My wife is not a woman

***

My wife is not a woman.

We waited until we could actually be legally married. We didn’t want to be palmed off with a partnership, civil or otherwise. We got our wish, too, in the middle of what was to be just one of many years from hell; carried there by friends and family who came together and let us ride a wave of love and support, just when we needed it.

I had been married before, and my ex-husband was there at our wedding, with his neat, new, conventional family, a little bemused by it all. This wedding made up for that one, and for being 25 years later came in at easily half the price too. You get what you don’t pay for, so often in life. From hymns at the village church, hotel catering and hired dj to free room at the local social club, hand-written vows, food truck and ice cream van. You know which one rocked the hardest.

I can remember the moment I made the decision, and stepped out of the safety of hetero-conventionality, and the security that we still carry in those age old gender roles. I hadn’t realised how firmly they were entrenched until I not only gave them up, but took on something new. Suddenly, to take the lead in the dance, and be the one relied upon, no longer the one doing the relying. Holding, not held. The old fairytales were no more a part of this miscellany: we were writing our own fables. But it just so happened that we wrote together like a dream.

We should write again, you and I.

God, it’s been so hard to find ourselves, considering we’ve been right here, the whole time. Things I thought I wanted, or dared reach for, but didn’t really dare at all, it turned out. Fear and sadness and far too many things to try to hold together with frayed string, pva and hope. Cats and kittens, chickens and eggs, waifs and strays and love and pain. A new house, and an old one, left full of regret.

A house with space. Space to breathe. Space for new beginnings. So many new beginnings; new shoots, springing forth and climbing towards the sun. Overgrown, under-watered; lost chances hidden in the weeds. But we go back out, and try again, time and again. See what is waiting to thwart us, this time.

I was never much of a dancer. I was not so much leading as creating a close facsimile of the same. So good, I fooled myself too, most of the time. But fooling yourself is hard work. It wears you down, especially when there’s so much else to do, too. The tighter you grip, the more it all slips through your fingers.

This isn’t who I was supposed to be.

It mattered so much, to keep everything afloat. It cost so much effort, that in the end, that’s all there was. A brittle patchwork of responsibility and pain, and for god’s sake, don’t stop dancing, or someone will notice how little of you there is left.

I’m sorry. No one should have to pick up the pieces of another person, time and again. Lose them to pain and exhaustion and despair, and find that just when that job is done, and the storm is weathered, the hurricane hits. If ‘in sickness and in health’ said, ‘with bath lifts and commodes’, perhaps people would not leap into weddings quite so starry-eyed, and find that sometimes, love is not all you need, after all. I don’t want this to be the whole story. This is just a chapter, and it will not define me, or us.

This is not who I was supposed to be. It will not be who I am.

But my wife… I’ve got to see you take yourself apart and begin to build yourself anew, with tools you were never given so you had to make them yourself, too. Confronting how you’ve been let down, and left waiting for the reparations that never came, the closure that will never be. Taking down walls to make foundations. One step at a time, learning to run again.

You built yourself anew, and when that shell cracked and there you were, shiny, strong and reborn, you knew who you were meant to be. Who you had been, all along. Telling people has not yet been a surprise. All those times you were misgendered, your whole life, it was just you, shining through.

You are stronger, every day. Your edges becoming harder lines; your stance, your smell, becoming new and strange and yet familiar too. The physicality you always had is intensified, distilled, purer. Your voice, already deeper. I look at you, and see who you were always going to be.

My wife is not a woman.

My husband is a man.