Telling my Sweetheart (part 2)

So last Friday night, D.W. surprised me by picking me up at work for a really sweet date night out! It was fun and spontaneous and romantic and very thoughtful. She knew exactly what we needed as a couple, and it was wonderful.

As our date was in the "big city," we had a lot of time in the car to talk, and at one point she asked me when I was going to finish telling the story of my coming out to her. "Even though I know how it ends," she said, "I still want to read it!"

The fact that she asked me that, and the fact that we were even able to talk about it on a date, should tell you something about how things are going. ;)

Anyway, like I said last time, I wasn't really surprised by her initial reaction to my emailed "hey, I'm trans" letter (ouch, it still bothers me that it happened that way), but it hurt all the same.

She felt lied to. She felt like I'd been dishonest with her all these years, which in a way I guess I have, at least concerning this one thing that I've been keeping from her. (Although in fairness, that's because I was denying my own transgender nature as well, basically putting my fingers in my ears and going "LALALALALALALA," like that could actually drown it out)

She told me she wasn't entirely surprised. As I mentioned last time, she'd caught me dressing a few times early on in our marriage, and of course she knew I shave my legs, so she'd always kind of wondered if things weren't really over.

She was angry. She was worried about what was going to happen to our marriage, to our kids. All her future plans for growing old together seemed in jeopardy.

All of these are fears I shared, of course.

After her initial email reply, we went back and forth a couple of times through email, but I suggested that we really needed to talk about it face to face, and she agreed. Meanwhile, I encouraged her to go visit my blog and my friends' blogs (thanks, you three!), and cautioned her against looking at too many other things on the Internet, because there were so many different ways of looking at our situation, and most of them wouldn't be very helpful to her.

I don't really remember the rest of that work day. I just remember being worried about what was going to happen to us and our family.

That evening was pretty tricky too, because we had to act like nothing was going on until the kids were asleep. Finally, we got time to sit down on the bed together and talk face to face.

That afternoon, in spite of my warning, D.W. had done some Internet research, and as I feared, a lot of what she read freaked her out. Rightly so: trans folk tend to have a much higher suicide rate, divorce rate, and a raft of other challenges no one in their right minds would willingly take up. Fortunately, she'd also read Laurie's, Christi's, and giantC's blogs, so she saw that the two of us weren't alone in the darkness, and she saw three people with very different life circumstances but surprisingly similar approaches to our common challenge. So to my friends with the courage and willingness to blog difficult things: thank you!

(well, honestly, at first she wondered why I'd tell my troubles to perfect strangers and not to her. But when I explained that I needed a safe haven where I could work through my feelings and figure things out first, thus saving her undue stress, she understood)

Now, a quick aside... right about the time I started this blog, when I first began to recognize that it was possible to reconcile my transgenderism with my faith and family, I started trying to "Metro" up my appearance a little. I put more effort into skin care and shaving, got some new (guy) clothes in brighter colors / softer fabrics, and - this was a big one - I started growing my hair out. I've worn my hair super short for years — military short, pretty much — and I felt like it was important to the overall image I wanted to convey that I have more nicely-styled hair, perhaps a tetch on the long-for-a-guy side (think Josh Groban or Orlando Bloom). When I told her that this was what I was aiming for, she didn't yet know about Arcee, but she went along with it, because I think by that point she knew I was having a midlife crisis or something.

I tell you that to tell you that once she knew what was going on in my head, this apparently sudden shift in my attitude made more sense to her. And for the most part, she was understanding, except for one little detail: dressing en femme.

To be blunt, the idea of me dressing skeeves her out. As we talked through all the ins and outs of what the reality of my transness means to us as a couple, this was the one thing on which she wouldn't budge: no more dressing like a girl. Go as Metrosexual as I want, sure... but dress like a man! (whatever that means these days... I mean, you can't really say Russell Brand and Sean Connery have anything even remotely in common, yet they're both "dressing as men") Anyway, that was her concern: could I give that up?

Well... yeah. I love her and the kids more than I love myself (which I guess means I'm not a "true" Metrosexual, since one of their defining characteristics is narcissism). But would it be easy to give that up? Don't count on it! That said, I've found some strategies that are working okay so far, which I'll be blogging about soon. This is very much a case of us feeling our way through the dark together, and it's going to take time.

The important thing is, now D.W. knows, and we're working through all the implications of my transgenderism, however it solidifies, together. Over the past few months since our initial conversation, we've had several others like it, and she's beginning to understand what I told her that first night: I'm still the same person she married, now I'm just a little more free to express my whole self.

Occasionally when we're alone, she'll get really serious and ask me, "how are you?" — most of the time I can say I'm doing okay. I've had a few dysphoric episodes (my friend giantC calls them "gender freakouts", which fits), but overall, I think things are beginning to level out a bit into a new sense or normalcy. I'll talk more soon about exactly what that means and where I think it may lead, but for now, I've probably said enough.

I'm so grateful for my dear wife's love, patience, and efforts to understand something she never asked for, and probably never in a million years would have imagined would fall in her lap. I pray I never let her down.