All about me

Angela is regularly asking me whether I still fancy her, does she look OK? But it's weird. I have no notion what she will look like when the swelling goes down. Prior to the op the team of surgeons where all aiming to get a result that was the same face, just softer and feminine. THE SAME FACE JUST A FEMALE VERSION... but what I am seeing five days after the op is a new face, a face I have not seen before, this is bizarre and we are talking about this a lot. I feel like I don't know this face. How would you feel if you woke up one morning and the person you loved and desired had a new face? It's unsettling and I gaze at her awake and while she sleeps and wonder how it will feel to kiss this newly feminine face. It is very very different. How will the children react when we get back? My young son is staying with Nan in Ireland for the summer holidays, he adores Angela, he does not know yet that she has had the op? I need to prepare him. I think it could be a great shock otherwise. His daughter, who is under 10, knows about the op and why it is being undertaken, but how will she feel about her beloved Daddy's new appearance? We have to be sensitive and use our time together to talk and about what all this means. Where do you find resources on this? Who can advise us? We are as a family in the dark. I hope-and if I felt that there was a god - and I'd pray that by talking honestly and openly it will be an easy transition for our family. It is more life changing I feel, than the Sex Reassignment Surgery for everyone else, as it changes our perceptions. Aesthetics are a very powerful thing.



Walking along the promenade yesterday to get Angela an Ice Cream and me a strawberry Daiquiri, I felt uncomfortable being affectionate to her in pubic and I knew exactly why. It is an old personal issue I have had...
I find it OK to be the loving partner of a transexual woman (on the margins of society, individuals who have been affected by this call it cisgendered, I don't know why) but feel a peculiar discomfort at being seen as an older lesbian.... I don't like it. it may be a cap that suits others but it doesn't feel right on me. This is not a new feeling for me, I have had relationships with women but as much as I loved those women I struggled with a lesbian identity. I just don't identify with that. I have been lying in bed at night trying to work out why? Is it internalized homophobia, is it that I want a man? Is it that I am very cerebral and analytical by nature? I feel that humanity has constructed a society with all it's structures and codes from words and the problem with that is that the world shifts and words also change in their meaning and their power. Have we built a world on the back of thought or is it all just in out heads? I find it very hard to explain what I mean because at the end of the day it's all semantics, descriptions, trying to put a definition on how I feel, who I love and how I love and if I hang the banner of say Lesbians Moms over me and Angela I feel odd... but in essence this is what we will become. I so hope we can be this and that I love her enough to accept all the words that could be used to describe what I purportedly am.

I'm experiencing a kind of quiet turmoil, that my positive feelings for Angela quell but do not erase. What will it mean for the future? I have no bloody idea! I do know that it means adapting and that my love is a living interpretive thing that can dismantle fear and piece back together things that previously got broken.

I will write more later... everything I am feeling is I think normal, when your partner has been through a life changing operation and at the end of this chapter, I know for her it is liberational and where the real person she always was can finally start taking shape and be at peace.


I just need to remember in the middle of all this is me- and beside me is Angela and what remains of my family.