One evening, I was driving through central Maine with our older child, when they announced that when they got out of college they wanted to move to Australia, to help develop anti-venom for the world’s most poisonous snakes.

I offered my opinion: No. I hadn’t logged all these years as a parent to have my firstborn dead of a snakebite on the other side of the globe.

“You said you’d always support my dreams,” my child said. “You said you’d always stand behind me.”

I sighed. “O.K.,” I said. “Fine. You can become a herpetologist. I’ll always support your dreams. Even when your dreams … are stupid.”

My child did not, in fact, become a developer of snake anti-venom. But it was not the last time I would think about whether I could support their dreams. Two years ago, in fact, my child sat next to me on the couch and told me she, too, was transgender.

I felt, in that moment, as if I had been struck by lightning. Dear God, I thought. Anything but this. Given how hard being trans has made my life, it was the one thing I hoped my own child might be spared.

In the time since she came out, though, my daughter has mostly been treated with love and support by her friends and the people she works with. I think I’ve gotten better at expressing my love and support, too. But it still shames me that at the moment my child first came out to me, I reacted in a manner not dissimilar from the one I used when she told me she wanted to milk the venom from snakes.

Why was my mother able to open her heart, when my own heart, in the exact same circumstance, fought to just stay closed? Why is my daughter’s generation better than mine when it comes to accepting abundance and variation in human sexuality and identity? Why, to them, is being queer a delight and a cause for celebration, when for me it was something for which I felt I had to apologize, over and over, and to endlessly explain?