed as a cis woman (i.e. be “stealth”) and never revealed my trans status to anyone. It shamed her that much that her child should be “one of them”6.
“Ex-Mother”
So, why do I use the term “ex-mother”? I always get baffled looks for this, and my rehearsed, short answer goes something like:
“Because she failed me as a parent and I decided to deliberately cut ties with her and signal this fact to the world with that label.” (me, many exhausting times, 2021-)
While this captures the essence and often ends the conversation, it doesn’t explain why I’ve chosen it over just telling people that I’m estranged from her, like so many people I know do. But to me, “mother” is not some eternal, sacrosanct entity, a limelit pigeonhole to be occupied by those who can brave the lifelong shackles of maternal duty and honour. It is a social role that you can adopt, and that can be abandoned or taken away from you. It is certainly not something you are given once you’ve grown a life inside you - for a start, I consider adoptive mothers to be equally authentically mothers in every regard to their non-adoptive counterparts. I am aware, as Faye writes in the same chapter on motherhood, that mothers, in the UK and elsewhere, are trapped between a rock and a hard place, their body, mind and soul torn apart by competing expectations of feminine perfection in a world determined to give them very little time, space and resources to work with. I am not trying to add expectations to an already overburdened role. I merely wish to point out that, to me, it is a social role, not an inherently biological one. “Mother” might mean gestational parent to a large part of the world, but what about the non-blood relative who devotes herself utterly to care for the adoptive child who was abandoned, given up, or whose gestational parent simply died? She who takes on the mantle, who chooses to push the boulder up the cruel, remorseless hill, is worthy of being called “mother”. To be a mother is to choose to love your children unconditionally. As for love, I will come back soon to that four letter word.
Defining the person who birthed and raised me as my “ex-mother” serves multiple purposes. It is a small form of activism on its own: reminding the world that mothers are not eternal, your children do not owe you anything, and you can be dishonorably discharged from your post like a deserting soldier, a general stripped of her stripes. It serves to combat the tendrils of the patriarchal Romanian society I put behind me, which places such a high value on “[biological] family before all else”, with a strong dose of “listen to your elders [even if they do not have your best interests at heart]”. It serves to undermine the status quo bias entrenched among my other biological family members, whose placid sentences have been handed handed down like benign judgments from shoulder-shrugging bystanders:
“You must mend things with her, this situation is intolerable” (ok, I’m sorry my struggle against a carer turned abuser has made Christmas planning more awkward)
“I’m sure everyone has a side in this” (yes, on one side a person trying to live her own best life, and on the other a person desperate to exert control over that separate individual’s life, I’m well familiar)
“You’ll see in time how things will change … especially when you have your own kids!” (this argument always baffled me the most, as if bad parenting excuses and begets further bad parenting. It certainly puts me off having my own children, if this is the best I can look forward to)
“She’s just concerned and worried about you” (concerned enough to push me to ideation, sure)
And lastly, the most perniciously well-intentioned, under-examined Trojan horse of a truism:
- “Y’know, she really does love you.”
That word again.
To me, “love” is a four letter word that covers all manners of sins.7
Many seem to think that affirming the word affirms its reality in the world: I say “I love you” and therefore I do! If we imagine an abuser saying this the morning after he unleashes hell on his victimized partner, can we really say that it’s the reality? That is an extreme example, yet more mundane ones abound, from the mediocre, one-sided romantic relationships to the friendships that fizzle when a more opportunistic partner has extracted everything they wanted: again, in each case, it was very easy to invoke the spell of the four letter word. Sure, the word is not vacuous, it is merely rendered so when it is utterly and repeatedly unmatched by reality. When I consider love and its meaning, I turn gladly to this passage from the noted feminist author bell hooks:
“Ever since I started writing about love, I have defined it in a way that blends M. Scott Peck’s notion of love as the will to nurture one’s own and another’s spiritual and emotional growth, with Eric Fromm’s insight that love is action and not solely feeling” (hooks, 2004, p65, emphasis mine)
So, who will be mother, if not me?
On Mother’s Day 2025, a friend who is estranged from her mother invited me and our mutual bestie to get breakfast together and quietly, informally celebrate the fact that we were all mothering ourselves. It was nothing fancy, but we went around the table and asked each other, all grown, adult women in their late 20s/early 30s, what our needs currently were and what we were doing to mother ourselves.
Taking “mother” as a verb does wonders for the soul. It reminds you that much of the affection and care you need can be given by other people, most notably yourself. One thing that my ex-mother’s generation never even considered was the love you have to show yourself - she herself was the kind of person to throw herself wholly into the fires of vocational and maternal demands, sacrificing all of her personhood to satisfy the immense expectations placed on her from a young age, ranging from academic success to raising perfect, clean, healthy, well-educated children. Her own mother, who we buried very recently, was probably much the same, except that she sacrificed career and intellectual pursuits entirely for the sake of her family and her husband’s career. The generational trauma runs deep.
A good friend of mine gave me the single best mental trick when making choices. When you are faced with a tough decision, imagine if your closest friend was facing that decision instead: what would you advise them to do? Ultimately, the more abstract form of this exercise is to
“treat yourself like you would treat your best friend”,
and I’ve tried to live up to that maxim. There is a natural extension of this when it comes to motherhood and self-love:
Raise yourself as if you were your own mother (or parent / father).
This pillar of my life has become more and more important, because I frequently ask myself its corollary every time I’m suddenly too hard or too soft on myself: “what would I say to my own children?”. Returning to my ex-mother briefly, and questioning her behaviour towards me, I flipped this again and asked myself: “would I accept this treatment for my own children?”. Queer people whose families did not accept them wholeheartedly often have to construct their new, authentic identities from the ground-up with very little parental guidance, and in that sense, a lot of us in the alphabet mafia are self-parenting, in ways large and small. You’re trying to raise yourself into a person, and treating yourself as if you were your own child reminds you of how much love and care you actually deserve.
I can’t deny my grieving over the mother-daughter relationship I never got to actually have, but I also have to advance through life and pull it together emotionally. Nothing will ever replace that source of love, even though I have lovers, close friends, and tightly-knit communities. But, what I often do, in those moments where I wish someone would walk in and mother me, is to say to myself:
“I am my own mother.”
This doesn’t take away all the pain, but it gives me enough impetus to pull through. It reminds me that anyone can mother; that you can genuinely care about the successes and obstacles in your life without any hidden, prior intentions. It reminds me that you can say “I love you” to yourself in the mirror, and actually mean it.
References
Footnotes
To be fair, this happened after I started cutting ties with her. Unfortunately, while attending a cousin’s wedding and spending an evening looking after elderly grandparents in boymode, we crossed paths and she decided it was a good time to hug me as if nothing had ever happened.↩︎
Yes, my ex-mother did indeed read pseudo science from Blanchard and called me an “autogynephile”. If you don’t know what that means, I do not recommend looking it up, but I do hope to write about it in a piece on gender science in the near future.↩︎
I swear to god, in the extremely unlikely event that I ever won a Nobel Prize, my ex-mother would probably say something to the tune of “Well done, but I’m amazed they give it out to crazy people”↩︎
This paragraph could have been far longer. Every single thing I’ve mentioned has happened to me, and more.↩︎
I cannot overstate how much I adored this book, and although I use this quote in stark contrast to my own experiences, I have nothing but appreciation for her writing. I recommend this book to every trans woman. I was left gagged by the number of passages that felt all too relatable to my life.↩︎
For context, my parents and grand-parents grew up and lived in a deeply socially conservative society whilst also under the Romanian communist regime. In my discussions with other queer Eastern Bloc folk, the pattern of societal shame comes up repeatedly, and I can only theorise on how the psyche gets shaped by having to think of every neighbour as a potential informant that might turn you in to the secret police for their own ends (this did almost happen to my great grandfather). One day I’ll write a lot more on my family’s relationship to societal shame and the generational trauma that still percolates from having lived under such an inhumane and psychically damaging regime.↩︎
I’m flabbergasted to find out that I’ve subconsciouly managed to mangle together a Joan Baez song and a Bible verse↩︎