In the Den is one year old! To celebrate a full year of episodes, we’re turning the spotlight back onto our intrepid host Jen Blair. Mama Dragons Executive Director Celeste Carolin guest hosts and asks Jen about her experiences of having a child come out as gay and finding Mama Dragons in its earliest years of existence. We hope you enjoy this chance to get to know Jen better and to glimpse the source of her endless passion for creating a better world for parents of LGBTQ children.
Special Guest: Jen Blair
Jen has been a member of Mama Dragons since January 2014. She has a husband, four amazing kids, and one pet--a plastic skeleton dog that sits on her porch during the month of October. Originally from Utah, Jen currently lives in Idaho. When not practicing yoga or reading, she's often having lively conversations with strangers on the internet.
Special Guest Host: Celeste Carolin
Celeste Carolin studied business at Harvard Extension School and is currently earning a Masters in Marriage and Family Therapy from NCU. As a queer (lesbian) cisgender woman, she has worked with LGBTQ youth and non-profits for the past 10 years. Celeste has served in Mama Dragons leadership since 2016 and currently serves as the Mama Dragons Executive Director. She lives just outside Seattle with her lovely partner Jamie, extended family, grand kiddos, and their pup Jackson Blue. Both Celeste and her partner come from non accepting religious roots, which fuels Celeste's passion for understanding and serving the intersectionality of faith and parenting LGBTQ children.
Links from the Show:
In the Den is made possible by generous donors like you.
Help us continue to deliver quality content by becoming a donor today at www.mamadragons.org.
Connect with Mama Dragons:
Website
Instagram
Facebook
Donate to this podcast
In the Den is one year old! To celebrate a full year of episodes, we’re turning the spotlight back onto our intrepid host Jen Blair. Mama Dragons Executive Director Celeste Carolin guest hosts and asks Jen about her experiences of having a child come out as gay and finding Mama Dragons in its earliest years of existence. We hope you enjoy this chance to get to know Jen better and to glimpse the source of her endless passion for creating a better world for parents of LGBTQ children.
Special Guest: Jen Blair
Jen has been a member of Mama Dragons since January 2014. She has a husband, four amazing kids, and one pet--a plastic skeleton dog that sits on her porch during the month of October. Originally from Utah, Jen currently lives in Idaho. When not practicing yoga or reading, she's often having lively conversations with strangers on the internet.
Special Guest Host: Celeste Carolin
Celeste Carolin studied business at Harvard Extension School and is currently earning a Masters in Marriage and Family Therapy from NCU. As a queer (lesbian) cisgender woman, she has worked with LGBTQ youth and non-profits for the past 10 years. Celeste has served in Mama Dragons leadership since 2016 and currently serves as the Mama Dragons Executive Director. She lives just outside Seattle with her lovely partner Jamie, extended family, grand kiddos, and their pup Jackson Blue. Both Celeste and her partner come from non accepting religious roots, which fuels Celeste's passion for understanding and serving the intersectionality of faith and parenting LGBTQ children.
Links from the Show:
In the Den is made possible by generous donors like you.
Help us continue to deliver quality content by becoming a donor today at www.mamadragons.org.
Connect with Mama Dragons:
Website
Instagram
Facebook
Donate to this podcast
JEN: Hello and welcome to In the Den with Mama Dragons. I’m your host, Jen. This podcast was created to walk and talk with you through the journey of raising happy, healthy, and productive LGBTQ humans. Thanks for listening. We’re glad you’re here.
JEN: It is 2024. Can you believe it? I want to take a moment to celebrate that our podcast has made it a full year and we are ready to hit 2024 with a bit more experience and some amazing ideas. But if anyone in our intended audience has ideas or suggestions for important topics or guests, please send us a message. The link is always in the show notes. To start off this year, the podcast team decided that the listeners might want to know a bit more about the person hosting the episodes each week. To be perfectly transparent, I was the dissenting and losing vote on that topic. So, with this assignment, we’ve asked Celeste Carolin to come and play the role of interviewer today.
Celeste has worked in Mama Dragon leadership since the early days and has been instrumental in the evolution of the organization and has spent the last three years as the Executive Director. Much more than that, Celeste is someone that I respect deeply. So, with that, I’ll hand the reins over to Celeste.
CELESTE: Thanks, Jen. And Thanks for your kind words. I think you know this too, I also respect you deeply. And I’m really excited to do this. I’ve known you for a bit and I’m excited for everybody else to know a little bit about what I know about you. And I want to start today a little bit in the background of Jen Blair. If you could kind of take us back to maybe even just how you grew up. Tell me a little bit about how you grew up, a little bit about your family dynamics, how you saw the world.
JEN: I had one of those maybe idyllic TV versions of growing up. I have two brothers, one older and one younger. And I think my parents always knew that I felt a little bit outside of the boyhood being in the middle and being a girl. And that status elevated me a little bit and I got some special treatment from my parents. But my parents were super hands-on. Every dance recital I participated in, every gymnastics competition, anything like that, we were super active and my parents were in the front row cheering us on for anything. I had a dad, when I think back I realize he was kind of a little bit of a feminist. So he would say things to me like, “Well, if you want to be the president, then I guess you should run for president.” Or “If you want to date that guy, why don’t you just ask him out?” which sounds silly now, but I’m 50, so those things weren’t super normal. I really did feel like I could conquer the world and I had a whole team behind me that was going to push me through it. We went camping. We toured the US with our pop-up tent trailer and saw everything. And they always made sure we had everything we needed. I had a great neighborhood. I had amazing friends. I loved school. Honestly, there was probably negative dark things that happened, but they were so few and far between that I mostly don’t remember.
CELESTE: Yeah. And, so location-wise, where were you growing up?
JEN: I grew up in Sandy in the foothills before when we had to drive miles through the fields to get to where the houses were.
CELESTE: I’m assuming Sandy, Utah.
JEN: Yeah, sorry. Sandy, Utah.
CELESTE: How did that culture and this family that you brought up and kind of shape your identity today?
JEN: Well, I was a little bit delusional, to be honest, about what the world was like. We were surrounded by really stable and amazing people. So, when I went to church, the leaders were amazing. There wasn’t a lot of oppression of women going on. We had the same budget for example as the boy scouts to do our activities. The girls went rock climbing and we took a 50 mile bike trip to go water skiing. So there was a lot of really empowering that I felt all growing up that I had a voice, that what I had to say mattered, that people cared about me. And because the world was so fair around me, I sort of just thought the world was fair, like in general the whole world is just fair and everyone’s happy. And if you need something you just call someone from your church and they’ll help you out. Kind of a little bit of a naïve bubble that I lived in.
CELESTE: So you start moving through the world. You end up going to college? Where did you go to college at, and what did you study?
JEN: I went to BYU. I got my degree in elementary education. I married my husband early in that process and we both graduated together on the same day with a two year old on my hip. I knew my growing up was fairly conservative, the background and stuff. So I knew that his degree was the important one that we needed to emphasize that because he was going to have to provide for the family. But there was no way I wasn’t going to graduate from college. So we slowed him down and sped me up so that we could both – It was a little bit crazy. I was working a full time job, taking 21 hours, pregnant with my first baby. But I was absolutely not going to walk away from there without a degree.
CELESTE: And so you ended up finishing your degree. Where do you guys end up moving? Where do you go next?
JEN: We went everywhere, it seems like, for a little bit. My husband and I, we decided together that it would be a good idea for him to apply for medical school and go that route. So we did. We left with two kids in tow to start medical school. And we started in Missouri. So we lived in Missouri for a couple years. And then we headed to Ohio to do rotations. So we lived just outside of Akron for two years and had our third baby. And then we moved to Iowa and we lived there for five years to do residency and had our fourth baby. And after all of that, we ended up in Idaho with our four kids. And that was about 15 years ago, 16 years ago.
CELESTE: So you didn’t go too far from your beginnings?
JEN: No. We had some pretty small parameters. We just wanted to be closer to family. And, at that point, our family was all in Utah still.
CELESTE: And so this is kind of your origin. You have this beautiful little family. You followed this Christian religion model. And it sounds like you grew up LDS. Is that right?
JEN: Yes. And it worked for us. I hear stories now about people who struggled to fit in or who couldn’t make sense of it or just didn’t fit. That was not my experience. The whole thing was designed for how my brain already worked. And so it was just easy. It was just easy to belong.
CELESTE: And so then, at some point, your journey collided with Mama Dragons. And can you kind of tell me what led up to that collision?
JEN: Yeah. So, that’s actually an interesting question because it does feel like a collision the way that you’re talking about it. We were living in rural Idaho and the schools weren’t really providing for my kids what my kids needed at the time. So we were homeschooling and we were super active and participating with a homeschooling group. And I loved it because I got to teach again and I love teaching. And so we had this little perfect – everything was good. And our oldest had entered the teen years and I had all these weird stereotypes in my head of what the teen years would look like. They’re full of angst and there’s a lot of pushback and teens are so moody and miserable, and hormone levels are high. All of those things were in my head. And I had this boy who entered his teen-hood and he was like this paradox because all of those things were true. He was so moody. He was so angsty. But he was such an obedient and kind and compassionate and empathetic kid. Like, for example, he had a guitar teacher one time and I said something negative about the guitar teacher and he totally called me to task on it and absolutely would not let me judge that man harshly.
CELESTE: So the juxtaposition. It’s like a juxtaposition of this boy you know, so sweet and then he goes into this moody, angsty guy. And were you just like, who is this kid?
JEN: I just kept thinking, this is what teens are like because he would piggy-back his little sisters all over the house and they would play hide-and-seek all day. If I pulled in with groceries, he was out there in one second telling me, “Do not pick up a grocery, Mom. That’s my job.” He would like load all the groceries in. and then he would also stomp around. He was like always hunched over. And I would say things to him like, “Hey, what do you want to do when you grow up? Are you thinking about where you want to go to college?” And he’d be like, “I wish I were dead.”
CELESTE: Oh, wow.
JEN: Yeah. Like extreme things like that. And I would say, “What do you mean by that?” And he’d be like, “I just wish that I’d never wake up again.” And then I was just so naïve, I didn’t realize how close we were to actually some serious tragedy in that space. In my head I was like, “Whew, they were right. These teen years are angsty. These kids are moody.”
CELESTE: So, when you were hearing that, you weren’t hearing, “I might want to die.” You were hearing, “I’m just being an angsty teenager.”
JEN: I remembered myself as a teen throwing myself on the bed and stuff being like, “I’m so depressed.” But I wasn’t really. So I was kind of like projecting that onto him a little bit.
CELESTE: That’s a tricky thing just even in that, right, like somebody else’s experience. We only know our own. And so then we’re like, “When I was a teenager . . . When I . . .” And not being able to see the differences maybe going on with him.
JEN: Yeah. And I had weird ideas about what suicidal meant.
CELESTE: Yeah. What did you think it meant?
JEN: I thought you could tell if someone was really suicidal they would be doing dangerous things all the time and they would be taking these big risks in their lives and they had no family and they were addicted to drugs and nobody loved them.
CELESTE: Oh, wow.
JEN: Those kind of extreme things, I just thought it was so much more rare than it actually is. And in his case, he was surrounded by people who loved him and he was such a good kid. He wasn’t doing anything wrong. But I couldn’t get him to see a future, if that makes sense. So we were homeschooling and he was 16. He was taking quantum mechanics and he was taking calculus. And I kept saying, “Hey, there’s a community college right there. You could be getting college credit for these courses.” And he’d be like, “I don’t understand the point of that. There’s no reason to do that.” But simultaneously, he was studying these things.
CELESTE: But you’re hearing all the signs, “I have no life to live for.”
JEN: Yeah.
CELESTE: Which, as you know, now, that’s a significant indicator of suicidal ideation and potential.
JEN: Oh, yeah. We did it wrong. We did it wrong and we’re just lucky that things didn’t end up in a tragic situation because we were too ignorant and naïve to understand what he was really going through and he didn’t dare tell us.
CELESTE: Right. So how did this shift? How did everything change?
JEN: This part of the story is always a little bit tricky for me because the way I interpreted it in the moment is maybe a little bit different then I would interpret it now. So I’m going to go back to my brain at the time. I’m homeschooling the kids. We have this morning devotional every day where we meet together and talk and start the day. And I am doing my own morning ritual which at that point included prayer. And I just feel that “Mom instinct” or the gut – at the time I for sure called it inspiration – that I needed to go have a talk with him. And I was like, “ugh, another conversation with him about video games, probably. He plays too many video games. I probably need to rein that in.” So I walk up the stairs and go into his room and I sit down on the floor, just leaning against the wall to have a little chat with him. And I don’t really know what we’re going to chat about. I think it’s probably video games, but I’m not sure. So I just kind of start. And he is like full-angst. Like I can’t think of another word for it. He was pacing all over the place back and forth. And his energy level was intense.
CELESTE: Had you ever seen that before?
JEN: No. This is brand new. And, maybe when he was a 3-year-old about to have a tantrum kind of energy. And so I was like, “I need you to talk to me. Something is happening. I feel like you want to do something bad or angry or mean but you don’t dare or you don’t want to face the consequences of that.” And he was like, “That’s exactly what it is.” And I’m like, “Let’s talk about that. Let’s talk about these feelings. What’s going on?” And he just kept pacing back and forth and I was trying to breathe and figure out, like, this can’t possibly be about video games because we’ve talked about that 100 times and I’ve never seen this behavior before. And somewhere in my subconscious I must’ve known. But, before my brain engaged, the words came out of my mouth, “Are you gay?”
CELESTE: Why do you think that was? Like, if we pause that for a minute, why was that your first thought?
JEN: I honestly can’t figure it out. It’s been ten years and I don’t know still. I think on some sort of subconscious level I must’ve known but it hadn’t registered in my brain. It was so far outside of the realm.
CELESTE: Was it something you were afraid of?
JEN: No. I probably would’ve been afraid of it if I had been smart enough to think of it.
CELESTE: But it wasn’t ever a top of brain, it was something that just came out right then?
JEN: Yeah. And then I felt bad.
CELESTE: Why?
JEN: Like it was an insult. Like what sort of a horrible mother accuses their child of something so awful. That was my mindset at the time.
CELESTE: So, at that time, that’s what you were thinking, “I’m accusing my child of this awful thing?”
JEN: Yeah. I absolutely did. And I thought he was going to turn to me and be offended and deny it and I was going to apologize.
CELESTE: What happened?
JEN: Instead, he turned and stared at me, like the biggest eyes you’ve ever seen. He just stared and he was kind of like shaking a little bit and his eyes were giant and they filled up with tears. And I was like, oh, oh, oh. And so I said to him like, “This isn’t something I can guess. Is this for real? I need you to tell me for real?” And he couldn’t. Like he physically couldn’t. And he talked to me. We had a great relationship. But he kind of crawled over to his desk and scribbled the word “Yes” on this little corner of a piece of paper and ripped it out, completely illegible. You absolutely could not read it. But he handed it to me and so I knew what it said.
CELESTE: What was your first thought when he handed that little piece of paper to you that said yes?
JEN: Overwhelming feelings of protection. I wanted to protect this kid. So I kind of ran over to him. He was so tall. He was like 6 feet tall. He was only 16, but he was so tall and he was so skinny. And he was on his knees, like kneeling up tall. And I just went and grabbed onto him and just hugged him. And I said, “I don’t even know what this means. I don’t know what this means. I don’t know what to do with it. But it want you to know that we love you forever and whatever this means, we’re on your side and we’re going to work through it and figure it out together.” But I had all these flashes of Pride parades in whity tighties and Senators being caught in airport bathrooms. And I was like, “That’s a scary world. I need to protect my kid from it.”
CELESTE: OK. So you’re like, “I’ve got to protect my kid from this queer community, queer world out there.”
JEN: Probably even more than that, was I knew the ideas I had in my head about homosexuality. And instantly I knew how wrong they were.
CELESTE: Why did you know they were wrong?
JEN: Because I knew this kid. I knew him. We’d been homeschooling, right? I was with him all day every day. I was teaching his classes with his peers. I was watching him with his friends. I knew him. And so all these ideas about sexual addiction or sexual perversion or being evil or whatever, just so unrealistic. Not even in the world, he was such an innocent kid in all the ways. He was just so innocent. I knew all those things were wrong. So even more than protecting him from the queer world, I felt a need to protect him from our own world that was going to judge him so harshly.
CELESTE: So the world that you’d brought him up in, which was more conservative?
JEN: Very conservative.
CELESTE: And what were the values at that time, or even in your family system, what were the values about gay people?
JEN: Well, in my world, they didn’t exist.
CELESTE: Okay. Gay people didn’t exist in your world.
JEN: I knew they existed somewhere else, like in the dark seedy corners of back alleys. But I didn’t know a single queer person that I was aware of.
CELESTE: Yeah. But you knew this kid.
JEN: Yeah. So I knew he wasn’t that. And so what I knew about gay people must be wrong.
CELESTE: Yeah.
JEN: And I had a few little introductions that helped soften the blow, I think. I had read, I’m sure all of our listeners are familiar with Josh Weed’s blog. I had read that. and I didn’t think about it, but I must’ve internalized it somewhere for my kid, right. But I didn’t really internalize it. But I was reading this story of Josh Weed going like, “Wow, clearly he didn’t choose this. Maybe it’s not a choice for everyone.” And so I had some of those things maybe that softened the blow a little bit.
CELESTE: So if we kind of run way back. You have this kiddo, he’s on his knees, and you’re having these feelings of “I know this kid” and this tremendous need to protect him. How did you guys move forward from there?
JEN: We started, he kind of broke down after that. And it’s so interesting to me what it taught me in those first couple of days about the experience of being closeted because I was so clueless. I was thinking, “Why wouldn’t you tell us? Of course you would’ve told us.” That sort of energy. But I went back to my little spot on the floor and he laid his head on my lap and I just played with his hair. And he sobbed for about two hours. And I just kept trying to like suck it in and kept telling myself, “This is not about you. This is not about you. This is not your day. This is not about you.” Trying to hold myself together for him. But the thing that was interesting to me is that his body, his whole body, just kind of shook, vibrated almost kind of like your muscles do after an intense workout when you’re physically, like your muscles are so exhausted. And I remember thinking, “Carrying this secret has been physical, like trapped in his body. It has been heavy for him.” And then we talked about his trudgy, stomping, miserable self. The next morning, I’m making breakfast for the girls. And this kid skipped through the kitchen, like full on skipped through the kitchen. I don’t think he knew he was skipping. He was 16, not a normal activity anyway. But he had been so heavy and all the sudden he was so light. And I realized, “Okay. The only thing he really needs is for us to love him and to know that we love him. And then I can figure out the rest of the parenting stuff. We’ll figure out the rest of it. but he’s kind of done.” He just needed to know that we were going to be here for him.
CELESTE: And so, to some degree, you were able to simplify it. You’re like, “I’m just going to love him.” But I know, on the other side, there must be a ton of things going on with yourself because there is a collision of values going on.
JEN: Oh, yeah.
CELESTE: And how are you sorting all through that?
JEN: Well, I didn’t very well. So, right after the fact, my brain couldn’t hold both of those things at the same time. Everything I knew, everything I’d been taught, everything I had built my whole life on was completely wrong about something that was the most important thing in the universe to me – my kids. And so I couldn’t hold those two things. They’re right about everything in the universe, but they’re wrong about my kid. And I didn’t sleep, to be honest, I didn’t sleep for about four days and I had a total breakdown. My brain just broke. It couldn’t hold those two things simultaneously.
CELESTE: Yeah. It was too much.
JEN: Yeah. My brain just couldn’t. My husband’s really good at compartmentalizing and he kept saying, “Our kid is fine today. Let’s focus on this. He’s fine. He’s fine. Just relax.” But I was trying to plan the whole world and recreate an entire value system and how do we fit into the world and how do I parent and how do I keep these kids safe now and are we going to lose our whole community? I was going to call them nightmares, but I wasn’t asleep, like these flashes of how every single different person was going to respond to us and speeches about how we were standing with our kid that I was just replaying, ruminating, like I said, my brain broke. It was like in a movie when they have a bad dream and there’s all those flashes of pictures or flashing before your eyes. It was like that for about four days.
CELESTE: So exhausted?
JEN: Oh, yeah. I was a wreck.
CELESTE: So, four days, you’re a wreck. You broke.
JEN: I broke.
CELESTE: Where did you go from there?
JEN: I feel actually super lucky because in most circumstances I would’ve ended up being hospitalized for a little bit to kind of work through that. But I have a husband who’s a doctor and I had parents who just showed up. They just moved in for like three weeks to take care of my kids. And they had no idea what was going on or what had caused this or what my problem was. And I couldn’t talk about it. So they kind of moved in and took over the kids and house. And everybody medicated the crimany out of me for months until I could just calm my amygdala, I guess, down to a point that I could start thinking again.
CELESTE: So your relationship with your parents must be really close at that time?
JEN: Yeah. They had always, always, always shown up for me.
CELESTE: And so a few months goes by and you had this little gay boy. Where do you go?
JEN: I had a lot of conversations with him about how – this makes me teary even though it’s been so long – about how my mental state was not about him. He was perfect. He was fine. We didn’t want to change anything about him. But I was having, like an existential crisis about the universe. I was still homeschooling all these kids and so we sent them back to school. And I was determined to replace my brain with truth. I had lost access to truth and so I was going to replace my brain with real truth. And so I studied, 8 to 10 hours a day, all of the religious minds throughout history. I was reading the works of Arthur Katama and all of the Thich Nhat Hanh and Mother Teresa and trying to figure out in this quest to understand God and the mind and the heart and the will of God because this kid was my spiritual responsibility. So we sent all the kids back to school and I just started to research, research all things, including all things queer which was hard back then. The internet was not as full as it is now.
CELESTE: Yeah. What were the resources like then?
JEN: There was so little. I started with my church, right? Because obviously, I had just misunderstood and they’re going to be able to teach me what I need to know. And it ended up breaking my heart because they were saying things about my kid that was just factually incorrect. And the more I dove into the theology – I wasn’t like a lukewarm member of my congregation. I was all in. I had studied and rewritten and taught scriptures pretty much my whole life. I was 100% in. And so that was the first place I looked for answers and they weren’t there. And my son wasn’t ready to come out yet. So I tell this story a lot because I think it’s funny. But I found Huffington Post, a news-ish website, had a newspaper section, called ‘Gay Voices.’ And they would post Gay news, gay-related news. And so I would go in the comment sections of the newspaper and ask people questions because I didn’t know who else to ask.
CELESTE: Yeah. And was that enough?
JEN: Oh, no, because they were all just mad at me because I was way too naïve and I was asking questions that were actually borderline offensive. I just wasn’t smart enough to know that they were offensive at the time. So that wasn’t really working out well for me. I got permission from my son to tell one person so that I could have somebody to talk to. And she told me, “There’s another mom that has a gay son from our religion. It’s unbelievable. There’s two of you. And let's connect you.” So I got permission from him to go out to lunch with this other mom. I called her up. I met her. I took her to lunch. And it was really really good for me because as we spoke, I was like, “Nope. That’s not what I’m doing.”
CELESTE: What do you mean, nope?
JEN: She had been navigating for several years and she was super nice. But as she’s telling me how they’re doing it, I realized – this is going to sound really mean and judgemental – but as she’s showing me pictures and I had heard about her son from other sources, I realized, essentially, her son was just lying to her to make her happy. She had these certain expectations of what it would look like for him to move through the world and he didn’t want to crush her dreams. And so he was just lying to her. And I thought, above all else, I’m not putting any dogma or system that’s going to separate me from my kid, our relationship at all. He needs to be able to talk to me and trust me. Because just like I don’t have anyone to talk to, he’s clearly the only gay boy that’s ever existed, and so who is he going to talk to? He’s going to have to be able to talk to me. So that was really good for me to realize, that the preservation of our relationship and communication was going to be the most important thing.
CELESTE: The only person in the world at that time that had a gay boy, wasn’t going to be your person.
JEN: Nope. But she taught me a lot of lessons.
CELESTE: Yeah. What were some of the important things that you remember?
JEN: Basically, that about relationships. My kid was 16 at the time so I felt like I was still really responsible for him. He wasn’t an adult yet. But I realized that he was going to have to live his life and make his own decisions and navigate his own spirituality and his own value system. And I could either be a part of it by trusting him to do that, or I could alienate him by trying to impose my ideas and values onto him instead. So I changed my parenting a lot. And all the kids have benefitted since then. I hope they’re all grateful enough to him for that.
CELESTE: So this is how this collision with Mama Dragons started. When did that collision actually happen?
JEN: So, about a year-ish after he came out, I was still just so desperate to find some sort of information. I couldn’t figure out how you move forward in healthy ways. There weren’t articles about what gay relationships looked like or if gay people had kids in healthy ways. Those things just didn’t exist yet, that I could find. And so I went onto Facebook which was pretty new at the time. And I found a group that was anonymous. It was called Gay Mormons. And I asked to join the group and I put out this – I was so vulnerable and so afraid, but I put out this heartfelt plea. “I think our community’s doing it wrong. I think we’re doing it wrong. Is there somebody else who wants to talk to me?” And I got a super sweet private message from someone who said, “That’s actually a dating group for gay Mormons to find each other and go on dates. So you’re in the wrong spot.” Which was hilarious and super kind of him. And he said, “But I know some moms in your situation that I could connect you with. Can I connect you with them?” I was totally scared of him. He didn’t have a real picture for his profile. Daniel, I love you. He didn’t have a real picture and I had to accept a friend request from him at that point in order to get a private message. And what if I accidentally outed my – I was so scared. I just felt so vulnerable and so protective. But I braved up and he introduced me to three of the people who were currently in the little Mama Dragon message thread. There were eight women that were talking to each other at that time.
CELESTE: And what was that experience like for you?
JEN: When I first messaged them – or he messaged all of us this little group message. And I was so terrified. And I was like, “Hey it’s nice to meet you.” And Christie, I guess I won’t use last names in case people don’t want that sort of thing. But Christie said, “Call me.” And she put her phone number in the chat which was so brave. Of course, I called her. And I said, “Hey.” And she said, “It’s going to be okay and you are doing it right.” I bawled. I totally remember that, like the intensity of that. I bawled so much that here’s a person who gets it. Because, before that, every time I would try to talk to someone they’d be like, “Oh, it’s okay. Celibacy is the way to go. You just have to encourage him to be celibate. Don’t forget your values. It’s important that you keep taking your kids to church.” But I was taking my kids to church and then they were all coming home and crying all day afterwards because of the things that they were hearing about their brother that were so inaccurate. So I was stuck in this world where I was gaslighting myself. But my instincts were not wrong.
CELESTE: And just having someone validate that for a second . . .
JEN: Yeah. It was like water after trudging through the desert for a year and finding somebody who’s going to talk to me about these hard questions and answer and fill in my ignorance and not judge me for being ignorant and understand how much I love this kid and how also terrified I am about the future that he might face that I still cannot even imagine. I know he’s not going to be Ellen Degeneres. So, that’s it. That’s the only future I can see. So Christie, we’ve drifted apart, but she’ll always have a special place in my heart for that initial, “It’s going to be okay.” Because I didn’t know if it was going to be okay.
CELESTE: Right. So how did things proceed? At some point, you connected in person? You got more involved? What was that like for you?
JEN: So they had just turned this Mama Dragon message thread, they called themselves the Mama Dragon Council at that point. And they had just turned it into a Facebook group. And there were probably like 20 people in there. And they were all talking to each other. And I kept seeing little hints about some sort of a retreat that was coming up. And I was like, “Wait, are you guys getting together?” They were from all over the country. And I was like, “Are you getting together?” And I was told that they were. They were having a retreat and I totally invited myself. Super out of character for me. But I said, “Can I come?” And Jill, bless her heart, said, “Yep. You just need to send me a check.” So I wrote a check to an internet stranger and mailed it so I could go spend a week in Saint George, Utah, with these women from all over the country.
And my husband was super protective about it. He was like, “Hmm, maybe we don’t send money to internet strangers. You’re just going to drive down there and stay with them?” I’m all, “Yep. I’m in.” And he was like, “What if they’re not even there? What if this is like a giant lie, and it doesn’t exist?” and I was like, “I don’t even care. I’m so desperate for some support and some interaction and some people who get it. I’m going anyway.” And he was super sweet. He was like, ‘What if our whole family takes a trip to Saint George and we’ll rent a little house and you can go spend the daytime with them. And I was like, “Nope. I’m in. Sleeping on an air mattress on the floor.” And he was like, “All right.”
CELESTE: And what was that experience like for you?
JEN: I don’t want to sound overly dramatic, but I would say for sure that it was life changing. There were 17, I think, women there. And I cried. It was four days long. I cried all day, every day.
CELESTE: Which as, knowing you today, that’s kind of out of character for you.
JEN: Mm-hmm. I just went to each of them one at a time and said, “Tell me your story. Tell me your story. Tell me your story.”
CELESTE: What were you looking for when you asked that question?
JEN: Similarities. I wanted to know that I wasn’t crazy, that it was this hard to figure it out back then in our religious community. Even within the LDS faith, it’s gotten so much better in the past ten years. There’s like websites and books and stuff now. Those things didn’t exist back then which was probably good because I wasn’t lulled into any false sense of security. But the situation I just wanted to hear over and over, “How had you handled it? What did your kid do? How is your kid now? How is life going? What does the future look like?” My introduction to the queer world was a bunch of moms. And I met Neca. We went to dinner the first night. Everyone else had already gone by the time we got there.
So we were sitting together across the table and she was telling me about her trans son. And, full on, my mind was blown. I did not know this was a thing that even existed in the universe. And she was showing me pictures of him and how happy he was post transition, and I thought, “Wow, I’ve spent a year trying to understand what it means to be gay. But I have no concept of what it means to be queer. I have some research to do.” And I want to be a strong advocate for the trans community.
CELESTE: So these experiences, and I know you’ve had hundreds and hundreds of experiences since then, they’ve really shaped who you are now. How did those experiences change that original value system from when you were a kiddo?
JEN: It’s interesting because I think the values themselves are pretty consistent. I feel like I’m a totally different person who’s still the same person, if that even makes sense. I have always been passionate about learning. And I’ve been an avid reader and loved all things education. So picking a new topic and taking a deep dive was nothing new. I’ve always been really driven to serve and work hard for people who have less. I just wasn’t aware of how deep that “less” sometimes went. So I spent a lot of time serving people that were in my same situations instead of venturing out into the scary, scary world that existed. So, kind of combining education with my desire.
But more than anything, I was raised my entire life with the idea that there was nothing more important that I could do than be a mom and raise healthy, productive, intelligent, contributing children. And so when my kids needed something different, I had to change everything that I was doing. But that main driving passion to raise those kids was still there. It just looked like I was doing bad things to people on the outside.
CELESTE: How did that change things within your family?
JEN: My little family?
CELESTE: Yeah. First, let’s do your little family and let’s do your extended family next.
JEN: My little family, we were already pretty dang close, partly because Jaxson set the tone and then the next sibling. My kids are just friends. They’ve always cuddled together watching movies, even now into their 20s. But we kind of were isolated a little bit when we got to the point where Jaxson came out publicly. We lost a lot of our outside support. And so that kind of brought us together even closer. We had lots of mottos. “Our whole family’s invited or nobody’s invited” kind of things. We were going into the whole thing as a unit. So I think we got even closer.
CELESTE: And then what about your external family?
JEN: That was hard and I probably can’t talk about that without crying because it changed a lot. From the perspective of everyone outside of our little circle on both sides of the extended family, there was a lot of fear that I was doing crazy things, that I was making crazy decisions that were destroying and harming my children and taking our family outside of circles of safety. And so I actually talked to you on the podcast about circles of support. And I felt like, when it was a health crisis and I had my health breakdown, the family showed up and centered. But when it was a conversation about Jaxson making his own decisions and us supporting his healthy choices and even more so when it was our youngest, it was me causing problems. I wasn’t getting support. I was the bad guy. And so it changed all the dynamics when you go from being the family sweetheart to being the black sheep in such a short amount of time, it’s pretty unsettling.
CELESTE: And you mentioned just a second ago, your youngest. How did Jaxson’s coming out support you in parenting your youngest?
JEN: I sound so dramatic when I say some of this stuff. But I’m pretty much 100% confident that if Jaxson hadn’t come out first that our youngest wouldn’t have survived middle school. I think they would’ve taken their own life. They have a different kind of personality and Dylan was struggling. They first came out as bisexual at age 12. They’re just 18 now. The first attempt was when they were 11 and thankfully that didn’t work out the way they were hoping at the time. Thankfully they were still with us after that. But, between 11 and 17, there was a lot of exploration and a need for them to find themselves and figure out who they were and have us only support that search. Where, before, I think we would’ve tried to force them into some bubbles that were never going to fit. And after going through the whole thing and learning how to stand up for ourselves as a family, and learning how to support the other kids in their own wishes instead of fulfilling my dreams and expectations, it was so much easier to just jump on board and be Dylan’s cheerleader.
CELESTE: So you’ve been on quite a journey.
JEN: I think a lot of us are in that boat, which is why I think Mama Dragons stick together and understand because there’s not a lot of people in the world that are going to understand this collision and identity crisis and protective parenting. The conversations in the group are always so interesting, right, because we’re talking about politics and we're talking about parenting, and we’re talking about religion, and we’re talking about orientation. And we’re talking about gender. And somehow, 99.9% of it remains supportive and educational.
CELESTE: Right. It is kind of interesting that we’re able to maintain that with so much diversity. Kind of my couple last big questions is, you’ve been highly involved in Mama Dragons.
JEN: Yeah.
CELESTE: Your personality, you like to be in the background. You don’t like to be in the spotlight.
JEN: That is true.
CELESTE: And many people don’t know that Jen was kind of the heart and soul in the beginning of Mama Dragons and held most of it up for many years.
JEN: That’s sweet of you.
CELESTE: It’s not sweet of me. That’s just honest. And now you’re doing this podcast and now you’re kind of out in front. And probably not the role normally you would pick to do for yourself. Why are you doing it and what do you want the listeners to know about you and your intention behind doing this?
JEN: Okay. So this podcast is probably one of the most vulnerable things I’ve ever done in my whole life. Like you said, I like to be in the background. I would love to be on the podcast team and have a lot of really good ideas and support for someone else because I don’t like the attention. I don’t know if the listeners have ever even noticed. But part of the early agreement included not using my last name a lot and not naming the podcast after me or including my name in the podcast because I want the podcast to continue long after I’m not doing it anymore. And that’s kind of where my heart is.
I remember being scared and I remember having nowhere to turn. And as soon as I started to figure things out, I decided I had to be loud enough and visible enough that no other mom would ever have to feel that alone and afraid because they would be like, “Oh, there’s that one crazy lady who talks about it all the time. You can reach out to her.” We searched all the podcasts. There’s nothing we could find specifically focuses on how to parent an LGBTQ kid when you’re thinking about school rules, and bullying, and possibly medication, or transition, or dating, none of that existed. And I think it’s so important for our parents.
So my intense desire to educate the entire world kind of collided with my desire to be more in the background. And so I’m showing up while I can until somebody else is ready to take over and do the attention part. It’s really uncomfortable for me. Every time I share the podcast I feel kind of embarrassed. I don’t know why, I hate listening to my voice. I know my own skill set. I know myself enough to know I don’t have a radio voice. I’m not a radio announcer. I’m not a professional performer. And so I kind of just have to put my heart in front of that and be like, “This information is so important to me for every other person to know, that we’re going to ignore all of the parts about me that are just not designed for this job.”
CELESTE: Well, I love this podcast. I’ve loved the types of connections you can make and your ability to really bring out unique questions, unique people to illustrate kind of this wider story, this wider experience.
JEN: I’m crazy curious about all things, so that makes it fun.
CELESTE: Yeah. I can see that. And I can see that in your podcast. Is there anything else you want your listeners to know about you?
JEN: About me?
CELESTE: Yeah.
JEN: I think mostly, I just want the listeners to know that I genuinely care about them as parents. I see the listeners as people who want to do right by their kids, who want to make the world a safer and better place, that we can create this universe that we desire for all of our kids to grow up in. So even though I don't know who’s listening, I feel like this connection that I’m talking to my friends, which sounds – I know – really weird because five or six hundred people listen and I don’t even know who they are. But I feel like it’s my friends that are listening and we all have this common goal and purpose. And I want the listeners to know that I feel that, that I feel like we’re on the same team and that we’re headed the same direction and going for the same goals.
CELESTE: Well, I know that even doing this podcast and talking about your own experience adds to that vulnerability that you shared a second ago. And I just, for your listeners, and for the organization, I just want you to know how much we appreciate you and that it’s meaningful. And the things you’re doing matters.
JEN: I hope so. I hope it matters. Save one life, that’s all we’re doing. One at a time.
CELESTE: Yeah.
JEN: And on that note, I want to thank you for being willing to come and participate with us today. And I want to thank all the Mama Dragons for showing up when I needed them and providing spaces for me to learn and then spaces for me to give back. So thank you listeners for showing up and for sharing and for leaving reviews. And thank you for joining us for our second year.
Thanks for joining us here IN THE DEN. If you enjoyed this episode, please tell your friends, and take a minute to leave a positive rating or review wherever you listen. Good reviews make us more visible and help us reach more folks who could benefit from listening. And if you’d like to help Mama Dragons in our mission to support, educate, and empower the parents of LGBTQ children, please donate at mamadragons.org or click the donate link in the show notes. For more information on Mama Dragons and the podcast, you can follow us on Instagram or Facebook or visit our website at mamadragons.org.