I wrote a letter to the mother who accused me of "grooming" a student

and it's not exactly what she expected

A letter to the mother who called me a “groomer”:

I am, from the deepest recesses of my heart, so truly sorry.

Not for who I am or who your child is, but for the feelings of loneliness, confusion, and resentment that have made a home in your life. Because honestly, I can’t imagine a job harder than being a parent. Teaching is challenging, but when that last bell rings, I say goodbye to my students and go home to a different life. At the end of the year, I pass them along to a new set of teachers and cross my fingers hoping that they will carry something from my class along with them. But really, there’s no way to know for sure. My investment, I hope, is a meaningful one, but it is still brief.

But you – you once held your child in your arms before they could speak and imagined a life for them. You manifested a world that was kind and secure and loving, and you played out how they would live in that world. You picked a name, you painted a room, you chose baby clothes, and you watched them night after night just to be sure they were breathing. You taught them to roll over and crawl and stand and walk. When they started school, you read to them every night and helped them trace the letters of their name. You watched them grow out of their shoes too quickly, you introduced them to the music you like, you picked them up early from sleepovers when they got homesick. There was a time when you knew your child better than any other single person in the world, including them.

I can’t even begin to imagine how disorienting it must be, no matter how much we all know it’s coming, to watch that child grow into a person. Puberty comes lightning fast, and with it, an avalanche of brain development. Neural pathways are forged, along with a host of new connections between neurons, and suddenly, that brain is in the body of a whole teenager, not a child. I know it happens to all of them, because I’ve been teaching high school for my entire adult life. Suddenly, the kid who once was struggling with a rolling backpack twice his size is six feet tall and raising his hand in the middle of class to ask “if time really exists.” Students who have obediently followed their parents to Sunday church service every week since they could walk are now dodging their moms’ texts and chatting together at lunch about the paradox of omnipotence. And a star athlete who is less than a year away from a full ride scholarship to his father’s dream school is pacing in the hallway, rehearsing how to tell him that he doesn’t want to play football anymore.

As terrifying as it is, that change in them isn’t against nature – it is nature. It is not only normal, but developmentally necessary, for children to forge their own identities.

And maybe you knew that. It’s possible that you saw this moment coming, but you thought it would be different. You hoped that your child’s departure from your worldview would manifest as something more manageable. Something, anything, but this. You thought you raised them differently. In fact, you swear you did. You can’t believe for a single moment that this kind of change came out of nowhere, or that the child you held in your arms was actually someone else all along. This has to be something forced on them, something they didn’t choose. They were tricked. They were influenced. This isn’t them.

And I know believing that is easier. Because the alternative is that you missed something. If what we say is true – that we were born this way – then a piece of your child has been invisible to you for their whole life. It was there in your arms, it was there when you watched them sleep, it was there when you read to them– it was there right from the start, and you didn’t see it.

And sitting in that is painful.

Here, there is a grief that can’t be ignored.

But instead of facing it, it is simpler to push that grief down and replace it with rage. There’s nowhere to direct grief, there is nothing to do but hold it. But rage – rage is a weapon. It’s a weapon begging to be used. That’s when you found me.

And so, as I said before, I am sorry. I am sorry that I can’t absorb your grief. I am sorry also that taking on your rage won’t help you either. The truth is that no parent has ever strengthened their relationship with their child by hurting someone else. There is no one to yell at, no complaint to file, no school board meeting to attend, no bill to pass, no president to elect, that will change who your child is and always was. Seeing me might have helped them envision a path away from shame, but there’s nothing I could have done, just as there’s nothing you could have done, to change the essential truth of their identity.

You might be able to convince your child to hide again, to retreat into themselves, to push down the knowing that burns under their skin, but you can’t reshape their heart. You can’t mold the person you want out of the person who is.

And, truly, wouldn’t loving them be easier?

Because it’s not too late. You could start right now. There is still time to turn this ship around and rebuild trust with the person you once promised to love unconditionally. You might think it’s your love that’s guiding you in this moment, but that’s not what this is. Fear, rejection, anger, resentment, disgust – these are feelings that don’t have a home within love.

I won’t anticipate that you will ever see me differently, but I will hold on to the hope that one day, not too long from now, you come back to the child who needs you.

This has been an excerpt from my new book, Teach Like an Ally, available now (also in audiobook). If you enjoy (or get anything at all) from my writing, you will enjoy this book. Consider supporting a trans writer and former educator by purchasing a copy or twelve for yourself and anyone else in your life who knows and loves trans people like me.