Chapter Five

Vicky was now the proud owner of a UK passport, that stated her gender as female. A change of name deed document witnessed by the solicitor, and a letter from the GP confirming she was living full time and undergoing treatment, had been all that was needed. When Vicky went to pick up the passport, she was asked ‘are you collecting this for someone else?’. When she said, ‘no’ the lady went and got her supervisor, who checked the documentation and gave Vicky her passport without any more questions.

I was very glad it was sorted out. I had worried how she could possibly travel abroad, looking as she did but with a passport that said ‘Male’ and belonged to Anthony. The photograph was all but unrecognizable. Now the name and photo matched the reality. It was one small ray of light in an increasingly stormy sky. Everything at home seemed to be falling to pieces. Despite my earlier optimism, we were not moving swiftly towards happy ever after. In the middle of August Vicky went to America on a photographic project. I was actually relieved at the prospect of some time without her.

Her relationship with Ellie was strained. Although Ellie was trying to take this huge alteration in her stride, it was not enough for Vicky who still didn’t seem able to offer patience in the face of fairly standard teenage behaviour. In Vicky’s eyes, her step-daughter was not moving forward fast enough, and she resented it terribly. At the same time it was all I could do to stop Ellie giving up in the face of so little understanding. When Vicky left for America, Ellie gave her a goodbye hug. It was really affectionate full arms hug and, I was sure Vicky would be overjoyed. Her response was an irritated ‘Where’s my smile - can’t you manage a smile?’. There was so little comprehension of what it must have cost Ellie to give her that hug, to give an act of loving acceptance which drew a line under the father daughter relationship and instead accepted the new relationship and reached out to it. Vicky was only annoyed by such an act. I could have throttled her.

This, far more than any gender issue, was what would do for us. I drove Vicky to the airport. An hour long journey during which she shouted at me about how unfair it was and how I favoured Ellie over her. I did my best to keep quiet with the occasional ‘I can see you’re hurting’. This was not because I was full of saintly compassion, simply that I knew what would happen if I started venting how I actually felt. It was not much fun. Vicky was now so enveloped in pain she really couldn’t see beyond it. The focus for this pain had become the ‘lost’ relationship with her step-daughter, a magnet for all the despair and fear inside her. I wish I had understood that better at the time, because all I could see was an unreasonable focus on my child as though she were withholding the keys to Vicky’s happiness.

Add to this that Ellie had just turned 16, a tricky time in anyone’s life without their dad becoming a second mum. It was very hard to unravel what was related to our unique situation and what was just life with a 16 year old. One day, While Vicky was still abroad, Ellie spoke to me about the loss of her step-dad. She could still see him in Vicky, and she missed him. It was a brave thing to admit to.

Why couldn’t I get this through to Vicky? How many times would I have to tell her to be patient? How many times could she ignore her therapist, my mother, her friends with kids - all saying how lucky she was to have a step-daughter willing to try to understand. She just couldn’t see it. How long can one bang one’s head against a brick wall before getting knocked out? Not this long, I thought.

Before she went to the States, I had finally agreed to go to a counselling session with Vicky. I think I had been very much seeing Vicky as the problem, the one who needed fixing, but we both had our issues and I needed help just as much. The office was in central London on the third floor of a very smart block of flats. The little lift was just big enough for two people, or three very friendly people. The waiting room was carpeted and furnished with comfortable leather armchairs. On the coffee table were magazines. The titles were not one’s I’d come across before. ‘Transliving’, with a glossy front cover showed a glamorous woman with long brown curly hair and very made-up face, all slightly soft-focus and a bit too much cleavage. It was somewhere between Woman’s weekly and FHM. The articles were very much focussed on where to find heels that fit and which false breasts would give the most natural look.

On the shelf in the corner were a series of pastel church candles in varying sizes. They were attached to the shelf with small chains. This seemed excessively protective for candles, until I realized they weren’t candles. They were dilators - a dildo shaped object designed to help a post-operative transexual increase and stabalize the size of her vagina. At this stage of the game that was a bit too much information as far as I was concerned.

The counselling itself was a very useful experience. The counsellor was neither judgmental or so opinion-less that there was nothing to lean against. I listened to Vicky express her pain at Ellie’s ‘failures’ to get with the programme. She was so desperate not to ruin everything with Ellie, that she was ruining everything with Ellie. And she could not see it. That seemed to be at the root of the shouting, and we hadn’t even started hormones yet. She very much saw everyone’s advice as ‘ganging up’ on her. Like any creature trapped in a corner, she lashed out. I felt so angry, I really didn’t have anything sensible to offer. The counsellor gently untangled thoughts and feelings and challenged Vicky and me to think about it in a different way. This was hugely constructive. This was a way to hear and to be heard. There was so much built up hurt and resentment on both sides which was going to have to come out. Better in the safety of a counselling session than all over the kitchen table. It wasn’t going to be a one session solution, but it might actually work.

A few days after she had gone to America, I sent Vicky an email reminding her of the kind gentle thoughtful person she had always been. That was who Ellie needed as a parent. I understood, I told her, that all this rage and stress was a passing phase, but for Ellie’s sake, and for hers and mine too, we had to get beyond that. Vicky’s transition and it’s impact had become the sole topic of conversation between us. It dominated every minute of every day. I knew that was unsustainable, but I didn’t know how to stop. She came home from her trip and we picked up the last argument where we had left off.

The worst was yet to come. In September, nine months after Vicky had first realized she had to transition, nine months of both of us trying so very hard to hold it together, Vicky had her second breakdown. It was as though the anger of one argument rolled into the next until there was nothing left but shouting and anger. She was unlivable with. I couldn’t do it anymore and I wouldn’t expose Ellie to it anymore either. I had thought we were ripping the wallpaper off, but the truth was the whole building was falling down. Trying to stay together as though nothing was happening was impossible. I knew if we did this to our relationship any longer, there wouldn’t be any relationship to save. No, that’s not true, I wasn’t thinking a month, or even a week ahead. At that moment I just wanted the shouting to stop. I couldn’t live under that level of stress and Vicky couldn’t see what the problem was, all she saw was how unreasonable I was and how unsupportive . Though I did my share of shouting and, I’m sure, unfair statements, I still think Vicky wins the all-over gold medal. She told me, as yet another argument drew to it’s weary conclusion, ‘You’ve changed’. Pot, Kettle, black.

I went to my sisters with Ellie and I asked Vicky to move out. She could go and live with her mother. It was our lowest moment and though it solved the immediate problem it caused a whole other set that I didn’t foresee. Once you start allowing other people to pass judgement on the state of your relationship, you also give them certain rights to advise on what to do next. If you don’t follow that advice, they will be more than a little disappointed. Hindsight eh. Marvelous.

How had we come to this. I knew we loved each other, really loved each other and yet we were separated, like a couple who had had enough of each other and were preparing to make the final break of divorce. Except I didn’t want a divorce. I didn’t want this alternative future without Vicky. Yes of course if I could have waved a magic wand and had Anthony, non-transgendered, like all the other blokes I knew, then I would have waved it. I think Vicky would have too. I knew that was a fantasy, and I wasn’t holding out for it. I had been so determined that I was kind enough, bright enough, wonderful enough to drag us all through this awful time and come out the other end together, a family. Why wasn’t it happening like that? Didn’t true love mean happy ever after.

The day Vicky moved into her mother’s was the day she took her first hormones. After months of psychiatric assessments she had finally be judged to be, as we both knew perfectly well, a transgendered woman in need of treatment. Because Vicky’s body will never be able to produce the female hormones they should have, she will always have to take medication to replace them. They come in various forms, Vicky started on pills - one a day. It must have been a euphoric moment, but I was not there to share it with her. I was watching determination in action from a distance. Even though we had separated and everything seemed so disastrous, she was ploughing on with her treatment. I felt very low down the list of what was important to her. If she really loved me, she wouldn’t take those bloody hormones, I thought.

Vicky and I weren’t speaking, texting, anything. It was a strange calm. Life at home became very peaceful, it was like being back in the maisonette, just Ellie and me, no arguments no shouting. That time did us good, we needed peace, but I can’t begin to imagine what Vicky was going through. She did not think we were having a break to calm down, she thought it was all over. As I wasn’t talking to her there was no way to put her right. If she wanted to collect anything from our home, I insisted she phone first to make sure we would be out. She was facing her transition on her own and it seemed to be following the well trodden path of rejection and loneliness so often documented online. She couldn’t turn back though. Even if she really loved me, she couldn’t turn back. If I couldn’t love her like this then she just had to lose me.

A few days later a hand written letter dropped through the letter-box. It was delivered not by Vicky, but by a friend acting as go-between. I suppose I had been very firm on the subject of leaving me alone and not coming anywhere near the house when I was there. The letter showed how very sad she was. Vicky said if I did indeed accept her and want to be with her, then our problems were other things and we needed to sort them out. If her behaviour was destroying our family then she wanted to understand it and change it. Would I come to couple’s counselling? She was already seeing her specialist transgender counsellor once a week and she wanted me to start coming with her to that on a regular basis. She also wanted us to try good old-fashioned marriage counselling where we might be able to rebuild our relationship, even though we were still living apart. We would meet twice a week and go to counselling then she would drop me home and go away. It felt like a step forward. I sent her a text. ‘Yes’.

We had problems, but they were not insurmountable and we still loved each other. We were both, it seemed, endlessly hopeful. Maybe with couples counselling we would not build up unsaid unhappiness until it exploded in that all to familiar destructive way. The problem, for me at least, was no longer the fact of her gender. It is all to easy to think that this huge challenge must have been the root of all unhappiness, but it wasn’t. We were just a couple with the same baggage and fears as a middle of the road heterosexual couple. I had been shocked and challenged and frightened. All sorts of things, but I’d got over it. It was not her gender, it was her anger. Her transexualism had opened the floodgates to a lifetime of emotional hurts, they were what was hurting me. I wanted to work it out. I wanted us to get back to happy.

I still believed that at the end of all this there might be a happy ending. The sheer pain of being apart though, was all but unbearable. Again I cried so much my eyes swelled shut. Days and days. My mother and my sister were very worried for me, there was just no containing the distress. They wanted to tell me it would be alright, they would all be there for me, help me make a new life. I had been wonderful for trying to stay, but it really was an impossibility and I should move on with my life. The thought of a future without Vicky was beyond my imagining. I tried to visualize it and I couldn’t. I tried to see how we could possibly go back to the screaming and shouting, and I couldn’t. The path had crumbled into an abyss in front of me and there was no way forward and no way back, so I cried.

Finally my mother, who was beginning to worry for my sanity, came up with a solution. We would separate in the short term, in order to stay together in the long term. I needed to raise Ellie without all this trauma. Vicky needed to focus on her journey without the emotional and financial burden of trying to be a parent and a partner. I understood that many trans women go a bit haywire during transition, but by the time the storm was over the damage was done and the relationship gone. The moment she told me I thought ‘I can accept this and if Vicky can too then it’s not over’. I stepped back from the abyss, there was a way to have a future with Vicky. Just not yet.

So we would separate. Sell our house, both rent somewhere for the next two years. Vicky would make her journey without having to worry about hurting anyone. We would be at a safe distance. Once Ellie had gone to university, we would come together again and ask ourselves the simple question - ‘is this who I want to spend the rest of my life with?’ I believed it would be, and that thought, finally, enabled me to stop crying. It was a good thing, I looked like a Cabbage Patch doll.

I think my family hoped that this ‘plan’ would soften the blow of ending our relationship. I obviously couldn’t cope with it in one fell swoop, so they would help me break it to myself gently. Maybe, I don’t know if they actually thought this, I would meet someone else in the meantime and be able to put this very sad time of my life behind me. Anyway, whatever their thinking, they did not like it when I received texts from Vicky. They had watched me brought to the very edge and they saw Vicky as the author of all that. It’s understandable they wanted me to find the strength to walk away.

The plan had taken the terror out of being apart. It felt more like when she had been abroad. We would have late night phone calls and send long emails to each other. Sometimes I could even imagine it was Anthony I was talking to on the phone. It was still his voice. I didn’t tell my family about those calls and emails, but I think they were on to me. We went to see the estate-agent together and explained we needed to sell the house and get a little flat for Ellie and me - Vicky would continue living at her mum’s - and then later we would buy a house together.

It was certainly easier after the months of such intensity to communicate with none of the pressures of daily life to distract us. No shouting and no arguing. We treasured the time we had together, because we knew it would be brief. It was as though we’d gone back to dating. We didn’t waste our time with all the serious realities.

Vicky would come to the house in the daytime, while Ellie was at school, but go before she got back. Maybe this is what having an affair feels like, I can understand why people get swept up in the thrill of the secret. Though in our case it was a badly kept secret. My family felt I was not sticking to the bargain. The idea was that we should not see each other for at least two years and ideally not communicate in any way. Cold Turkey. Otherwise how would I move on? Moving on was not my idea of happy ever after.

I was facing a particularly unique challenge that needed a particularly unique solution. I knew it looked as though I was jumping ship, I know Vicky was worried that was what I was doing, but truly, I was not. I honestly believed this was the course of action that would lead to Vicky and me spending the rest of our lives together. Trying to stay together as though nothing was happening had actually made things worse. Vicky needed space to be however she needed to be to get through this. Sometimes, if you need to bring all the plaster off the ceiling, it’s not a very good idea to stand underneath it. Sometimes you might need to stand outside for a bit. It made sense. At last we were doing something positive to secure our long term future.

Of course I wished we could achieve all this with Vicky in situ, Selling the house and renting a flat. All that disruption was daunting, but at the end of the day, it was just stuff, and stuff is never more important than people. If this was the price to keep Vicky it was worth paying. Things had got very very bad, now they were getting better. All those months ago I prayed for guidance and heard the words ‘love is the answer’. We both still believed that.

I was a single parent again. Ellie was still too angry and upset with Vicky to even talk about her, let alone with her. It was very hard to see her distress. She had lost her step-dad, and now we were getting ready to move again.

A week later I got a call from my son’s college to say he’d gone missing. Someone had foolishly believed him when he claimed to know his way back from town. He hadn’t been seen for two hours. All I could think about was his cavalier attitude to crossing roads and his gentle heart that would go wherever he was told. What if someone got hold of him. I was so afraid and there was absolutely nothing I could do but wait. Finally there was a call. Clever lad, he’d gone to the college, the one place he knew how to get to. It was closed for the holidays so he sat on a boulder in the car park. Thankfully a member of staff searching for him checked the college. He was sitting there, in the dark. Thank God. All evidence that he wasn’t ready to live independently just yet. An argument I had to make on my own at his next review. No Vicky to hold my hand. To tell me not to panic. To hug me when it was all alright. I missed her for so many reasons, and everything that happened seemed to underline how much.

The 17th of September, 2009 was Vicky’s 40th birthday. We had, years ago, planned that it would be a big party with all our friends. Turning forty was a big deal, it was also Vicky’s first birthday as herself. There should have been a party. There couldn’t be, of course, because everything was in such a mess. Instead Vicky and I, much to the disapproval of my family, met up in Richmond Park for a picnic. We met in the car park like two cold war spies. It was a little surreal sitting in glorious isolation, occasionally passed by dogs and their owners wrapped up against the cold, but I had brought hot tea and chicken and pudding. It was a great picnic. And we both felt very happy. Whatever else, we were at least together for her birthday.

I had bought Vicky a necklace and matching earrings, they were red and heart shaped. Vicky was thrilled and touched that I should buy her such a gift. It was a present for a woman who was loved. After the picnic we strolled about for a while. In the isolation I was happy to hold her hand. We sat down on an old tree stump and embraced. Just to feel those arms around me, to feel that cheek pressed against mine, felt so right and so natural. Everything we had been through seemed so incredibly unimportant next to this truth. We loved each other. This was what we had been fighting for. This was why we were going through all this hell. This love, this closeness was worth having. Back at the car park we got into our separate cars and drove away, and that just felt wrong.

My family were very concerned that I was slipping back into bad habits, like Toad in the smoking room, having promised to be separate from Vicky for at least two years, I was in daily contact with her and now had met up with her, not for counselling, which was OK, but for her birthday, which was not. What about my children they wanted to know. How could this possibly be good for them. I had to be strong, not think of my own selfish desires but about what was best for them. There are few mother’s who would respond well to being told they didn’t know what was best for their children and I was not one of them. Suddenly my tight knit support network felt more like a cage.

I do understand why my family were so worried. They had witnessed the breakdown of our wonderful happy life and Vicky had, undoubtedly, said and done some pretty extreme things, but then she was in a pretty extreme situation. We were trying to get beyond that, and that meant understanding and forgiving. I wasn’t about to force Ellie to ‘forgive’ Vicky if she wasn’t ready, but honestly I think she understood better than anyone else, what had driven that behaviour and that Vicky was trying to do better. My family wanted things to be wonderful for my children and me. That’s not an unreasonable thing to want. Surely this strange man who had turned out to be a woman, and then screamed at everyone for several months, couldn’t be the way forward? The trouble was, for them my moving on and not being with Vicky anymore was a possible outcome, and for me it wasn’t.

I say Vicky was trying to do better, but it was by no means an instant success. And all the while she was racing forward as fast as she could with her transition. She had discovered from several of the other transgendered women online, that there was a doctor in Thailand who specialized in GCS and would be willing to operate with proof of one, not two years of ‘living in role’, and the necessary psychiatric sign-offs. Her attitude was still the sooner the better, and yes, I expect if my vagina looked like a penis I’d want the damn thing dealt with as soon as possible. I did understand, but we were still in such a fragile state as a family, by no means stable enough to cope with surgery abroad, and not just abroad, but the other side of the world. Where was I supposed to be during all this? By Vicky’s side? By Ellie’s side? Being only one of me, I could see a problem. Again I found myself saying to Vicky, ‘For God’s sake, slow down, think of the impact on us, not yet’.

The counselling was at least moving us forward, tiny step by tiny step. We were talking about so much more than the fact that one of us was transgendered.

it was forcing Vicky to face a lot of painful stuff. It became obvious why she had waited so long before exploring her gender issues. Her father, fighting his own demons, was in no position to be supportive about a condition even less understood twenty years ago than it is now. Vicky had sought some control over her own life in her twenties by becoming anorexic. Then she had turned to alcohol, drugs, anything to blot out that unlivable truth, ‘I am female’. There was a lot of past hurt to deal with. Sometimes I felt frustrated that breakthroughs made in counselling seemed to evaporate as soon as we got outside the door. She would seem to understand in the session, but ten minutes later would be saying ‘but WHY won’t Ellie talk to me?’. Patience was not in her vocabulary.

The discussions regarding her GCS in Thailand continued through November, One day the counsellor said to Vicky ‘you are very in touch with how you feel about everything but you don’t show any awareness that Emma or Ellie might have feelings’. I don’t think she was able to take it on board, but at least someone other than me had said it, without suggesting that meant I should dump her. The idea of waiting for corrective surgery because someone else isn’t ready for it, is very challenging. To this day Vicky and I don’t quite agree on the rights and wrongs of it. the truth is, I think, that of course everyone’s body is their own and they must do what they need to do, but there will be consequences if you can’t give those around you time to catch up. It isn’t a question of whether or not a partner ‘should‘ stay, it’s a question of whether they will. It’s not a question of a person’s ‘right‘ to have their surgery, it’s whether they can cope with the impact on their relationships. Each individual person has to weigh that up and decide.

I had trusted the fact that being attracted to Vicky and able to love her for herself would be enough, but it was, it seemed, the least of our challenges. The real Vicky, the one who had gone missing in action just at the moment, would have been very concerned. There was a lovely person in there somewhere. She had just got lost.