Tonight
- Do not put them out. Not tonight, not in anger, not to teach a lesson. Every year young Nigerians die on the street within weeks of that door closing. I have written about one. You can shout tomorrow. Tonight, they sleep in the house.
- Do not call the pastor tonight. A pastor called at midnight arrives with a verdict, not a question. There is time.
- Do not take their phone, their money or their documents. Those are the things that keep a person alive if they have to run. Taking them does not change what they are; it only makes the running more dangerous.
- Say one true thing. You do not have to say you accept it. You can say: I am your mother, I am confused, you are not leaving this house tonight. That sentence has saved lives.
What it is and what it is not
It is not a spirit, a curse, a Western fashion, a phase, the result of bad friends, of the internet, of something you did or failed to do. It is not a choice; nobody chooses to be a criminal in his own country. It has existed in every people on earth, including ours, for as long as there have been people. Our grandparents had words for it. The silence is newer than the thing.
It is also not the end of the child you raised. He is still the boy who was good at school, who read to his sister, who sang beside you in church. Nothing about him has changed except what you know.
You cannot pray it out of them. You can pray them out of your house. Those are the only two prayers on offer, and only one of them is answered.
The choice you actually have
You cannot choose whether your child is gay. You can choose whether your child has a family. That is the whole decision, and it is yours. I have watched what each choice produces. The families who kept their children have children. Some of them are in England now sending money home, some are in Lagos, some are in Owerri with a partner the family calls a friend. The families who put their children out have a photograph and a story about a car accident.
To pastors
I grew up in your churches. I sang in your choirs. I believed, and I believe. So hear this as a believer: the boy in the third pew who has stopped coming did not leave because he stopped loving God. He left because you told him God did not love him, and he took you at your word. Count them. Ask where they went. Then decide whether a doctrine that empties your pews of its most faithful children is one you were given or one you inherited from the same colonial law that wrote our criminal code.
You do not have to bless it. You have to stop calling for the door. That is all I ask of you, and it is enough.
If you want to talk
Parents call the support line more often than you would think. Fathers, too. Nobody will lecture you. Most of us are somebody's child from Owerri or Aba or Enugu who has been exactly where your son is, and we know what it is to want a mother to pick up.