I left the church I grew up in and my mother believes I'm going to hell, and she's not being dramatic — she actually believes it.

It was a nondenominational church in a town of nine thousand. Three services a week, youth group, mission trips, the whole architecture of a life. My father was a deacon. I was baptized at nine and I meant it at nine.

It came apart slowly over about four years in my late twenties and there wasn't a scandal. Nobody hurt me. That's what people want when you say this and I don't have it. It was just that I kept asking questions and the answers kept being smaller than the questions, and one morning I noticed I'd been performing for a while.

I told them in 2021. My father said very little and has said very little since. My mother cried and then started sending me things — articles, sermons, a book. For two years.

Last Christmas she asked me, in front of my brother's kids, whether I'd prayed about it. I said yes. It wasn't a lie, exactly.

Here's what nobody warned me about: I'm not angry. I expected to be angry, and people in forums seem to be, and I'm not. I miss it. I miss four hundred people singing without instruments. I have never found anything that does what that did and I'm thirty-six and I think I just don't get that back.

And I understand my mother. From inside her world she is watching her son walk toward something terrible and being polite about it. That's a horrible position and she didn't choose it either.

Anyone here on the other side of this with a parent? Not how to win the argument. How to still have the parent.