The Transition of My Husband: The True story of my Life with a Transgender

I stood on the stool, looking into the top cupboard of the wardrobe. I stared for about five minutes, and my mind didn't really understand what it was seeing. I had been foraging around for a pair of pajamas, as my partner was in hospital having a small operation, and I couldn't find any in the usual places, like the airing cupboard, or the wash basket. So, after shuffling through all the clothes and sheets, I suddenly remembered the small cupboard that he always seemed to be going to. It was too high for me, so i usually left it alone, as It didn't hold anything of interest to me. Or so I thought. after clambering on the bed, I decided that I wouldn't still be able to reach, so I got the stool. Opening the cupboard, I realised that there were lots of clothes inside, and, reaching in, I pulled them towards me,

To start with, I just found a pair of trousers and a shirt, but at the back, I could see something that did not look quite right. It was shiny and red, not something I would expect a man to wear. I did not know what it was, but the colour seemed strange to me, as my husband tended to wear black or dark blue.

I reached in, and grabbed the clothing, and a funny thing happened. As I slowly began to pull it towards me, I realised, with a shiver, that the world had started to tilt. I knew, I just knew, instinctively, that this item of clothing was going to change my perspective of my marriage, and my whole world. My heart started beating very quickly, and my hands became clammy. The material began to slip through my fingers, as though, somewhere in the back of my mind, a voice was shouting, NO, DON'T PICK IT UP. Put it back, go downstairs and make yourself a cup of coffee. Forget it. Hide, be normal, feel safe, don't let the world tilt sideways.

But I found that I couldn't let go of the cloth. My rational mind tried to overcome the clamoring, and I continued to pull it towards me. My legs started to feel like jelly, and my hands were shaking badly. I let go of the cupboard door and balanced on the stool, I began to breath again slowly, realising that I had been holding my breath. I closed my eyes, and shook the cloth out, so that I could see it. I opened my eyes and looked. There in my hands was a red slinky blouse. I knew it wasn't mine, as it wasn't the sort of thing that I would wear.
The stool started to tilt as I found myself fading, my head was floating as though someone had given me a drug, that made me float towards the stars.

He's having an affair!
OH MY GOD, OH MY GOD,oh my God........my legs began to shake uncontrollably, and somehow I managed to get down on the floor and make my way across to the bed.
I can't remember how long I sat there. The room was spinning, my head felt light, and I felt sick to my stomach, sick in my head, and the words HE'S HAVING AN AFFAIR, HE'S CHEATING ON ME... went spinning around my head. I can't remember starting to cry, and was surprised
when I realised that there were dollops of water on my hands, on the cloth, on the bed. My heart was breaking, I felt it crack, slowly opening like a flower, and then wilting in pieces onto the floor.
It was 7.30 in the morning, my son was still in bed, and I had to get him to school. But I didn't know how. I didn't know anything.
Somehow, amongst the rubble of my heart, a feeling began to come back, and I pulled myself up, staggered to the cupboard, and climbed back up. A small voice in my brain said, WAIT, WAIT, maybe there is another explanation. Maybe you are making a mistake.
How can he be having an affair? He doesn't go anywhere, only fishing, and that is with your best friends boyfriend, and her brother.
It can't be possible.
I started to breath again, calm down even. But then I looked in the cupboard once more. There were blouses, knickers, silk vest like clothes, not camisoles exactly but similar, less sexy but more practical.
I couldn't understand it. I was still shaking, and with these discoveries I began to fade again. Reaching for the phone, I somehow managed to get my friend, who, after listening to my hysterical voice down the phone, bless her, came running down to my house
and took over. I can't remember the conversation, but she got me into bed, took my son to school and came back.
Sitting on my bed, she went through the cupboard and took out all the clothes and put them in a big bin liner, and took them out to the bin, as if throwing them away, would wash away the pain and the truth.
She was a shocked as I was. And Bewildered.
'How can he be having an affair?' she said. 'It is not like him at all, he never goes anywhere'
I couldn't answer her. What other explanation was there?
'I have to leave to go to work, will you be alright?' she said.
I nodded, and thanked her, by now automatic pilot had kicked in. And anger.
After she had gone, I went to the Doctors and got some tranquilisers. These calmed me enough so that I could do what had to be done.
I phoned the hospital and said ' I never want to see you again'
I had forgotten about his operation, I had forgotten he was ill. I didn't care.
All I cared about was my son and me.
I phoned his mother, and told her to take him back, all she did was laugh. At that point I did not know why.
Later that day, after picking up my son, and sending him to his friends house for tea, and to stop the night, I got home and my husband was there. He had checked himself out of the hospital, before his operation.
We sat in silence, I looking at him, thinking who is this stranger in my husbands body, him staring at me in pain and distress.
Quietly and slowly, he started to explain.
' I didn't want to tell you, I couldn't tell you, how can I explain that the clothes belong to me? I want to be a woman Nell, couldn't you tell? didn't you know? how could you not recognise the signs over the years. The missing skirt that you couldn't find, the cardigan that had got stretched, all these little things and you just did not see, how? how did you not see?
His face scrunched with tears, sobbing quietly and painfully.
The words didn't sink in. I didn't believe him. This was an excuse to stop me believing that he had had an affair.
' I would never cheat on you, I love you, I don't want to have a relationship with a man or a woman, I just want to be female'
What was I to think?
I couldn't talk to him, and I went to sleep in my sons room, where I stayed for three months. I found I couldn't kick him out,
I didn't have the strength, or the heart. I didn't know the rules for this game. If he had had an affair, I would know what to do, but this? how do you act? I had never even thought of it. I had seen it on TV, in the paper, listened to my friends laughing
and discussing it, but to be confronted with it, in my face, in my house. Oh my God. There was not a set of rules laid out neat and tidy in a book, or on the Internet. I was fishing around in the dark.

I lost myself. Somewhere somehow, I faded into the abyss, and swam around in the dark for three months. I remember conversations I had, but don't remember the words or the meanings. I could hear him, see him, but I did not know him. In my sweaty, hallucinogenic way, I thought he was an alien, somehow taking over my husbands body. I grieved for him, even though he was there.
I felt that someone had taken my husbands spirit, and he was floating somewhere in a void, screaming for me, HELP ME NELL, HELP ME.
I cried because he had died, and some hideous creature walked around in my house. He even smelled different. Every woman knows her husbands smell. Even in a room full of men, you can close your eyes and his aroma will come to you, and you know instinctively that it is him. A mixture of pheremones, after shave and just him. The person that you had cuddled, made love too, run your fingers through his hair. Just him.
Why did he smell different? I don't know, maybe my grief affected my senses, maybe his affected his body chemicals. I do not know.
I would look at him out of the corner of my eye. never full in the face.
I would shudder. He tried to be nice, kept explaining, why he felt this way, what he wanted, how he didn't want to hurt me.
HURT ME? WHAT?
I was broken, drifting, and he didn't want to hurt me. I started to hallucinate. I remember going to bed and placing a glass of water on my bedside cabinet. I could see earwigs crawling up the rim, floating in the water, and as I looked at the ceiling, I could
see faces, American Indians staring down at me from the pattern of the small cracks and paint smears.
One thread held me mentally to this world. My son.
Somehow, somehow....
I took him to school, I explained it to him, as best as I possibly could, I don't know what he said back. We had ruined him.
We had ruined his life, his future, and there was nothing I could do about it.
But he surprised me. He took control, fifteen years old and he took control. He loved his dad, and he didn't want to lose him.
He took control of me. He passed me my tablets when, watching TV, I began to feel I was once again falling, falling... down, down down, into the dark hole. He brought me back up.

I don't know when I started to emerge again into this world of light. It was gradual. I began to sense things, do things, get up and start speaking again. I began to realise that I had had a breakdown, but instead of ending up in hospital, I somehow, had managed to hold on to a little bit of sanity, and convince people around me that I was fine. My mother was at her wits end,
not knowing what was going on.
I couldn't tell her, that my husband was mad.
That was what I thought at the time. I still did not believe him. I wasn't rational, I thought he had had an affair, and this was his way of lying to me.
I closed the curtains in the house, all the time. Day and night. I was so scared that someone could see our nakedness. Not literally, but mentally. I felt that everyone was watching and laughing.
This was the girl who had been bullied so badly at school, laughed at, taunted, hit. And now, of course, she is the one who has ended up with the freak.
HA HA HA HA HA freak lover, freaky freaky freaky...........
When I went to the town, I held my head down, hiding behind my hood, mumbling under my breath. A voice in my head said, nobody knows, nobody knows. But I knew they would. Soon, somehow, they would.
It happened as I expected. My Husband went up to London, and was spotted by my sons class mate, a bitchy girl, who couldn't wait to get back and spread the gossip.
My sons life was ruined at school. He was bullied, hit, embarrassed, humiliated. He hit the drugs soon after.
I knew then that I would have to get strong. I would have to do something about this. So somehow I did. I went to the school, sorted it out, felt proud of myself. But it didn't really stop, not even now, fifteen years on, he still gets it sometimes.

So Life went on.

Four months after the happening, when my husband was still there, still holding on, I decided that enough was enough, now was the time for him to go. There was no other way. He had started to become more effeminate, started taking the hormones that would transform him.
We had argued. 'If you love me, you won't do this' I said
'I have to, this is the real me, don't you understand?' he said
And it went on and on and on...........
But Fate took a turn in this, as it always does.
Just before Christmas, I was ill, so ill, I couldn't stop being sick, and the pain in my lower stomach was so intense
that I thought, ' stop, please stop' I whispered.
The ambulance came.
The scans showed that not only had I been born with an upside down kidney, it was filling my stomach cavity up with water and the stress over the last few months had made it on the point of collapse.
I had to have an operation. And quickly. I stayed in for a few days, with a big tube in my side, draining out the water. As it was Christmas, there were few people there, and when they inserted the tube, the pain was so great, i passed out.
They sent me home.
'Come back in February, and we will take the kidney out, or re build it' they said.
I came home to recuperate, and my husband and son looked after me.
A week before I went in for the operation, my husbands mother died. She was fifty six.
Our world was falling apart, and like two people on a life raft, clinging on in open water, we clung together.
I went in for the operation on February nine, one day after burying his mother.
I didn't let them take my kidney, I had already lost enough.

I came home ten days later. My husband and son looked after me, pampered me, soothed me. Over the next few weeks and months my husband moved away, came back, moved away, came back, and on and on....
There were so many instances that were bad and good after this, but I will write about them another time.
As time went on, I healed, both mentally and physically. I went to night school, psychology, and learned all there was to know about transsexuals.
I hated my husband, I hated who he had become.
Then a strange thing happened.
I had been living for fifteen years with a man that was hard to know. Hard to get on with. He was never unkind, but he never liked cuddling much, sex was okay, but there was something, you know? we never held a conversation that made us laugh until we cried.
I had got so used to it, that I thought this was normal.
We were physically together, but mentally miles apart. At quite a few stages over the years before, I thought I would leave him.
But it never happened.
But now?
The changes came slowly. As His skin became softer, so did his moods. At first I thought it was because of the hormones, but I now know that it wasn't that.
He started to laugh. I had never really seen him laugh. He started to dance, and muck around.
I laughed, I giggled, and I roared with laughter.
My miserable husband had been replaced by a funny, hysterical comic. a comic who looked after me like a mother would. a sister, a friend. The sex had stopped at the first sign of the hormones, but now I had a person that worshipped the ground I walked on.
Especially the day I said he could stay. For a while at least.
He has never looked like a prissy lady, or even a workman trying to look ladylike!
I call him Xena. why? Because over the years since, when He first tried to be a ladylike woman, I said ' you are too tall, too manly, you like bikers gear, be a goth or a biker, then you can be neutral'
So he did. When he was a bit younger, he wore lots of goth gear, now it is more bikerish, and from the back, he looks just like a woman. Just like Xena, in fact. I of course, got called Gabriel. From the front, not so good, but most people are confused because they are not sure if he is a woman, or a biker man with long hair. Face wise, with a bit of makeup, he tends to look like his sister, but more manly. I say he is androgynous. I don't think he ever really was a woman, or a man. He is sexless, and he never has a relationship. He is just happy to look after me, which he does very well.
The whole town knows him. In fact he/she is very popular. More so than me! probably!
Somehow he has never moved away.
He puts up with my relationships, knowing that someday I will move away with a man.
But so far I have not met one that is anywhere near as perfect as my husband/sister/mother.
My confidence will never come back entirely. And I know that people will always be nasty. But I can handle it now.
But that is another story.