I don’t think these will be a surprise, and neither could be different either, these are as they need to be. I made a choice to move forward with my life and to become Rachel and even though the other choice wasn’t an affirmative one, it was available, and if I’m entirely truthful I cannot know what darkness I would have travelled. I can only say for sure that there was no available path that would have left me male, that wasn’t available at all.
I met my wife, I like to say, under a tree next to the Concord Massachusetts scout house back in the Fall of 1981. We fell together quickly, I think both because we were well suited for each other and because we both really needed a partner. Thirty six years is a long long road and we travelled it together through good and bad times.
She was beautiful to me. She still is beautiful to me. I have come to really appreciate that beauty is really something that illuminates the world around us from within if we are good people. It comes from our kindness shining through and landing on each other’s faces. You can have the most classically beautiful symmetry in the world, but if you scorn the people in your life your light is hidden.
While I know every reason we cannot move forward as a married couple and respect her, it is still my most painful lost in the whole mass of things I have lost. Of all the valises and boxes fallen over the edge and into the abyss never to be seen again, that is one I would have saved. Not because it was perfect, no it was not perfect, but it was true and we still had love and respect after thirty years of marriage.
At least that love and respect can live on without marriage. It doesn’t require romance.
The other great loss to me was one that might have happened in part anyway. I think at this point our daughter is simply distancing and busy and it isn’t so much about me, or if it is perhaps it is best not to be reminding her.
It is a hard truth we need to accept as parents that our children really owe us nothing. An expectation of love and respect isn’t too much, but especially at her young age life is full as well it should be and I shall not do to her what was done to me. If we do talk it should not be a regimented affair and it will be a proper conversation.
My Gifted Life 