My mother only came to the very end of the graduation day of the first year of my apprenticeship. It was a mutual thing really, she didn't want to be around people call me Alex and using male pronouns, and I didn't want her there making a scene and spoiling it. She came at the end out of a sense of duty and because I was moving from the residential training centre to my flat the other side of the country. It would have been very difficult to do that via train, and she'd already promised she'd do it. She missed the whole day though, literally just turned up to collect me.
Although I don't regret basically engineering it so she didn't turn up, there's no pretending that it didn't hurt like hell. Seeing everyone with their parents, happy and excited to be heading (in most cases) home after 9 months, introducing their new friends, parents saying they were proud, and doing whatever else it is that families do. I thought I was over it after a lifetime of them never showing up to events, but it still hurt. It's not easy knowing that everyone else's family cares, and in my case my father doesn't speak to me and decided not to come, and my mother came out of a sense of duty. I had to get away.
