When I opened my eyes to blinding white light, my first thought was Oh, I guess there is a God and I'm in the afterlife.
Then I heard beeping. I was breathing into an oxygen mask and my entire body felt like it was on fire, my stomach was churning like a maelstrom.
Oh shit.
The room swam, and I slipped into darkness again.
Nigel and Not-Arsehole Steve came to visit me once I was "with it" enough to have visitors. Steve gave me a hug and said, "Glad you're still with us, Toni," before he walked off, leaving me alone with my uncle.
There were tears in Nigel's eyes, which brought tears to my own. I felt immensely guilty for scaring them... and guilty that I was angry at being alive, that I wasn't grateful for "a second chance".
"You could have talked to me," Nigel said, his voice raspy. "You could have told me you were feeling like... like this."
Then he broke, and so did I. We cried together for a good long minute and then he moved his chair closer and held me and let me cry on his shoulder.
"What's going on with you?" Nigel asked. "I know you're under a lot of stress with the abortion, and the divorce, but you're also usually so strong, so tough. There's something more, isn't there?"
There was. I took a few deep breaths and I said it out loud. "I'm transgender."
I pulled back and looked him in the eye. Nigel didn't react right away. He waited, knowing there was more.
"I wish I was a boy. A gay boy. I'm just... I'm so tired of this." I gestured to my breasts, then lower to my pelvis. "I've felt like that as long as I can remember -"
"I know," Nigel said. Then his chin trembled, he covered his mouth with the heel of his hand, and then he broke again, a few sobs before he pulled himself together and said, "I think of you as the son I never had."
"I wish I was your son," I said. "And I just feel so... so trapped -"
"Tell them," Nigel said, gesturing out towards the hall where doctors and nurses were walking back and forth. "And then they might be able to help you."
"Help me with what? Putting me in a straitjacket -"
"They might be able to help you... become a boy." Nigel exhaled, and his chin quivered again, his voice shook as he said, "Then you can truly be my son."
And then he smiled, and hugged me tight as I fell apart once more.
I spent a few days in a psychiatric ward - I kept the grippy socks for years as a souvenir - and then I was allowed to return to Nigel's house... with a treatment plan.
That treatment plan involved going to a gender clinic. After the intake appointment, it was decided I would socially transition, and after some time passed and it was determined I was really sure, I would be given a prescription for testosterone, and from there, get the process started for a mastectomy. The hormones and surgery would change my body enough that I would look more like a man, my voice would change and I would sound like a man, and hopefully would pass in society as a man.
I could live with that. It wouldn't be perfect, but it was infinitely better than what I was dealing with now.
In the meantime, I felt unsafe returning to work, and I had applied for disability. It wouldn't last forever if I got approved, but I thought that taking a year would be enough time to regain my bearings and consider my options about my career. I really just... needed a break. A vacation from life. After what felt like an eternity of storms, the little ray of light that was beginning the transition process still wasn't enough. I needed to rest, and only then could I begin the process of reinventing myself.
Nigel took me shopping for men's clothes, and he bought me a couple of chest binders to flatten my chest while I waited for top surgery. He also took me to a barber to get an undercut, a more masculine hairdo than the pixie cut I'd had since I got married. I started wearing my glasses again, instead of contacts, because I felt the glasses made me look more masculine.
After I had been back at Nigel's house for almost a month following the suicide attempt, my mum showed up without warning on a sunny September afternoon, the last lingering notes of summer. I had been avoiding her through all of this - I was still pissed off about what happened at Judith's rehearsal dinner, and really that incident was a microcosm of all the bullshit I'd gone through with her over the years. But I knew that Judith had probably told her, since Judith had been to see me the first weekend I was home.
Nigel came out to where I was puttering around in the garden. "Elaine's here," he said.
I dropped my hoe. "Shit."
"Yeah. I can tell her to, um, piss off..."
I shook my head. As badly as I needed a rest - I still felt fragile, even though I felt less hopeless than I had a month prior - I also felt like my pride had been wounded enough without Nigel fighting my battles for me. And I also knew that as angry as I was at my mum, still, it would be worse if she didn't care enough to see me once she'd heard I tried to kill myself.
I washed up and met her in the living room. Nigel had put out some lemonade and scones and left us alone. There was a very long, awkward silence between us the first few minutes.
Then my mum finally spoke. "I heard... that you'd been in hospital."
I nodded. "You heard correctly."
"You tried to kill yourself?"
I didn't want to tell her I'd aborted her only grandchild - she wanted grandchildren so much - but I also felt like the time of reckoning had come. If she was going to remain in my life and not be cut off for good, it was contingent on how she responded to the truth. "Steve and I have been having problems for a long time. I found out he'd gotten me pregnant, and I had an abortion. There was no way I could bring a child into the world with... everything. Then Steve hit me, and I left. Then he made things... bad... for me at work." I exhaled and braced myself. "But all of that touched upon a greater issue. Mum, you don't have a daughter. You have a son."
There was another long pause where my mum sat pensive, head slightly bowed, then she jerked her head up and blinked as if it was finally hitting her. "...What?"
I took a deep breath. "There's a word for it. Transgender. I've felt like a boy as long as I remember, you know this, but it finally all... came... crashing out, around the time of the abortion. I feel like I'm living a lie as female, like I'm putting on a very bad drag performance. So I'm... while I'm on disability for the next year trying to recover from living with an abuser..." And that, too, felt like I was finally speaking the truth aloud, that I'd experienced spousal abuse; Steve had only hit me once, but he'd left scars on my soul a thousand different ways. "...I'm going to start the process of... transitioning, they call it. Transformation. Aligning my body with my internal concept of self, as best as I can. I'm going to be starting testosterone soon, which will change my voice, I can grow a beard if I want." Though I didn't know how I would look with facial hair; Nigel said he would teach me to shave with a straight razor if I didn't want a beard. "Eventually I'll be getting surgery and lose the tits -"
And then my mum doubled over crying.
I sighed. I felt exasperated rather than sympathetic - I realised that my mother had been very invested in the idea of having the daughter she always wanted and perhaps grieving was normal, but for me to express that being female had caused me such anguish I had attempted suicide to escape my body, and her to react like I'd intentionally hurt her, making this about her pain and not mine... was not what I needed to deal with right now. I looked away in disgust, feeling myself start to tremble with anger. Feeling ready to cry myself, my own heart breaking as I began to lay hopes for acceptance to rest, as I began to resign myself to the death of my relationship with my mother -
"I'm sorry," my mum choked out.
My head whipped around to look at her and I felt myself recoil, shocked. "For...?"
"I failed you." My mother wept harder.
I sighed again and pinched the bridge of my nose. "Lay off the guilt, Mum. There is nothing you could have said or done to make me 'a proper lady'." I made air quotes, feeling sarcastic. "This isn't because you failed at raising me to be female -"
"No, I..." My mother sniffled. She picked up a box of tissues on the coffee table, dabbed at her eyes and nose, took a couple of breaths to try to pull herself together, and then broke down again. "What I mean is, I forced you to be this feminine little girly girl after you'd told me you were a boy. I didn't listen to you, I didn't let you be yourself, I was hoping I could get you to like it and wouldn't grow up to be a lesbian - it was so hard to be gay in the 80s -"
"I'm... not a lesbian, Mum." I was completely taken aback. I expected a fight with her, I expected to never see her again after today. I didn't expect an apology for how she'd mishandled my childhood. "I mean, I'm not a het guy. I don't like women that way. I'm gay, but it's the other kind of gay. I like blokes -"
My mum didn't reply to that remark and went on. "I made you dress up, I made you participate in sodding beauty pageants even though I knew you hated it, and I hoped if you just... did it enough times, you would learn to like it. I was wrong. I damaged you. And I am so, so, so sorry..."
"For what it's worth, Mum, I think I would still be telling you I'm your son even if you hadn't gone to that extreme. I don't think my being a boy is a... reaction to that, more that it's how I've always been. Different brain wiring or something."
"Even so, I feel I should apologise, that you deserve an apology for everything I put you through. Especially when I drank and did coke and made you grow up too fast. I wasn't there for you when you needed me, and I know that telling you I'm sorry now doesn't change the past, doesn't fix things, but..."
"No," I said softly, hearing the steel in my voice even as my heart was melting, wanting to forgive her, but still afraid of letting her in.
"I want to be here for you now. I want to be the mother you need as you begin this journey." My mother set her jaw and squared her shoulders and looked me in the eye. "I would rather have a living son than a dead daughter. I may not understand, but I... I love you and I want what's best for you. I want you to be happy, and I'm proud of you that you're taking the steps to become the person you truly are, and I... I accept you. As you are."
That was it. The tears blubbered out of me, ugly crying. My mother came over and sat next to me on the couch and held me, and rocked me, and we cried. No, it didn't fix everything, but it was something.
"So..." My mother poured me a glass of lemonade, like I was a child again. "What do you want me to call you?"
I smiled. "Call me Anthony."
_
"I would rather have a living son than a dead daughter" is the opposite of what I told my mother to her face in 2019, "You would rather have a dead daughter than a living son."
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