So, big things for me in the last 24 hours. After finally getting home from Florida (perhaps the longest two days of my life) the wife and I went for a walk to talk about us. It was the strangest thing because she talked about why she felt our marriage had fallen on tough times, that we should probably drop the attempt to have another child and just concentrate on being more intimate. The course of the conversation was killing me because I had been thinking about the same things over the last week, but from the point of view of a person with a TG "secret." As I mentioned in my introduction, I haven't been the most pleasant person to be around sometimes over the 15 years of our marriage and I am totally to blame for that.
As we continued to walk and talk, I told her that I had been unhappy and depressed for a long time. Nearly my whole life. I apologized over and over (I think I apologized more in one evening than I had in the previous 39 years of my life) for having put us through that. I then told her all the things I had always wanted to about my childhood, my relationship with my parents and how I grew up both being attracted to and wishing to be a girl. How that confused me and made me ashamed and caused me to keep everyone at a distance. That our lack of intimacy was nothing she did, but totally due to my inability to share all parts of myself with her. I didn't allow anyone too close, although she had gotten the closest. Finally it got to the topic that I had recently come to the realization that I was very likely trans.
It was the hardest and frankest conversation of my life. I felt simultaneously very bad for what I had done and was about to do if things progressed as I thought they might and elated that I no longer had anything to hide with excitement about the future thrown in for good measure. We talked for hours with lots of tears and some very tough statements. She feared that if I were to become a women, I would leave her and give someone the good years while she got the crappy ones. That one alone shattered me and broke us both down. I told her that I would prefer that we stay together, but that I didn't want her to do it out of any obligation. That I felt she deserved to be happy too and if that meant leaving me for a man she found attractive, I couldn't stand in her way. I owed her at least that much and much, much more. She found it hard to understand that I would still want to stay with her.
Overall, she took it so much better than I thought she would. I greatly feared she would simply tell me that if I went down the girl path, we were over. She did not. It was more relief to her that there was a reason for the way I had been and it wasn't her. She said she loved me more for having the great trust to tell her. That one made me cry too, but more tears of happy than sad. She is truly a special person. We went to bed, but things felt different. Like we were renegotiating our intimacy. It was much more girl/girl lovers than husband/wife and that seemed to feel right and good. This morning I woke up and called a gender therapist. Waiting on a call back to set an appointment.
Now, I am not naive and I realize this is the first step in a long journey. It is still just between us and we haven't felt the stress of what this will mean in practical terms yet. Things might change then, but I have hope and that is so much more than I had yesterday. I feel like I told her I want to go the moon and she said she wants to ride along as far as she can. Maybe even the whole trip. One small step for this man, one giant leap for the women I want to be.
Melody (artist formerly known as Megan Dee)
