husband so young, and by the inevitable empty nest as my sister and I headed out into the world—but she always had that Good Witch energy, as if she’d just floated down to earth on a bubble and was now happily waving her wand over the heads of those she loved.
I don’t know. Maybe she was just glad, after all these years, not to have to be cleaning up after a dog she did not want. Old Brown had given up the ghost in the early 1990s, about the same time as Alex, and in the post-Brown era it had occurred to Hildegarde that finally, at last, there would be no more dogs to tend.
Her infectious contentedness might also have come, at least in part, from the Lutheran church that had now become a regular part of her life. My father, the fallen Catholic, had wanted to spare his children the gibberish of the church, and as a result my sister and I had largely been left to our own devices, as far as the eternal was concerned. But with all of us—and the dogs—finally out of her hair, my mother settled into the front pew of the St. Luke Evangelical Lutheran Church in Devon, and it gave her a tremendous sense of belonging and peace to be part of that community.
And so it was, in 2001, as I sat down to tell her, after forty-two years, that I was trans, that I felt my heart pounding, wondering whether my conservative, religious mother would find in my unveiling a final sense of tragedy, a misfortune more or less of the same degree as my father’s death from cancer fifteen years earlier.
I poured her out about the strongest gin and tonic I’d ever made for anyone and I sat down and then I spilled the beans.
“I’m sorry I never told you before,” I said, “but I was afraid that if I told you the truth about who I was, that you wouldn’t love me anymore.”
I started to cry, and the tears rolled down my face and hung there suspended at the bottom of my chin.
Hildegarde thought things over. Then, my tiny, eighty-four-year-old mother climbed out of her chair and sat down next to me. She encircled me with her arms and said, “I would never turn my back on my child. I will always love you, no matter what.” And then she quoted First Corinthians: “And now these three remain: faith, hope, and love. But the greatest of these is love.”
I said, “Okay, Mom, but seriously: When everyone finds out that I’m your daughter now, won’t that be an embarrassment? And a scandal?”
And she said, “Well, quite frankly, yes. But I will adjust.”
She wiped the tears off of my face and said, “Love will prevail.”
* * *
In this prediction she was not wrong, although there were times when things other than love prevailed as well—loss, fear, guilt. As Deedie and I moved forward together it was clear that my wife was in a transition as well—from the life she had known, and in which she’d felt protected, to a new life: one that we seemed to be inventing as we went along and in which she felt very raw and vulnerable indeed.
There were times when all we did was cry, day after day, month after month. I’d come home to find her in tears, or she’d come home to find me in tears. Sometimes we both sat there in tears. It was a moist passage.
I know couples who’ve split up when a spouse comes out as trans, and there’s no shame in this: everyone needs to do what they need to do in order to find their happiness. But Deedie and I were reluctant to part because … well, because we were so goddamned fond of one another, and a life apart struck us both as a life a whole lot less fun than a life together. And so we stayed together, and to the surprise of many people who were certain they knew what was best for us, our marriage improved. As I write this, we are two weeks away from our thirtieth wedding anniversary, an occasion for which I am told the official gift is pearls.
My marriage is not perfect, and as a parent I am likewise certain of my many shortcomings. In making a career out of writing so extensively about the people that I love, I’ve run the risk of holding all of us up as emblems