Anyway, hope my perspective is somewhat useful. Please send the letter. Send more than one if you have to, and tell him you’ll respect anything he says, but you need to make it clear to him how much you want to be in his life in whichever way will make his life better. If/when he gets angry or says something hurtful to you, be calm, tell him you understand he’s angry and hurting, and apologize again.
TL;DR: Be the parent you failed to be when he needed you. That means putting your own needs and pride aside, the way you should have when he was 16.
OOP: Your perspective is very useful. Thank you! I’ve tried to imagine what he might feel or think if I send a letter a million times but to actually read your thoughts on this is very eye opening. I can handle him yelling at me if it means I get to see him and hear his voice again.
Commenter 3: A few things. Does he know his mother is dead?
You need to make no excuses whatsoever or try and qualify your behaviour. This is about him not about you.
Keep in mind this might still (probably is) a huge source of pain for him, you getting in touch might upset him deeply, is it worth it? Especially since he’s in a good place (this may well have been extremely hard earned given what happened to him).
What you’re doing is a fairly common technique for people who have behaved as you have to “lure the sinner” back in and try and “fix them” again. He may be aware of this and believe this to be your motivation.
100% use Facebook, do not use his address, knowing that you know his address might scare the shit out of him.
Make contact with zero expectations, he is well within his rights to either ignore you or send you a very strong negative response.
I’m sorry about you’re wife, and I’m very sorry you find yourself in this situation with your boy, you’re learning the “you reap what you sow” lesson in the hardest way.
Although I am disgusted, I must say props to you for changing your mind on this and taking a more positive path and outlook, you have no idea how rare you are and I know that must have taken great strength and a ruthless and painful analysis of your behaviour to do.
I hope you find some peace on this issue either way.
OOP: I don’t know if he knows about his mom dying. I never contacted him to tell him and I don’t know if anyone in our family did.
Keep in mind this might still (probably is) a huge source of pain for him, you getting in touch might upset him deeply, is it worth it? Especially since he’s in a good place (this may well have been extremely hard earned given what happened to him).
That’s why I’m considering not contacting him at all. I don’t know what he’s been through because of what I did, I’m just relieved he’s alive, but it’s not uncommon for kids in that situation to live on the street and get themselves into a lot of trouble. If he’s at a good place right now I don’t want him to have to relive everything he’s been through.
I felt like Facebook would be more invasive than a letter but maybe in this day and age it’s the opposite.
Commenter 4: Out of curiosity, what are your other children’s take on this? Have they expressed any interest in reaching out to him?
OOP: We haven’t talked about him years. At the time me and his mother told them he was kicked out because he’d chosen a sinful life and that there was nothing more we could do for him and that he needed to find his way back to God on his own. We never said he was gay.
Around the time I was starting to realize that what I’d done was wrong one of the kids asked about him while we were eating dinner and I reacted very badly and told them to never ask about him again. I felt guilty and knew they’d be pretty upset if they knew why he was kicked out so I couldn’t bring myself to talk about it with them.
Commenter 5: You may need to ‘practice’ by coming clean to your kids at home first. You can’t really humble yourself to your eldest child if you haven’t faced the music at home. They need to know and process what you did to their eldest sibling. You’re going to have to humble yourself at the most basic level o your children because you failed as a parent immensely. Hopefully your children didn’t inherit your religious zeal.
You never mentioned how your wife felt about your actions before she passed. How she felt about you kicking her child out?
OOP: We made the choice together. I expected her to ask me to find him when she was dying so that she could say goodbye, but she never did. If I had just done it without waiting for her to ask things might’ve been very different now.
Commenter 6:
I eventually kicked him out of the house because I couldn’t have him there as a bad influence on his younger brothers and sisters.
You know, we don’t usually get much of a chance to ask people about decisions like that, so I’m going to ask: how did you reconcile that with Christianity? What part of the Bible says you can abandon your minor children just because they lead a “sinful lifestyle”? Presumably you were aware as a Christian that everyone is an unrepentant sinner, yes? Why did you believe at the time that the sin of homosexuality was somehow in a category of its own?
I’m atheist now, too, but even as a creationist, evangelical Christian I couldn’t have countenanced the action you took, and can’t understand the Christian parents who believe that the God of the Prodigal Son wants them to abandon their children to the streets. What on Earth did you think you were doing?
Now 11 years later I feel horrible for what I did and want to contact him and apologize but I can’t get myself to send the letter.
Do you deserve his forgiveness before you’ve even found the courage to ask for it?
OOP: I don’t want it to seem like I’m defending what I did but I can can explain the way we were thinking. At the time I was sure the being gay was a choice and that if we let him stay in our house our other children would think we were accepting of his choice to live in sin, and it would be easier for them to follow in his footsteps, we also believed that we had given him all the help we could and that there was nothing more we could do. He needed to hit rock bottom and find his way back to God on his own. We believed we were helping all of our children making that decision. I know it sounds ridiculous but at the time it all made perfect sense to us.
Update (rareddit): May 30, 2016 (over two weeks later)
I just wanted to give you guys an update and also thank you for all the great advice and insight. It was really tough to read some of the more angry comments, but I understand why some of you were angry with me. What I did was horrible and unforgivable, so I was expecting a few angry comments.
What did bother me a little bit though was everyone who was saying that I only wanted to apologize to my son out of selfish reasons and wanted to guilt him into being in my life again. It worried me that that was the impression I was giving some of you because that’s not what I wanted at all. I love my son and I just felt like he deserved an apology and a chance at having a relationship with his siblings and that if he wanted me back in his life I’m here now, even though I should’ve always been there for him. I wasn’t expecting him to want to have contact with me again, but I wanted him to know it was an option if that’s what he wanted.
I invited my kids over for dinner the day after I posted here and they all came and I sat them down and told them the truth. It was a very painful conversation for all of us and lots of tears but I was happy that the truth was finally out. They all wanted to send him letters as well and we decided to send them together with all our contact information.
I don’t know how to explain the feeling I had after we sent them. It was a mix of a lot of emotions and then waiting to see if he would reply to any of the letters was also weird mix of emotions. I didn’t really know what to expect but couldn’t help but hope that he would at least reply to one of us.
Our family try to eat dinner together every Sunday, it’s an old habit. Everyone can’t always make it but the Sunday after sending the letters we were all together. No one had heard from him yet which wasn’t really surprising. We talked about how he probably needed time to process everything. I must be very bizarre and overwhelming to suddenly get an envelope full of letters from your estranged family. The doorbell rang while we were eating dinner and my oldest daughter answered it, when she came back we were extremely shocked to see that the person at the door was my son. I can’t help but cry while I’m writing this because it was just so emotional to see him standing there in front of me. Everyone got up to hug him but I wasn’t sure what to do so I just sort of stood there with tears in my eyes. When his siblings let him go he looked at me and I was half expecting to yell at me and half expecting him to punch me but he just walked over and gave me a hug. I completely broke down and he started to cry too. We all stood there crying for a minute before we finally were ready to actually talk. And we all talked for hours. There’s no words to describe how it felt to see my son after all these years and hear him talk. I could listen to him talk all day.
He said he couldn’t figure out what to write in a letter or what to say in a phone call so he just got in his car and drove here. It was really unexpected but really wonderful. He told us about his life from the day he left and it was very difficult to hear what he’d been through because of me, but I needed to hear it. Apparently his aunt, my sister, had been in contact with him after he left, and she told him about his mom dying and she sent him money now and then. He’s been through a lot but he’s doing really well now. After sitting and talking for a couple of hours we went outside to talk just him and me and long story short, he forgives me. He said that it’ll take a long time for him to really trust me again, but that he’s been angry with me for years and he’s tired of it and ready to start building a relationship again.
He left about an hour after our conversation, and we all exchanged phone numbers, and his siblings added him on all their social media stuff. He lives about an hour and a half away, but he said he’ll let us know when he got time for another Sunday dinner. He’s sent me a couple of texts since then and I couldn’t be happier than I am right now. I know I don’t deserve to be forgiven and I don’t deserve to have a relationship with my son, but I would be lying if I said that I didn’t have a small hope that it would happen. I know that I have to be extremely respectful towards his wishes and let him take the lead with all this. I told him to let me know if he felt like we were being to pushy and that he’s the boss of this whole situation. We all want to go at the pace he feels comfortable at and he’s always welcome here whenever he feels like it.
So yeah, I’m extremely excited for the future and also incredibly grateful for all the advice you guys gave me. You really gave me the push I needed to tell my kids and send that letter, so from the bottom of my heart, thank you.
Relevant Comments
Commenter 1: Your sister is a saint, and you should also thank her as well for actually acting like family to her nephew.
OOP: I went by her house the day after with flowers and cake as thank you. I asked her how much money she’s sent him and offered to pay her back, but she refused, so I’ll just have to get her really nice birthday presents the rest of her life.
Downvoted Commenter: Why didn’t you ask him to sit down to dinner with the family?
OOP: I did, he wasn’t hungry though. We all sat at the dining room table and talked.
DO NOT COMMENT IN LINKED POSTS OR MESSAGE OOPs – BoRU Rule #7.