We aren’t welcome at family Thanksgiving this year but fingers crossed for more accepting years in the future.

It’s never really that simplistic. I’m 52 and my wife is 62. So this all went down at least 25 years ago. I think it is partly generational. Also I come from a huge mormon family that is mostly VERY religious. 3 of my 11 siblings left the Mormon church over the way I was treated. The relationship with my parents never fully recovered and my parents forever lost out on a real relationship with our daughters and our granddaughter. It has been very painful over the years and I have tossed my family in the garbage bin many times and pulled them back out just as many times but I decided that I would forgive as much as I could and try to love my family, as they really are, the way I want them to love me and my small family the way we really are. During the years I severely limited my contact with my family I was very clear with them that it was because their treatment of us was unacceptable and that I was disappointed in them. That actually ended up being fairly effective. We had many discussions about how their views made no sense and had no basis in actual reality. It took many painful years to get here. Are we close? No. We are not. But I came to the conclusion that I do want and need to belong to a family even if that family is very peripheral in importance. Would I ever consider attending thanksgiving with my family of origin? No. My little family does our own thing. We don’t have time for them.

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