This one is rather long. I apologize for that. It also covers a subject which I’m positive I have said elsewhere I would attempt to avoid. But it appears there was a time when I did not avoid it. So here it is:
I was married for over 23 years before coming out to my (now ex-) wife about my transsexuality. I crossdressed with her knowledge for 18 years before telling her I planned to transition, although I never left my house and I did not do it around my daughter. Although it bothered her at times, she was mostly okay with it as long as we continued to have sex and she continued to have access to my money.
I met Becky when I was living in the Haight. Apparently she had seen me at the 409 House while I was playing chess and been attracted to me. About a week after my suicidal episode she saw me trying to sell hippie newspapers to the tourists in the rain and treated me to a cup of coffee at the I and Thou. I'm not sure what really happened but I remember her telling me that she was bisexual and I ended up spending the night at the place she was crashing. I did not tell her about my gender concerns, which I will always regret. I also lied when she asked if I were a virgin...she said she didn't want to be in that situation. After that night I wasn't a virgin anymore.
I started hanging around with Becky and her friends because it was a way to combat the loneliness that I had been feeling. I didn't often find people that seemed to like me. There were many warning signs that I ignored. Becky and company supported
themselves by boosting cigarettes from the local grocery stores and selling them on the street. I refused to actually take part in these episodes other than to be another person in the store...which made me feel bad enough about the whole affair. At one point we were fronted some acid to sell so we could make rent (we were living on Market Street at the time). We sold enough to repay the supplier and had enough left that we thought we could each take a hit, leaving five to sell for rent money. At least we had five left over until Becky took them along with the one that she was allowed. The fact that it involved paying the rent was secondary...there were four of us and she thought about none of the other three of us when she did what she did. Becky was selfish.
I knew this but by then there was a thread tying us together that I couldn't let go. Becky was irresponsible and it was my job to keep her out of trouble. When the '68 elections were over we decided that living in the Haight would not be a smart thing to do and Becky decided she was going to go home to Joplin. Tugged by the thread that bound us, I went with her.
We hitched across the country and ended up in her parent's house. She told her parents that we were married. She got a job as a waitress. I submerged my hippie appearance and got a job as day cook for a Pizza Hut. It soon became apparent that she was
pregnant. Then one day she told me she got a phone call from her probation officer and that she was in big trouble because she violated her probation (she explained that she and a friend had been arrested for something vague) by going to California but that she could get out of trouble if we got married really quickly. A few days later we were married in Miami, OK. I was taking to this codependency thing like a duck to water.
Jennifer was born a little less than five months later. In some ways I was shattered by the experience. I wanted more than anything to be a mother and now I was a father. The jealousy I felt toward Becky made me feel tremendously guilty: I felt the bond between her and Jennifer would be something that would always keep me apart from them.
I like to think I was a good husband and father. It's true I wasn't a very good provider in those early years, but I did what I could. Had I not felt responsible for my family, I probably would have chosen a jail sentence over two years in the military when I was caught dodging the draft in Venita, OK, in 1971. In fact I would not have even settled down in one spot, making it so easy for the FBI to find me. I really hated being in the Army for those two years but at least I didn't have to go to Viet Nam and try to kill someone.
Everything has its upside. The good thing about being in the Army was that I was able to return to college on the GI Bill after I was separated from the service. We moved to Oregon over Becky's preference for San Francisco and I enrolled first at Portland Community college before transfering to Portland State while Becky worked as a waitress. The money I got for going to school brought us more income than Becky made, so I viewed my education as my job, took over 20 hours of classes a quarter, spent upwards of 50 hours a week on my studies, and finished my undergraduate degree in two and a half years.
We lived in West Linn, OR, at the time and it was during this period (in 1974, I think) that I began to crossdress. At first it was just choice of bedclothes. My first assays into this were without Becky's knowledge and didn't really help me that much mentally in many ways, since I felt so guilty about it.
It was during our time in West Linn that Becky nearly left me and Jennifer. She went for a visit to San Francisco with a friend and was gone for over a week. When she returned she said that she was moving there permanently and wanted me to drop out of school and go there with her. I told her that I really couldn't do that and pleaded with her not to go. After a lot of tears on my part, she relented.
It really wasn't until we moved to Eugene when I took a Graduate Teaching Fellowship at the University of Oregon that I opened up about my limited crossdressing. Wearing women's sleepware somehow allowed me to at least be myself in my dreams.
It was in Eugene when I first really started noticing the periods of hormonal flushes I was to endure for the so many years. I tried to ignore them as best I could, certainly I did not tell anyone else about them. At the time I doubt if I really understood them to be what they were. It is only in hindsight, having gone off my hormones a few times to have surgeries, that I recognized the signs of menopause that happened back then.
As a family we were still not in a good financial situation, barely surviving from paycheck to paycheck...often not making it and Becky would write bad checks to cover our bills. I could never seem to get through to her about how counterproductive that was.
I earned my Ph.D. in 1981 and I accepted an assistant professorship at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee. I thought that this was the greatest thing ever. We would finally have the money to do the things other people could do. I'd only ever wanted enough money so that we didn't have to worry too much about it but I found that Becky viewed it differently. The more money we had available, the more she needed. We still couldn't make ends meet. She continued to bounce checks every month.
Becky didn't like Milwaukee and pretty much demanded that I look for a position closer to her parents, so I gave up my tenure track job for another one at the University of Central Arkansas. We moved to Conway in 1984...I've been stuck here ever since.
I actually thought that things were getting better between us. She still bounced checks every month but I was used to that by now. I was making a good living and she had taken a job as a secretary for the director of the Division of Continuing Education on campus. I didn't know where all the money went and that was probably a good thing as it turned out.
Jennifer grew up during this period, of course, graduated from high school and enrolled at UCA for a couple of years. Eventually she moved out of the house into her own place, then back, then out again, and once more back. Finally, after she came out to Becky about being a lesbian, she moved to Lincoln and started living with Julie, who was her partner for quite a few years.
The big shock came when Becky was arrested for embezzling money from her division. She had managed to steal over $5000 from the university. It was a complete surprise to me. Between the two of us our income was around $40,000 a year. It's true that because of her handling of the money I had never even thought about the possibility of buying a house or owning a car less than seven years old and I did know of her history of petty thievery, but to steal money from the place we both worked?!? I was dumbfounded. But as I had always done before since we met, I picked my jaw up off the floor and set about making amends. I repaid the money to the school (by borrowing from anyone I could find).
I couldn't raise bail money in addition to the money to repay what was stolen, so Becky had to stay in jail for several weeks. For the first time since I met Becky I was living alone. It was during this period that my dysphoria really hit me hard. Had it not been for my overriding sense of responsibility for Becky, I might have started doing something about it at that time. Becky was released on 5 years probation after a plea bargain.
All during the 1980s the barriers I felt were keeping me from doing what I needed to do started to fall away. My parents both died (within a year of one another) and my favorite aunt and grandmother both died a few years later. My daughter became an adult. I was granted tenure at this university. Finally, my wife got a boyfriend. The time seemed to be right to finally come out to her.
My wife was supportive of me for about a month after I told her what was going on. Then things started to fall apart. After I came out in public, many of our acquaintances heaped pity upon her and she liked that role. So much so that she began to pity herself as well. She would no longer appear with me in public. She would not disabuse other people of incorrect notions they verbalized to her (her mother still thinks I'm a gay male, I imagine), often in my presence. She told me to my face that she could never love another woman.
Looking back on my marriage with my therapist, I discovered a relationship filled with emotional abuse towards me on her part and codependency on mine. In fact, this is what most of my therapy time was spent trying to handle. When it got to the point that she could not even sit down with me and talk about howthings were going with me, I asked her to leave. That was January 1, 1993. Since we were broke, I took possession of all of her credit card bills at the time ( > $6000 worth) and said goodbye to her (she had a job and a place to stay) with the promise that I would continue to pay for her schooling. She was a senior here and as long as she was legally my wife, her tuition was very cheap, and I paid for what it was. In the following spring semester, she dropped out of classes in the middle of the term, and she repeated this in summer school. Mostly, she was getting to stoned with her bf. Eventually, I told her that I had given her enough time to finish and it looked like she was just trying to keep me from continuing my transition by draining me of money. Eventually, I paid her $1400 to move to Memphis*. Unfortunately, she was back within a month, having forgotten to inform her probation officer that she had moved out of state. While here, she wrecked my car while diving it without my permission (I didn't know she had a spare set of keys), and was arrested for driving with a suspended license (suspended because she had not paid the fines she had from driving her own car while unregistered and uninsured...which I had given her $1000 to do).
I bailed her out of jail for $900. Needless to say, she never showed up at the trial.
I haven't heard from her since she called in March. I know she wanted more money, but I told her about the extra $2000 in taxes I owed because of our divorce last October before she got a chance to say anything. I did hear from her probation officer. Since she never did fill out the appropriate paper work, a warrant has been issued for her arrest.
Every once in a while, I have to remind myself of what happened. From my vantage point now, finally truly away from her, it seems ridiculously funny.
I had guilt feelings about not telling her when we first met. I supported her (and my daughter) at a pace beyond my means for 23 years. I've paid up my guilt. I don't feel guilty any more. I'm free :)
I didn't write this as a horror story to scare anyone else, but as a means of catharsis...and for anyone out there who ever asks themself, "What could possibly happen?"
I almost wrote, "What's the worst that could happen?" but this is not it. My daughter is supportive of me and so are some of my family members. I have a good job, a loving new relationship, loads of new friends, and on Friday I will temporarily have enough money for surgery (have to pay bills you know...but I have two more large paychecks before my surgery).
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I discovered my JCPenney bill waiting for me, with about $600 more of debt than I actually have used. I called the 800 number and seem to have come up with the following scenario for what has happened.
My ex-wife went to a Penney's store and told them she was me and that she had lost her card. Apparently she had some sort of ID or they didn't ask for any. If she had some, they didn't check very closely, since she's 11 inches shorter than me and has dark brown hair compared with the blond that is on any of my IDs. They gave her a temporary card as a replacement and she went on a shopping spree. In legal circles, this is called credit card fraud.
So, I get to make more phone calls today...insurance company and maybe the state insurance commissioner's office, the JCPenney home office, wherever else they have me call...
I've decided to just think about it as being some sort of screwball comedy like was popular in the '30s movies.
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*When we got to her place, she invited me in, and I went which was a mistake on my part. Once inside she demanded that I loan her $1000 at the end of the summer so she could move to Memphis. I was utterly deflated. Having already decided that there was no way I was going to be able to afford surgery from Schrang, her demand would have meant no surgery at all, for at least another year.
I tried to explain this to her, and was told that my life would have to wait until hers was in order. I was abused verbally (I consider her not calling me Robyn, calling me "buddy", yelling at me and telling me that I am not a woman to be verbal abuse). I told her that I could not afford the $1000, that even if she wanted this to be considered a loan, she had received $2000 in "loans" already this year and had no intention of paying them back.
She then told me that if I didn't give her the money, she would tie my money up in court and I wouldn't get surgery anyway. She is probably right. She could do it. And she would.
