Last night I was extra sad. And when I get sad I try to figure out if there’s something true about my sadness. As an emotional person, I have learned not to trust my feelings, at least not all of the time. Though feelings just happen, they’re not always based on truth. So I try to figure out if my emotions are based on fact and try to adjust my perspective if they’re not.

I think my sadness has some truth in it, while also being impacted by other outside circumstances.

I was talking with my parents on the phone last night. They are both in their early 80s and both struggle with some memory loss and other health issues. I try to call them once a week and provide some encouragement since I live a 20+ hour drive away from them and can’t visit often.

Inevitably, we talk about the kids. I’ve attempted to explain the challenges our twins are facing, but they can’t comprehend the situation very well, so usually I don’t address it. I just refer to them by their given names and gender when speaking of their college experiences, them getting jobs, or them coming home for spring break. I think that’s what made me sad last night –  when I get to talk of them like I imagined I would when they were young. I was just wishing that the story wasn’t so complicated, and that my girls could just be my girls.

I was realizing that I missed the shared experience of gender with them. I know they’re still my children and their wonderful traits and personalities are still there, but there’s something special about sharing gender with your daughters as their mom. I suppose there’s something cultural about that, like the idea of showing someone how to apply makeup, or going shopping for high heeled shoes, but I don’t think that’s all there is. It is traveling through life knowing that you share a special solidarity.

I would have been happy to share my experiences with makeup or clothes with them, and did have some occasion to do so in times past. But I didn’t care if they didn’t like certain colors or sparkly things, didn’t like wearing makeup at all, or didn’t want to try and fit some cultural image of femininity. I do wear makeup and love glittery things (though I try to be subtle in how I wear them!), but I don’t fit an entirely typical picture of a traditional woman. I won’t be offended if you open the door for me, but I’d be just as happy to open the door for you, no matter what gender you present as. If I’m capable of lifting a box, I’ll do it even if there is an able-bodied man nearby. I like to dress up and look amazing, in probably a culturally typical way, but I’m just as happy in shorts and a t-shirt out hiking, no makeup, hair pulled back and just being a person.

I know my twins feel sadness and pain too. That makes it hard for me to communicate about mine, because when doing so in the past, I have hurt them even more. Maybe I shouldn’t have shared it with them and instead attempted to process it on my own. I guess I thought if they could understand how hard this was for me and our whole family, maybe they could reconsider their paths to find relief from their struggles. I guess I hoped we could solve the problem together. But my intensity, in contrast with their passivity and lack of comfort in verbal communication, caused them to hear judgment and criticism towards them instead.

As a parent, I’m sure my focus should be on mitigating my children’s hurts. But it’s hard to know how to do that honestly, because I’m also hurting.

So, should I feel sad? Do I have a reason to feel loss and pain? And if I do, is it because our society seems hyper-focused on gender? (One of the first questions to every newly expecting mom seems to be, “Is it a boy or a girl?”) Or is it because there is some value to being a person in a gendered body?

If you’ve read my posts to date, you can guess I think there’s probably some truth in each of those responses.

After hanging up the phone with my folks last night, I took my sadness into the remainder of the evening with me. It was sparked by my conversation with them about my twins, but included elements of a nearly 12-hour workday, feelings of responsibility for my folks, needing to prepare weekly for my doctrine class, and the fact that the sun was already going down when I left my office.

I conclude that there is some truth in my sadness, and I’m trying to allow myself to feel it rather than demand from myself that I’m always happy. I read a book long ago called Happiness is a Choice, which I believe is a true statement. We are not victims of our emotions. But in trying to choose happiness, sometimes I run roughshod over my felt emotions. That’s what my kids have told me it seemed like I did to them. I didn’t mean to. I wanted to empower them to go beyond their feelings. But in doing so I invalidated their feelings unintentionally.

I can’t have a do-over on how I communicated with my kids in the past, but I can try to change how I treat them moving forward.

And I can give myself permission to experience fully all the feelings that I have, happy and sad and everything in between. I think that’s one of the gifts of being human.