How to kill your children in nine easy steps

One, do not listen.
Do not listen when they tell you that they are hurting.
That they cannot get out of bed because it feels like chains have wrapped around them
and those links of iron are killing them.
Two, scream at them.
Tell them how disappointed you are because A’s have dropped to F’s
and senior year might as well be junior because it’s gonna be senior year again.
Three, tell them they cannot love certain people.
Tell them they cannot love someone of the same gender. Tell them they will go to hell if they do.
Four, do not acknowledge the heavy sighs, the dark shadows that have appeared under their eyes.
Five, tell them they do not matter.
Tell them they are a failure, they are worthless, they are not worthy of your love.
Tell them this with your eyes. Tell them with your hugs, tell them with your lack of hugs.
Tell them with your mouth hesitant “I love you’s”, where they used to flow like Niagara Falls.
Six, cry. Cry when you find a binder stuffed in a Drawer under underwear and bras.
Cry when you violate their privacy and go through their art and find two girls kissing.
A boy holding hands with another boy.
A vibrant watercolor rainbow with the words “pride” written under it.
Cry when you find an LGBT flag carefully folded and set in a box in the back of the closet.
Seven, be disappointed.
Criticize every action and everything that makes up the beauty of your child.
From their art to the clothes that they wear.
Eight. Do not accept them.
Yell back in anger when your daughter says she loves a girl at school,
tell your son the crush he has on that boy is a sin.
Glare, with the intensity of the hellfire you say they will go to
as your child tells you that sometimes they’re a girl and sometimes they are not
and they want to change their name and their pronouns do not belong to a binary gender.
Nine. You have now shoved your child into a box until they could not breathe
and now they are in a shiny, bigger box into a hole in the ground.
Soon it will be topped with a stone that holds the wrong name and you will tell them it is their fault