Helping extended family understand and accept your child's homosexuality

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Helping extended family understand and accept your child's homosexuality

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The way I dealt with the family members who maybe weren’t real accepting about my son being gay was really to just keep talking. I mean just to keep talking. Probably my hardest person was my father. He was a cop his whole career. He was a motorcycle cop. He’s a full Mexican. He’s a macho guy. He was a shooting range instructor and physical means of arrest instructor. Having a gay grandson might not have been the easiest thing for him. He did say at one point that I had him around my gay friends and I had to tell him that you can't catch the gay. It’s not a flu. Basically, it took time. He would tell me to put him sports and put him in this. I said, “Dad, he doesn’t want to.” I mean that it’s not that I didn’t ask because I always asked, “Do you want to play baseball,” “No, I don’t want to.” My dad just, I think in the beginning, did think something that we’d done. It took years. It took time, but now he completely accepts him. He sees it. He’s very proud of him, but I think you can't hopefully at some point, you’ll get shut down dialogue. You can't get the feeling hurt and walk away. You just have to keep, you have to keep talking, and hopefully at some point, you’ll get through.

View Lynette Vertoch 's video on Helping extended family understand and accept your child's homosexuality...

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Lynette Vertoch

Mom & Entrepreneur

Lynette Vertoch is an entrepreneur with a small company she runs with her husband in Seattle, called Cameos & Crowns. In her words, the company designs "these very cool dish towels, pillows, cosmetic bags and aprons."  She has two children, Harris, 16 and Izzy, 13. Harris is gay and Izzy is not. She is divorced from their dad and married to a wonderful man who has been their stepdad for seven years now.  She and her ex-husband and current husband all parent the kids together (even though they live in different states) and are all close as a family - they even vacation together.

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