"Sometimes I feel like I'm not going to be able to function." "I can't stop thinking about it," he told me. It had gone from being an occasional thought to a constant state of mind. When the older kids were out of earshot, Tom repeated the salient points of the previous night's conversation. The next afternoon we took a walk on a winding country road, with Lilly, not yet two, in the buggy, and Adam and Bibi on bicycles. Tom had a psychological problem, a big one. That night, after Tom's announcement, I tried to believe that our life together was going to continue, because, quite simply, I couldn't believe that it would not. As if I could see the knickers, the tweezers, the boat-sized high heels heading their way. It felt creepy every time.Īt the time, though some friends didn't know what to make of him, most thought Tom sweet, gentle, the sensitive type – qualities that, when I encounter them in my friends' husbands, now cause me, entirely unfairly, to cringe on my friends' behalf. After that, he often found some pretext – it always felt like a pretext – of doing something nice, and got his hands on a friend's phone number, calling for advice or information and asking her for secrecy. One time he called a new friend in secret to ask for babysitter recommendations so he could take me out for my birthday. Whenever I began a friendship, he would edge suffocatingly close. Yet Tom was interested in my relationships with other women. "I don't want you making suggestions like that," he said testily. He was angry, as insulted as if I'd suggested he join a group for the mentally impaired. He was kidding, right? What did he have in common with his own demographic? Tom wasn't kidding. "I have no interest in that," Tom snapped. "This is perfect for you." I was reading the events calendar of the local newspaper. We didn't forget to touch, didn't find sexless weeks slipping by unnoticed. For more than two decades, we had an active and, I believed at the time, satisfying sex life.
We never spoke of the discomfort Tom had once expressed about his gender – but those feelings had been resolved long ago, hadn't they? And we didn't talk about sex. We had every conversation, except the ones we didn't have. He lived with my preference for what he called relationship films and I lived with his films involving aliens and violent death. Tom was an avid football fan and he taught me the game so that I could enjoy it with him.
We took long walks, frequented cafes and bookshops, spent hours at home reading aloud, cooking and drinking wine. Over the years that followed, there were moments when Tom seemed distant and preoccupied, but for the most part we were in harmony.
I didn't think he had suppressed them I thought he had let them go. Given the strength of my reaction, it may sound strange that I thought I could continue in the relationship – in hindsight, it does to me – but Tom had put aside these feelings. For me, there was no wiggle room: I couldn't engage in an intimate relationship with a man who dressed in women's clothes. This understanding was so disturbing, it literally made me nauseous and dizzy. But this time it hit me that he had at least contemplated cross-dressing. I still thought he was investing gender with a power to resolve his childhood problems. Tom told me a few years later, early in our marriage, that he was struggling with these feelings again. Tom had a difficult upbringing, so for me it was a given that what he meant was that at his lowest moments he had wished to be something he knew he was not. When he told me once, early on in our relationship, that he hated himself and had sometimes wished he was a girl, I assumed it was psychological – a rejection of self. I can still see his look of stark sexual appreciation when he spotted me walking towards him on a date. His signals were heterosexual and male. He initiated our intimate relationship and responded to me in the ways I expected. The Tom I knew was sharp, funny and irreverent. We got married, had a child, then a second and a third. Tom and I met and fell in love at college. Our marriage, our family and everything that up until that moment had constituted our story was over. "I'm not going to do anything." By which he meant, it went without saying, anything to his appearance. I heard the urgency in his voice and tried to be supportive, as I would often fail to be in the many conversations that would follow. I know that I stayed surprisingly calm, for me. "I keep feeling like I'm the wrong gender, a lot, all the time, constantly." "I can't stop thinking about it," he said. Sex, among other things, would never be the same. As post-coital murmurs go, this one was a knockout. 'I 'm thinking constantly about my gender." That's what my husband said one June night, seconds after making love.
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