"I’m posting for the second time now. I didn’t see that coming. We made a big mistake when we didn’t take MIL’s threats seriously enough. We thought that she’s like a dog that barks but doesn’t bite. Speaking of dogs, the only hero in this story is actually our dog, heavens bless our dog. It happened at night. My husband and me, we’re heavy sleepers, we were dreaming sweet dreams and didn’t notice anything. If our dog hadn’t jumped on our bed and barked, waking us up, we would probably both be dead now. I’m a firefighter myself and I realized that the fire was too big already, we couldn’t put it out by ourselves. We escaped through the window, fortunately unharmed. Somebody had called the firefighters who happened to be my colleagues, which was a weird situation, it was the first time they had to work on their buddy’s house. They tried to work as fast and as efficiently as they could but our house is damaged beyond repair, we can’t live in it anymore.

MIL got caught and basically dug her own grave because she herself said that she was hoping till the last minute that her son would come to his senses, break up with me and start to date women but he didn’t and she felt ashamed that she has created such a deformed human being, so she decided that it is better to have no son than gay son. She basically said she wanted to kill him. So even though at first what happened was classified as ”arson with the intent to damage the property” which would mean softer sentence, after those words it became ”arson with the intend to endanger life” and that means much more severe punishment, even up to life imprisonment. Our lawyer said that most likely she will not receive the maximum sentence because no one has died but she will receive at least a couple years behind bars. And there’s not much her lawyer can help her because she confessed.

And she said such a stupid thing ”Well but my son’s faggot husband is a firefighter, why didn’t he save his house?”

In the middle of the night, just awoken, no gear, no tools, no equipment, caught completely unaware by the fire. Are you serious, MIL? You think that just because I’m a firefighter means I can put the fire out with my bare hands? Many people think that housefire is like they see in the movies – flames and light but actually it is a complete darkness. The smoke makes the room so dark within minutes that you can’t even see your own hands. Housefire is always like a dark night.

Now we’re living with our friends while we find another place to live. Our clothing, our documents, passports, marriage certificate, everything is gone but of course, those are just things, we can buy them again. We’re alive, that’s the most important thing. My husband is done with her. He's so very upset that his own mother wished him dead just because he's gay. If before this he still hoped that their relationship could be fixed, now he doesn’t want to hear a single word about her no more. Her homophobic hate almost killed us. And it is our own fault as well because we didn't give her actions and words the seriousness they deserved. We know some gay people who also have homophobic parents but they have never tried actually killing their children. I guess that's why we didn't think that it might happen to us."