Coping With a Gay Child: Or Not Coping!

By Harry Brown

A staggering 10% of our population are gay, covering all sectors of society and all nationalities. Although things are improving, there is still a huge element of bias and homophobia amongst us. This book is a lesson to parents on how NOT to cope with your gay child. The book is intended as a self-help text and the author only hopes that it will be of benefit to other parents and their gay offspring, by emphasising the mistakes made by the main characters in the book. The final section recommends 10 pieces of advice for gay children about to come out and 10 pieces of advice for their unsuspecting parents. I would really welcome your reviews, so please take the time to post a review.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Harry Brown
• Release date: May 27, 2013
• ISBN: 9781301426201

Book preview

Foreword

The fictitious family portrayed in this short novella are fairly typical of any late twentieth century family. It is strongly based on real experience and the poetry interspersed throughout the story was actually written by a genuine child at the ages indicated.

Being Gay is very common, estimated as 1 in 10, throughout the human and primate population and among every social class. Most Gay children are born to normal, unsuspecting heterosexual families. Our society must learn to accept those who are born different, those of the third gender, who must struggle to find their niche in a biased world. It used to be a closet secret, but as society evolves, the modern trend moves towards coming out rather than living a lie.

On the surface, this family are strong and stable. A hard-working mother, a supportive father, trying to bring up their children by example, by endeavouring to set good moral standards, in a caring environment. It could be YOUR family.

Yet, when their second child comes out as being Gay, the shock and the latent homophobia that is rife in our society rips this family asunder.

There are lessons to be learnt from Katy-Joy McEwan on how NOT to act if your child is Gay. This mother has a reaction to her son’s sexuality that is perhaps at the extreme end of the shock spectrum, but many parents in similar situations will be able to empathise. Most parents of Gay children experience similar shock, grief, sense of loss, and all the other mixed emotions that occur on the lonely road to acceptance.

Chapter 1 - Rats

Rats cannot vomit you know.

When they are poisoned, they eat clay to bind up toxins.

Zoopharmacognosy is a particular interest of mine. It is a new science. It was recognised only a few years ago. It is the study of self-medication in animals. Why they eat charcoal or clay or leaves of different kinds to ward off illness. Hairy leaf-swallowing apes intrigue me. They do this to scour out intestinal parasites. It works on horses as well.

Wild sheep on remote islands often exist on a starvation diet. So they bite the heads and legs off live arctic tern chicks. They have a real need to extract vital trace elements from the soft bones of the baby birds in order to live, in order to rear their young.

I truly thought I had a good grasp of Zoopharmacognosy. Yet, when I most needed it, self-medication let me down.

I’ve always had some difficulty understanding Probability Theory. My very patient Maths Tutor taught me to think of it as a continuous line from zero to one. He explained that the chance of any event occurring could lie at either extreme or at any point in between.

So, for example, the probability that we will all die one day = 1. It is a certainty.

The probability that we can fly through the air unaided = 0. It is an impossibility.

Now I can understand these extremes, and a few other clear-cut examples:

Tossing a coin and getting heads = 0.5. The chance is exactly one half.

But I have trouble with the more nebulous things:

Giving birth to a boy or a girl = near to but slightly less than 0.5. There are other possibilities, such as twin or multiple births, the misfortune of a miscarriage, an intersex child with indeterminate genitalia, or a hydatidiform mole, to mention only a few.

Winning the lottery jackpot = very close to zero. There is a small finite chance (< 0.00000001)

I have gone through life with a healthy respect for probability theory.

I have never played the national lottery.

I have never smoked.

I have crossed a busy road many times.

I’ve had three pregnancies: two boys and a stillborn girl.

Yet, however careful you are, the lottery of life can catch you out... with the unexpected... with events that lie so close to the zero end of the probability spectrum that you never think they can happen to you.

I have a strong belief in mind over matter. My life motto has been that anything can be conquered with hard work and a strong will. My name is Katy-Joy McEwan. I am a veterinary surgeon, BVM & S, MRCVS, who has specialised in lots of things with weird and wonderful names: Animal Psychology, Nutrition and Equine Shiatsu.

I guess I have always taken life at the pace of a whirlwind. Folk think of me as one of those rare people who seem to be able to handle any situation without appearing stressed. They frequently say to me, It’s OK for you Katy - you can easily do... whatever task it is.

This is a myth.

There is always stress.

There is always sacrifice.

Being successful in one area spells looming disaster in another.

Often you are so preoccupied that it just creeps up on you and bites you in the jugular.

Although my career has been important to me, I have managed to find the time to have a family of my own. I love them dearly. I have been greatly aided by having a wonderful house-husband, James. He is a gem of a man, with a pragmatic attitude to life. His masculinity could not be threatened by staying at home to look after the children, while his whiz-kid wife, as folk called me, toured Britain and the Continent, lecturing on various aspects of Animal Behaviour, Psychology and Prophylactic Nutrition.

I had started my own animal feed company a few years ago, in conjunction with a University friend. Equinox Ltd. was ticking along nicely, although not exactly thriving. I think I was spread too thin. One area that I was just not good at was the cut-throat world of business. They say that if you are too honest, you will never make a good businessman.

I would like to think that I am too honest!

My children just came along without much effort and my life carried on at the same hectic pace. I have been, and still am, a true workaholic. I have always cared deeply for my children. They were much wanted.

I was at a Conference in Birmingham, delivering a guest lecture on Antioxidants, Fructans and Laminitis when my first child, David, was born in 1974. I remember it was a Friday afternoon. I finished my lecture, with growing discomfort, admitted myself into the Queen Elizabeth Maternity Unit, had the baby in the early hours of Saturday morning and was back to full time work on Monday. I left the new-born in the willing and capable hands of his father. I thought he was perfect. I had carefully monitored my nutrition throughout the pregnancy. I had never taken so much as an aspirin for a headache. He was a healthy 7lb 6oz.

Yet he was not perfect.

David was a sickly child from the very start. He was four years old before his problem was finally diagnosed. He had a rare form of Idiopathic Thrombocytopoenic Purpura (ITP). Putting it very simply, his immune system was faulty. He attacked his own tissue as well as foreign infections. He was in and out of hospital throughout his early childhood and he missed a lot of traditional schooling. I spent many hours at his hospital bedside. My laptop and my books spent many hours at David’s bedside as well.

I did vital work.

He was well educated in the spin-off.

Before he was five years old, he could read and write and knew the names of all the essential amino acids and all the bones of the horse.

On the advice of the best Haematologist in the land, because I consulted them all, and after weighing up the various probabilities on my continuous line, David’s spleen was removed when he was ten years old. He certainly fared better after that although he had to swallow antibiotics daily as a precaution against the risk of opportunistic infection. Despite his misfortunes, David was very bright. James was saintly in his patience when the boy was poorly. I always benefited from getting the priority sleep allowance when it came to disturbances through the night.

My second child, Mark was born in 1982. He caused me a little more discomfort in that I put on three stone in weight, had constant indigestion and bad sciatica. When the time came, I was forced to take two whole weeks off work. Of course, I was older and a little less fit. He was a very large baby for a small lady like me, weighing in at 9lb. 8oz.

Unlike his brother, Mark thrived from the start and was never ill.

I was secretly relieved when my second child appeared to be ultra-healthy.

He was perfect.

From the earliest indications, Mark was always an artistic and rather fanciful boy, with such an imagination! When he was only two years old, we took him to the park and he started to scream uncontrollably. We thought he’d been bitten by a wasp or was having a fit. He was pointing at the tulips and hiding his face in my skirts. It was the black spidery-looking stamens in the centre of the flowers that terrified him!

It was years before he could walk past tulips in a civilised manner!

The Nutritionalist in me made me breast-feed both my babies.

My demanding lifestyle meant that they were synchronised to my strict timetable.

They cried furiously at 6 a.m., 12.30 p.m., 7 p.m. and midnight.

Between times, they whimpered and James was ready with the second-rate top up formula.

I believed that babies should fit in with any reasonable parental lifestyle and should not be allowed to turn your whole world upside down and back to front.

When I was a child, my own parents had no time for holidays. I think that we try hard with our children to compensate for perceived lacks in our own childhood. James and I have taken the boys on holiday every year - to Spain, France, and Greece. They were great holidays. David fished. Mark made castles and picked wild flowers. We had picnics. We swam. We danced in the streets.

My husband James is the love of my life. He has been much more than a mere househusband. He has had many home-based occupations, including making children’s toys and renovating houses. For years, he ran a small B&B Guesthouse, mainly to keep a constant source of human company and to meet interesting people, rather than because we needed the money. James was always busy, also tending a small menagerie of livestock on our four-hectare smallholding in the Fife countryside, just north of the Forth Bridge and the