Long Hard Road Out Of Hell

We are again talking, and things have eased up considerably.  However there is a rim, an edge, a fence of don't trespass here feeling about most of our time together.  And in an award winning show of passive aggressive, T.H. (The Husband) started asking me what was wrong in completely inappropriate times.  When?  Oh, how about in line at the grocery store, when he can see I'm just barely hanging on to my tears.  Or how about 5 minutes from our destination?  Or when I'm cooking supper with some of the kids in the garage, who are over working on their sleds (Alaskan wordage for snow machine), and T.H. just came in to retrieve something?  Yeah, that is what life was like since the drive talk.  As time passed, I once again felt corralled by his silence, knowing he didn't really want to talk about, wasn't ready to talk about it.  And to give T.H. his props his entire world view had shape sifted into something he isn't comfortable with.


I'm sitting on the sofa knitting, tears silently running down my face, he's sitting at the table reading one of his magazines.  He makes some comment about what he was reading to me, and when I gave him an answer with tears clearly in my voice, he got ruffled up and complained that he was tired me always being sad and how it was impacting his life.  I went from sad to instant furious.  The starting bell for the bout rang and off I went.


"How dare you!  It's not always about you!"


After some sharp back and forth, we both calmed down and started to talk, and this time we really talked openly.  He actually listened to what I had to say, and made some very concise comments.  By this time I was snuggled on his lap, his arms tenderly around me, my head resting against his neck.  




"I've never told you this, but all my friends thought I had an awesome wife.  They kept telling me that you were completely different than any woman they ever met, you made sense to them.  I guess we know why now, huh?"




He finally admitted how after our last talk he had been thinking and while he kept coming up and looking at, poking it with a stick, the idea of me being a inner guy was the truth.  And it scared him.  If he asked me once, he asked me countless times the same question that must have been burning him.


"You're not planning on leaving me are you?"


After telling him no, I had to desire to leave him, more times than he asked, things slowed down and suddenly the silence grew heavy like the air will before a thunderstorm.  


"I have no right to ask this of you, but will you please not change your body?"


We did finally and without holding anything back both talk and listen to each other.  I told him of my desire for top surgery.  After talking about it quite a long while, T.H. told me that surgery would be a deal breaker for him.  Ya know what?  I totally understand his viewpoint on this.  And for the time being am willing to honor his wishes.  We ended the conversation with agreeing to come back and re-visit this subject about top surgery again at a much later date.  This will give us both time to decide what is really important to us both.  What we can live with, and what we can live without.


Since then things have rebounded back to before I started this conversation back in December.  We are happy again, no shadows, no fenced off topics that are forbidden to speak about.  And ya know what?  It feels so very good to be free of angst and hurt, and just wallow in our usual relationship.  I'm not innocent enough to believe that this is the last time that thunderheads will build up and hasty and hurtful words will be hurled at each other.  I know they will be, but now I have hope that since we manage this last and greatest hurdle we should be able to weather any thing.


I got what I wanted, acknowledgement from him that he recognized my inner boy.  And he got what he wanted/needed from me, that I did still love him and wasn't planning on leaving.  I'm very sure that as time passes things will need to be adjusted and subtlety altered to fit both my stretching out of my shell and his accommodation of my needs.  Sensitive will be our new byword.  We are going to have to be sensitive of each others needs in our requests in a way that is going to be new for us both.


I want to thank anonymous for your wonderful comments!  Thank you very much, your comments meant a great deal to me.


And I got a very nice comment from Micky, that I want to comment on.  


If you were a boy you'd need to do pretty well everything as a boy or you'd be back in a quandary.
I don't think so, what I need from my viewpoint, is a way to express my boy.


If you are a girl but can part-time as a boy then you can pick and choose which behaviours (learned or 'natural') you want to follow at any particular time.
This is very true, and is what I'm trying to do now.

There is a big expectation in anyone changing their physiology because they then have to be 'super-male' (in your case). Being 'ordinary' or 'half-hearted' are not good enough. Everyone who has been prepared for the new you will want to see someone different emerge.
See, I'm not to sure about this.  What I see looking at the world is that there are women who are rather masculine, and men who are rather feminine, and then the whole beautiful spectrum between. I think that people would take me as I am, but that is me, always with my glass way more than half full... 



Are you really so very different from the bi-person you can be now?
No, I'm not.  What I'm playing out here in blogger is my adolescence.  For better or worse, I'm just like a teen now, trying to figure out who I am, what I am, and who I want to be when I "grow up".  And you hit the nail squarely on the head, I am a bi-person who is trying to figure out what I want.  

It is, you know, an enormous step. 
But all of life is an enormous step and leap into the great wide unknown.