The Sacrifice

Reflection from the Trenches

This one may be a little incohesive, even resembling stream-of-consciousness at some points. That’s what you get with StoicMom paid content! You get the messy. So here goes that promised reflection on that bomb I dropped in my most recent conversation with Jessie Mannisto. (To be fair, ya’ll had a little heads’ up since I dropped it on my paid subscribers first in Third Dream’s a Charm.)

Abraham and Isaac…

I conjure this much maligned and debated story from the Old Testament in this episode of my podcast where Jessie Mannisto interviews me. This episode inspired an email response from a wise rabbi I know that was filled with multiple interpretations of what the meaning and moral of this story is. Here is a simple version of this bible story and it’s important to note that when this filled my brain, I only remembered the bare details from my religious childhood: 

One day when Isaac was a boy, God came to Abraham and told him to sacrifice Isaac on Mt. Moriah. Though he loved his son dearly, he did not hesitate to obey the Lord. The very next day, Abraham saddled his donkey and began the journey, with Isaac, two servants, and wood for the sacrifice. As they neared the mountain, Abraham instructed the servants to stay behind, while he and Isaac ascended…

They came to the place where God had told him to go and built an altar. Abraham bound Isaac, arranged the wood on the altar, and drew his knife. But at that moment, an angel stopped him.

I think I struck a chord with this one. And of course I did! This is the story from the bible that had the most impact on me as a child who could not fathom what seemed like such a cruel and vain request from the God that I was being told was all wise and all loving. I could not reconcile this demand for Abraham to sacrifice his only son in my young brain or even for most of my adult life. I even had this story in my mind when I mortified one of my brothers by telling him I had no desire or intention to spend eternity with this God. I still remember the shock and fear on his wife’s face and her pleading me to take back what I’d said. 

So you can imagine the chord it struck in me when this seemed the answer to my question that day when I hit the trails: 

“What does my daughter need from me right now?”

That this story of this near bloody human sacrifice of a child by his own father landed in my brain sent shivers down my spine at the time and haunted me for over a year. By this point, of course, I knew it was metaphorical and that if this was indeed a message from my subsconscious, I wasn’t being told to go kill my child. Yet the message seemed pretty clear:

You have to be willing to sacrifice your daughter if you’re to have any hope of keeping her.

First I want to point out that none of the other bazillion interpretations of this story matter in this scenario and my rabbi friend assured me that there are endless ways to interpret the message. It’s my understanding now that the meaning of these ancient stories is what we need it to be to open up the path and inspire the strength to grow into our best selves (or get closer to God if that is your jam.)

Much like the dreams I’ve written about here, here, and here, this is very personal. For me, this is about a conversation between my subconscious and my conscious brain. This is about trusting my own wisdom and learning to interpret my inner knowing because it speaks in symbols. 

I’m pretty sure my mom would call it the “still, small voice” or the holy spirit who is God’s agent and acts as our conscience, quietly guiding us to choose “the higher path” in all things. 

The bottom line is I asked a question. Of the Universe, of God, of my own inner knowing, you can choose the framework that suits your belief system. 

I asked a question. This was the answer. But what the hell did it mean?

And this is where it gets tricky. Now I have to figure out: why this and what am I supposed to do with it? My messaging system thinks I’m going to get it, but sometimes it’s not that easy. I’m sure I got it wrong at first. I must have because the actions I took as a result of that interpretation did not feel right, certainly not “guided” at all! Instead I did more damage; I’d say I really botched the direction I thought it was steering me at the time, but I also think this course made some sense and it was important for me to see just how wrong we can get things.

The core meaning hasn’t changed for me, but let me tell you how I initially went wrong with this:  

You have to be willing to sacrifice your daughter if you’re to have any hope of keeping her.

Ugh. Probably your first thought–or at least mine was the whole “live son or dead daughter” nonsense. I dismissed this quickly. Never for a moment have I believed my daughter was born in the wrong body, but you can see how this would niggle into my brain and just annoy me. Maybe even enough to dismiss this whole incident as a meaningless fluke. As I’m writing this, it’s coming to me that my mother might identify this as another, darker voice who wants to steer me wrong. 

(Okay, now I’m thinking of one of my all time favorite animated films, The Emperor’s New Groove, and Kronk’s shoulder buddies who had very comedic and confusing communication styles. I feel you, Kronk!)

What came to me next was the deep inner conflict I was experiencing at the time. I am someone who acts on my values, who stands up for what I believe in. I thought maybe I was being told that I needed to “be a warrior” in the fight against this ideology, like openly and without regard to my own daughter’s needs. (Silly me totally forgot my own moral aversion to war here.) 

I got myself pretty worked up to communicate this to her, that I planned to take a stand and do whatever it took to shut down this ideology and prevent it from harming other girls; that if I couldn’t save her, maybe I could at least save other people’s daughters. I chose to break this news during a group session with her therapist. When I talk about that quiet “intense” place I go that’s rather intimidating? (I mention this in the episode with Jessie.) Yeah, I did that. Even her therapist, who I have a good, I would say mutually respectful relationship with, was like, “Whoa, chill Lady,” as my daughter is hyperventilating and giving the therapist a terrified look of “do you see what I’m dealing with here?”

It was awful and later that day, when the therapist wasn’t responding to my attempts to reach her and explain, I found myself set up for a long weekend of self-loathing and irrational fear that maybe she was planning to report me as a danger to my daughter’s mental well-being. Maybe I was–a danger, I mean. Not physically of course, but I certainly wasn’t conveying warmth and availability! Luckily my sister talked me down; turns out the therapist was just traveling that weekend and not getting my messages. I know you may think the paranoia was justified. Maybe it was, but this certainly didn’t feel like a “higher path”! (Oh Mom, you’re in my head right now. Maybe you always are…)

Oh shit. That’s it. What I just said about my mom. I want to be in my daughter’s head in this way. I’ll come back to this in a minute…

I had heard of other stories where daughters had allowed their mothers to be beside them during this, where they trusted their moms to help them research and navigate this safely. I so desperately wanted to be this mom, to have this relationship with my girl. It was what I thought I had spent her early childhood creating, and yet here we were, with me driving her away with my intensity, so desperate to save her that I couldn’t rein in the behavior that was tearing us apart.

And I knew. I knew what the message embedded for me in the Abraham and Isaac story was. Deep down, I knew. It was the same: 

You have to be willing to sacrifice your daughter if you’re to have any hope of keeping her.

It’s a harsh and brutal way to say it. It sounds much bloodier than it actually is—or so I hope. Remember Isaac remained whole at the end of that story? But this brings us to the “for realsies” part. As Jessie points out (though there are other “buying time” interpretations of the story, and I would say that I am still buying time in ways) Abraham was going to do it. 

Other voices that were banging around in my head around this time were those of Lisa Marchiano and Patrick Ryan. Lisa in this episode of Wider Lens saying essentially this (summary found in this essay of mine): 

…our young humans who are transIDed typically have plenty of ambivalence–these are highly intelligent kids engaged in some pretty heavy duty cognitive dissonance. Many come to see their families as representing their doubts about medically altering their bodies and by cutting out their families, they are able to cut off those doubts and move forward with these extreme and risky steps, forever altering their trajectories.

Photo by Fernando Aguilar on Unsplash

So much cutting going on in that description! Might she sacrifice me if I don’t figure out how to let go?

And Patrick Ryan imploring parents to not be activists, to find a way to get into neutral if they want to be able to ease their children out of this “group”.. He explains, in this conversation with Lisa, the best way to do this is to make peace with what he refers to as “different worldviews” and recognize the high odds of our children adopting a worldview different from our own.

And I’ll tell ya, after spending last night with my daughter who treated me to Chinese food that she purchased with her tip money, and being subjected to “BreadTube” and her claims that she’s been radicalized, I know how incredibly difficult this is. I breathed through the revulsion, asking careful questions and finding gratitude that she had invited me into this world, eager to share her influences with me—evidence that she trusts me now to not devalue? undermine? minimize? (struggling with the right verb here) her attempts to figure out who she is. It helped me to remember some of the weird (and radical) things I once believed (and maybe some I still do) and I’m confident I maintained my careful positioning (that’s probably outside the Overton Window. Can I fault my kid for being radical when it turns out I am? And no, that’s not really what I meant by “careful positioning.”)

For so many moms, this is a loss of our child. We have come so far in our own lives and the hardships we’ve endured have likely revealed to us our values; we’ve figured out so much and know how to survive the difficult things–we probably think we know how to avoid them, maybe even wish we could go back and do some things differently now that we understand the world so much better. It seems this should be our legacy, that our children will carry on those values and use them to guide their own lives. “Please, take them and learn from my journey. You can skip all that pain I went through to test these values–and instill them in you. 

And I can see the devastation in your future if I don’t rescue you from this.” 

But what if, 

What if it doesn’t work that way? What if to save her, I have to let her go? Because I can’t save her. Because part of her growing up is that she has to save herself? 

But some kids don’t make it. They don’t save themselves! They don’t see the cliff (as Jessie says,) or they don’t care, or they don’t understand how high and treacherous it is, and they play too close to the edge, falling off it anyway.

And this gets us back where we started: 

You have to be willing to sacrifice your daughter if you’re to have any hope of keeping her.

Ouch. It has to be for realsies. It has to be with the knowledge that she might not save herself. But maybe I can equip her with things that will help her save herself…

What’s going to help her the most? 

She’s got to believe she can do it, right? If I believe she can, does that help her? 

I think it does. 

Will it be enough?

I don’t know, but damnit if it will help, I’ll find a way to do it. I’ll believe in her and make sure she knows how much faith I have in her. That I’m here for her, but she doesn’t need me to rescue her because she’s perfectly capable of recognizing a cliff when she sees it. Though she may want to peek over the edge for the thrill of it—to test it. Where ever she lands, I want it very clear that I’m still here to throw her a rope so she can pull herself out, if needed, you know, like if she falls in and lands on that ledge just a few feet from the top…

(Now I’m thinking of my acrophobia that I worked so hard to desensitize myself to in my 20s with hot air balloons, sky-diving, and those cliffside roads that when you look out you just see sky, and how all that work just vanished in an instant when I had little ones. How my stomach would flutter when my husband would put them on his shoulders and I couldn’t look. How when they went on hikes where you could see treetops, I just couldn’t subject myself to the discomfort and I’d stay home so as not to infect them with my phobia.)

Where were we? Oh yes, equipping my daughter to save herself…

She’s also got to want to save herself. How can I help her want it? 

I can show her how good it can be. I can show her that the richness of life is worth it. That as we go, we get better at all of it, better at appreciating the good things and experiencing the hard things, better at loving the people in our lives, better at trusting ourselves, better at living.  

And this is where I’ve come to. I try not to spend too much time in regret yet I want to glean as much wisdom as I can from past mistakes. If I could redo any of this, it would be to recognize the power of this m.o. sooner so I could have more influence now. I’ve had to do lots of work to repair the damage of communicating to my child that she was somehow not enough, too fragile to occupy this dangerous world, and that I was not to be trusted as a guide because I didn’t even trust myself. I’ve done the best I could here and must now recognize that I can’t go back to pre-rupture state.

What’s coming to mind is a ceramic bowl that held our attachment. I dropped the bowl—about the time I put her in that stupid wilderness program. It broke into pieces and our attachment was threatened. I spent the next few years trying to put it back together but I kept trying to fit pieces in the wrong places. Yet I know how the bowl goes; I always did. I just couldn’t think straight in my fear and anxiety. I needed to trust myself again. I needed to trust us. Me and her. Now I’m glueing those pieces back together, but the bowl will never be what it was before. It will serve the same purpose but it will be different. It will have its own kind of beauty and be this new thing.

You have to be willing to sacrifice your daughter if you’re to have any hope of keeping her.

Could this just be about her growing up? That to have a relationship with my adult daughter, I have to sacrifice the child by releasing her to discover the cruelties of the world? I got called out on “blind faith” recently and I rejected this. But now, I wonder…Is it blind faith if I trust the order of the universe and that my daughter’s life will be the experience it’s meant to be? Hmm. I think maybe it is. At this point, what else is left? It seems this is the new understanding this experience is leading me toward. It seems this is the lesson in all of this for me. A larger letting go—faith in the order of things. In Life itself.

I have definitely changed my goal. I’ve given up my crusade to save my daughter. As Jessie said, I’m engaged in “unilateral disarmament.” I’ve laid down my arms. And I certainly don’t want to be her savior. She’s an adult now. If she still thinks she needs me to protect her, have I “taught her to fish?” I want a healthy adult relationship with my daughter—one where she considers that voice of mine in her head, but where she trusts herself to know when to listen to it. I’ve gained much wisdom in my life, but we also live in a different world than the one I grew up in and the future is a mystery. I want my child to be adaptable; I think she’s shown that she is.

When I refer to those “successful conversations” I mention to Jessie, they weren’t successful because they were getting her closer to desistance. They were successful because they were helping me to reposition myself as someone who wants to be beside her as she figures things out rather than someone who is going to drag her, kicking and screaming, to where I think she needs to go.

They were successful because I acknowledged that I know I cannot control her, that I have faith in her ability to figure things out for herself. When I noticed my mom in my head before, this was my “oh shit” moment. I want my voice that she hears in her head (Patrick Ryan insists we’re in their heads and I’ve certainly seen evidence of this in my kid) to be whispering, “you got this. You’ll make the best choice here. I trust you–you don’t need me to rescue you or fix you. You’re just right. You always were."

In fact, even if you try testosterone. You’re still just right. You always were.” 

Is this making sense? It’s so hard. Especially this last part, huh? But, I doubt this will be the only time she plays near the edge of the cliff as a young adult. I hung out near that edge much longer than I like to admit. Yet, even with all the damage I inflicted on myself, here I am. And I like who I am.

I also know the last thing I want is for her to inflict damage (which I think is highly likely in this phase of her life, even if it’s not testosterone) then feel she can’t come to me for support in healing out of embarrassment or shame or because she can’t bear an “I told you so.” I want her to know that we all do some really dumb things when we’re testing our new freedom, and it’s okay to change your mind and your path—and it’s never too late (I can model this part.) I want her to know that even though I release her to her journey, I’m always here, always available, always full of love and delight for her. Always willing to share my values and my wisdom, if needed, you know?

Maybe my job right now as her mother, as she’s crossing this liminal space between child and adulthood, is not to keep her safe. Maybe my job is to instill the confidence that she can take care of herself. To ensure she knows that Life actually isn’t safe, but she has what it takes to “face the day.” And her family will always be here to have her back and help her figure things out. Her heart is always safe with us. 

I will always be her mom. 

From one of my alltime favorite novels, Circe (a powerful book about womanhood and mothering and witches set in Greek mythology): 

Perhaps no parent can truly see their child. When we look we see only the mirror of our own faults. 

Maybe once we separate our work from theirs, we get to truly see our children. Wouldn't that be amazing?! 

I think it might be worth the sacrifice.