Month: March 2015

Another interview with a partner whose narrative is in Transgress Press’ Love, Always.

1. What didn’t you write about in your narrative but wish you had?

I wish I had known at the beginning that they were going to discard the conceit that it was a “letter to our partners”; I submitted early, before they abandoned that title and theme and opened it up to all sorts of contributions. (I actually love the new approach and think it was brilliant, so I’m not complaining about the change!) It seemed weird to me to write to my wife about things that she was there for, so I omitted a lot of discussion about, for example, the times when the year she spent in transition was tough in ways I never anticipated. I knew the “big stuff” would be a tremendous deal, but I didn’t expect to find myself crying every time I looked at her newly pierced ears, or that sometimes her gender issues would overshadow everything to the point where I’d be desperate for a conversation about something banal like who forgot to pick up cat litter. I didn’t realize that the process of transition wasn’t going to be about huge milestones so much as a million little things, all of them nibbling away at the life I knew and replacing it with the unknown. There were indeed some huge milestones, but when they came, I tended to have had a lot of warning and to cope very well.

I also didn’t want to make her feel guilty, and composing a letter ostensibly to her of “ways you made me suffer” seemed likely to do so. Particularly when, at this late date, we’ve both hashed this stuff out often enough that it would seem like re-opening wounds that have (genuinely) healed. But I think that sort of thing is important to tell because it shows that happy ever afters are possible… and that like most things in marriage, it takes work and determination and sometimes tears.

Oh, right, and lest I look like a saint, I kind of wish there’d been a way to shoehorn in the anecdote about the time I screamed “How can you be fine with growing breasts but afraid to buy a bra?!!” at the top of my lungs and then fled weeping into the bedroom and slammed the door. It’s easy to tell a story with smoothed edges and narrative flow after the fact, but the reality was messy and complicated and sometimes involved me completely losing the plot.
Continue reading “Five Questions With… Tasha”