The author and her mother during a 2021 visit.When I came out to my mum, she ripped up my birth certificate and sent it to me.I sat in my therapist’s office, holding the shreds, muttering, “I can’t believe how passive-aggressive my mom is being.” My therapist paused, looked at me and said, “I wonder. Is this more in the category of ‘aggressive-aggressive’?”I was very new to therapy and, apparently, very new to the concept of passive-aggression.Friends wondered if I’d underestimated my mom’s born-again Christian zeal when I made the decision to come out to her. But I knew she enthusiastically donned her cute QVC outfits and perfect face makeup for church every Sunday morning. And every Sunday night. And Wednesday night (for Bible study) and Thursday night (for choir practice). She had a lot of outfits from QVC and a lot of love for Jesus, plus a rigid obedience to the moral binaries she believed her faith demanded: sinful or not sinful, bad or good, heaven or hell.Our relationship hadn’t been simple even before I came out. I was born after a failed tubal ligation, the last of five kids with almost as many different fathers, some of whom my grandmother described as “re