My Christian wife wants to send our teen daughter to conversion camp
because she’s lesbian. When my daughter found out,
she did something horrible.
My wife has always been really religious,
and that never bothered me before,
but she went too far last night.
Our daughter said she had something really serious to talk to us about.
She ended up coming out to us as a lesbian.
I was really glad that she was able to trust us
with something like this, because I could tell she was really nervous.
During our talk,
I told her that her sexuality doesn’t change how we feel about her
in any way, that we were proud of her,
and we would always support her.
By the end of it, she hugged us and said she loved us.
Then she went to her room,
and I asked my wife how she felt
because I noticed that she was very silent
throughout the whole conversation.
She only nodded and agreed to what I was saying.
She said that she needed some time to think about what was discussed.
I told her there was nothing to think about.
Our daughter is a lesbian,
and there’s nothing we can do about that
besides support her and be happy for her.
It’s as simple as that. She just kept repeating that
I needed to give her time to process all of this.
I have never seen my wife act this way before,
and it caught me off guard.
I do know that she’s struggling to deal with this
because she’s Christian
and thinks that homosexuality is inherently wrong,
but she never expressed malicious intent.
Even so, this is our daughter we’re talking about,
and she has to deal with this in the best way possible.
Today, my wife acted very cold and harsh towards my daughter.
Whenever my daughter tried to talk to her,
she would ignore her
and only respond when my daughter badgered an answer out of her.
She came to me to talk about my wife’s behaviour,
and she said that she thinks telling us was a bad idea
because her mom is acting really weird around her.
She thinks that her mom hates her now.
I tried my best to reassure her that her mom loves her
and we just have to give her time to adjust to this new change.
I told her that I was going to talk to her mom about it,
but everything was going to be okay in the end.
Me and my big mouth. Later that night,
I was talking to my wife
and demanded to know why she was treating our daughter
like she had just done something horribly wrong.
She answered by saying that what she was doing was wrong.
We needed to send her to a conversion camp immediately
to help her realize she was committing so many sins
and she wasn’t going to go to heaven now.
I was shocked. I told her
she Was going to put her own feelings aside
for the sake of our daughter
because she is 16 and needs all the love and support we have to offer.
I wasn’t going to let her make our daughter feel like a bad person
for something she can’t control.
It took so much courage for our daughter to tell us,
given that she also knows that my wife is religious.
How do I get my wife to accept my daughter’s sexuality
and stop viewing it as a bad thing?
Update it’s been over two years since my original post
and over one year since I lost my daughter to suicide.
My wife couldn’t accept my daughter for who she was
and was really adamant on sending her to conversion camp.
My daughter found out and cried a lot.
She said she wished she was straight so that her mom could love her.
That broke my heart.
I kept having talks with my wife to get her behaviour to change,
but she kept avoiding my daughter like she was the plague.
The final straw
was when I saw her searching up the nearest conversion camps
and calling them. We got into a huge fight
and told her there was no coming back from this.
So we began the divorce process.
She moved out and went to live with her parents,
who my daughter absolutely adored.
They, of course,
sided with my wife when they found out,
resulting in my daughter being even More devastated.
The amount of nights where I held my daughter in my arms
as she cried herself to sleep at night,
asking why she had to be the way she was,
why her mother hated her, asking again and again if I hated her,
despite how many times I would tell her I love her unconditionally,
including her sexuality, were too many to count.
I put my daughter into actual therapy
to help her try to process all of this.
I cut back my work shifts to work less hours
to try to be there for her.
I tried to keep anything related to the divorce as private as I could
because I didn’t want her stressing about that even more.
I keep on thinking what I could have done to stop that day.
What else I could have done,
what else I could have said.
Every day I wake up thinking I should have done more.
She left a note explaining how it’s not my fault,
but what else am I supposed to think?
I haven’t talked to my ex wife for eight months now.
I’m in therapy, but to be honest,
I don’t think it’s working.
Sometimes I wander into a room,
sit on her bed, and sob for what feels like hours.
I keep on expecting to see her walk home from school,
to see her smile, to hear her laugh from down the hall.
I miss you more than anything, Jesse. I’m sorry.