Seventh Thing, Continued

This is a continuation of yesterday's post, so if you haven't read it yet, you might want to scroll down and read it through first.

The hardest thing for me after learning that Mike was a transvestite was not being able to talk to anyone about it. I couldn't talk to family or friends because this was Mike's "secret," although now it was mine too, and I didn't like keeping it. But everyone I knew also knew Mike, so who could I tell? The only person I could talk to was Mike himself.

The whole transvestite issue confused me. Was Mike attracted to men? No, he told me, he definitely wasn't. I asked him to explain to me what the attraction or compulsion was for him to dress like a woman. This was much harder for him to explain, but as best as I could understand it, by dressing like a woman, he could be both a woman and a man. I still didn't understand. Because Mike recognized it as socially unacceptable behavior, he suggested he obtain counseling, and I agreed.

After he attended several sessions, he asked me to accompany him. I certainly felt in need of some counseling myself, so I readily agreed. During the session, however, it became clear that the counselor was working with Mike to help him deal with his feelings and accept himself for who he was, not to try to somehow "cure" him. I know now that people who have gender issues can't be "cured," but back in the mid 1970s and at the age of 18, I believed that counseling would help to make Mike "normal." As far as I was concerned, then, the counseling was a failure. Mike, on the other hand, seemed to think he could suppress his urges and our marriage could continue on as it had.

Unfortunately, our relationship continued to deteriorate in other ways as it became clear we had very little in common. Around that time, Mike turned 21 and started going out to bars with friends in the evenings while I stayed home, and we began drifting even further apart as we spent less and less time together.

Sometime in the fall of 1975, Mike sustained a concussion in a company baseball game and stayed home, under doctor's orders, for a few days. I was working for Mike's dad, and as we were all concerned about the concussion, his dad gave me the afternoon off to go home and take care of Mike. When I arrived home, I found the door locked and chained, and when I called out to Mike, I realized he had chained the door so no one would walk in on him. As I sat on our front stairs, waiting to be let into my home, I realized that nothing had changed and nothing would ever change. I think that was really the end of the marriage. Within a few months, we talked it over and decided to call it quits. We bought a car for me, and I found a job and an apartment and moved out.

Mike and I continued to keep in touch for several months, but our contacts with each other tapered off as we each built new lives. A few years later, I got a call from him about having our marriage annulled through the Catholic Church. He had met another woman and wanted to get married again. I couldn't help but wonder whether he had been honest with her, but I didn't think that was really any of my business. I wasn't even sure if he'd tell me the truth if I asked, so I didn't ask. That was the last time I talked to Mike.

A few years ago, my brother-in-law told me he had run into Mike at their 30-year high school reunion. He said that Mike was no longer "Mike" but had had a sex change operation and was now a woman. It took my brother-in-law a few months to figure out how to break the news to me, but he never knew the background of my marriage to Mike. As you may expect, the news did not come as a complete surprise to me!

I hope "Mike" is happy in his new life. I'm sure the path he followed was a hard one with many obstacles and heartache along the way. I found that "she" has a website and appears to be doing quite well, having gone on to obtain several degrees and establish an engineering business in another state. I briefly considered trying to get in touch but decided that part of my life is long behind me and best left there.

As to me and how I feel about Mike and our marriage, I'm happy to say that my sense of humor is such that I can look back and laugh. It was a traumatic time in my life, and I'm sure it affected me in some ways I don't even realize, but I moved on, as we all do, and eventually met and married my current husband and built a different life.

So, now I've told you seven things you didn't know about me. I won't tag anyone with this meme since it's been going around awhile, but I'd welcome hearing about you. If you read my blog and have any comments or decide to take up the "seven things" meme, let me know so I can learn about you!

The Seventh Thing

I bet you were wondering if I'd ever get around to telling you the seventh--and final--thing about me that you didn't know. What's that you say? You forgot all about the fact that I hadn't finished my list? Well, I didn't forget--I was just saving it until I had a little more time to write. So here it is:

7. My first husband is now a woman.

Pretty weird, huh? Yeah, I thought so too, but I wasn't as shocked to find out as my brother-in-law expected me to be.

I met my first husband--we'll call him Mike, since that's not his name anymore anyway--when I was 16 and in my junior year in high school. I had gone with a friend and her boyfriend to a party at someone's house. None of us really knew the person having the party, but back in those days, if someone was having a party, half the kids in the city would hear about it and half of those would show up. And it was a pretty big city. During the course of the party, I met Mike and we started dating.

Mike was a fairly big guy at 6 feet tall and weighing 170 pounds. He graduated from high school the year before and had been working for his father, doing drafting work and helping to collect statistical data for environmental impact reports. He was renting an apartment with his cousin, and his motorcycle was his main form of transportation. I thought the motorcycle was pretty cool, and we took long rides into the Santa Cruz mountains and along the highways and byways of the Bay Area. Mike also loved to play his guitar and would occasionally serenade me with his music.

Sometime around the beginning of my senior year, Mike and I got engaged. As an engagement present, Mike bought me my first sewing machine. We set a June wedding date, and we were married two weeks after I graduated from high school; about a month before I turned 18. The marriage was to last just less than two years.

During that time, Mike got a job with a company that built custom conveyor systems for food manufacturers; for instance, Nabisco was one of his clients. His job involved designing and drawing up specifications for the production of those systems--something that seems quite complicated given the fact that Mike learned all his drafting and engineering skills in high school and in working for his father, but he was very good at what he did. Before we divorced, he had gotten interested in electronics and was taking a correspondence course. I had taken a job with a law firm before graduating from high school, but that only lasted about eight months before I decided it wasn't the job for me. After that, I worked on and off for my father-in-law.

Mike was also interested in hiking and camping and would drag me along on camping trips every so often. Backpacking, which was just becoming popular at the time, was something he enjoyed and I did not, but we would occasionally backpack into someplace and camp. Mike really enjoyed the outdoors and wanted to get into surveying work, although most of the jobs were through the State, and the State wasn't hiring.

I mentioned before that I first met my current husband at church when I went to mass where Mike played guitar with the "other Mike," who is now my brother-in-law. For the most part, playing at mass was the extent of Mike's musical outlet, although every now and then, he would get together with other musicians and "jam." A short time into our marriage, I began to hate that guitar! As a wedding gift, Mike's parents had given us money, presumably to start building a savings account to buy a house eventually. Mike used that money to buy an electric guitar and amp. I think that's where the resentment started, but it was fueled by the fact that his attention to his music meant less attention to me. On one memorable occasion, I was in bed, sick with the flu. And I mean the "real" flu--not just a stomach bug. Every part of me hurt, including my skin. I was running a high fever. That afternoon, Mike brought a friend home, and they hooked up their guitars to the amp and started jamming. That was pretty much the last straw for me with Mike's music.

We lived in a two bedroom apartment, and the second bedroom was set up with a drafting table and other equipment that Mike used in his work. Oftentimes, he would bring projects home which he would work on in the spare bedroom in the evenings or on weekends. About a year after we married, I woke up in the night to use the bathroom. As I walked down the hallway, I passed by the other bedroom, where I expected Mike to be working. Instead, I saw what appeared to be a woman in the room. I continued down the hall, attempting to process what I had just seen and make some sense of it. I remember thinking that it might be best if I just stayed in the locked bathroom the rest of the night, in denial. Maybe it had just been a bad dream? Before long, though, Mike came knocking at the door, and I had to come out.

We talked that night, and I learned Mike was a transvestite. What I saw on my trip down the hallway was Mike dressed in a wig, a mini skirt, and platform heels. That explained a few things--like why I would sometimes find buttons missing from my clothes and things moved around in my drawers! I'm not sure how he hid it from me so well for so long, although he said he fought his urge to "dress up" much of the time. Although I was only 18, I don't think I was naive for my age, but I also don't think I realized then the wide variety of sexual behaviors in the world. Looking back, I think it was at this point in my life that I realized I was a grown-up with grown-up problems, and I needed to make some decisions about my future.

TO BE CONTINUED TOMORROW . . . .