In 2013, five years after my hysterectomy, my mother called to tell me that the doctor had found what might be a spot of cancer on her uterus. She wanted to know about the surgery, what she could expect during recovery, and more shyly, if it had been painful. I answered her questions, and then the unlikelihood of the situation struck me. “I bet you never thought you’d be asking your 35-year-old son advice about a hysterectomy,” I said. She laughed, in that deep and abandoned way that I like to think only I can make her laugh, and for a moment we both forgot that she might have cancer.

I went to the mountains and took care of her for two weeks following her surgery, cooking meals and keeping the house spotless — all the things her husband had never learned to do. It was during this time that I first noticed there were no pictures of me in the public parts of the house. When I asked about their absence, she met the question with the Appalachian taciturnity I have always struggled with. “Well,” she said.

My mother, like many parents of adult children, suffers from selective amnesia. She didn’t remember burning my writing in the backyard when I was 13, or trying to protect me from disappointment by telling me I’d never amount to anything, or the countless times she beat me when I didn’t want to wear a dress on Sunday morning. When I was 9 or so, I said to her with a child’s conviction that God is concerned with the content of our spirit, not our appearance. That morning I sat on the pews in the church where my grandfather preached with the welts on the backs of my legs stinging.

My mother didn’t remember how many times she broke my heart. I know I broke hers, not once but twice, the first when I came out as queer when I was 17, the second when I became a man at 24. But, where my queerness hadn’t made us closer, my transition — the sheer impossibility of changing gender — eventually tore a hole in our shared reality, one through which we could talk about the ways we’d both been broken.

One August afternoon, we sat on the porch swing telling stories about things we’d never spoken of before. I knew her father had been a violent drunk, a moonshiner I’d never spoken to because he had a stroke that took his speech the year I was born. I hadn’t known that he’d buried his bootlegging money in the woods and thrown my grandmother against the wall when she tried to dig it up. I hadn’t known that my mother grew up hungry or that my grandfather sometimes shot his guns into the house while his wife and children were inside. She told me that her childhood had made her fearful of new experiences. “And you were always so different,” she said, “different from the whole world.”