Love Lives Here

by Amanda Jette Knox

  “Finally, a legitimate veto.” She thought for a moment. “How about Zoë?”

  “I love the name Zoë!” I said. The aunt of my childhood friend Emmy had that name. She lived out West and used to come visit from time to time. I was always taken by her style, attitude and sense of adventure. Unlike her sisters, who’d stayed local, she had gone off to build a life for herself on the other side of the country, and from my young vantage point, she always seemed to come back with more self-assuredness than she’d had the last time. Zoë was a perfect name to start anew.

  “I like it too,” she replied. “And it’s the furthest thing from an ‘A’ name.” We high-fived. A few toddlers looked up at us.

  “It suits you, Zoë,” I said, smiling.

  We turned and made our way back to the car, just me and Zoë, and I reached for her hand. It surprised both of us, but it also felt…right. I had held this hand for over two decades. But with relationship changes on the horizon, this might be one of the last times. The conflicting feelings of rightness and wrongness created a tug-of-war in my chest.

  I took a breath and focused on what was in front of me, what I knew for certain.

  Zoë. I had a wife named Zoë.

  * * *

  —

  Zoë.

  The girl from Peterborough had a name now. A real name that rolled off the tongue and felt right in a way her given name never had.

  For so long, she had hidden from the world, vowing never to step outside her cocoon. Now, awake and aware on a sunny July day, she could almost hear her new name carried on the breeze. She had so much still to do and so many fears to overcome. But this day, in this moment, she was choosing to push forward and live.

  She hadn’t always wanted to live. Once, years before, she had run out into a snowstorm—bootless, coatless—away from a late-night argument and her wife’s insistence that she tell her what was wrong. She had almost spoken the words “I’m not a man!” out loud, and the proximity of that truth was too much to bear. So she ran, leaving the door wide open, tears streaming down her face, hoping to outrun the woman inside her just as she had once tried to outrun the girl within. She wanted to run far and fast, to freeze in the frigid Canadian landscape, to die of exposure, to fall peacefully and permanently asleep, to never come home. She could hear her name, the man’s name that didn’t fit, being shouted from the doorway, almost lost in the howling wind.

  Aerik was a preschooler at the time, and in that moment, Zoë believed he would be better off without someone who could never truly be a father to him. She believed her young wife would be better off meeting someone new, someone less broken to build a life with. She didn’t want to be alive in this prison she had built for herself—the one society had insisted would bring her joy.

  Reason got the better of her and she returned home before frostbite set in. I stood at the door with tears in my eyes. “I was so worried about you. Why did you do that? We need you.”

  The next day, she tried to resume life as normal. Denial slowly buried the truth. It would take many more years and a talk in a parking lot to start to feel right.

  Zoë: the most powerful two syllables she had ever spoken. She could finally be the girl she always knew she was.

  Zoë, holding her wife’s hand in the sun.

  * * *

  —

  “I’m surprised it took you as long as it did to figure it out,” Zoë said to me while we were making dinner that evening.

  “I didn’t figure it out,” I said, stirring the taco seasoning into the pan. “I guessed.”

  “Did you, though?” she asked. “It’s a weird thing to just guess.”

  “Not when we have a trans child.”

  “Maybe. Or maybe you knew but didn’t want to look at it?”

  I stared at the sizzling pan of ground beef as memories of the past two decades played in my mind like old movies.

  Flashback: Her, as “him,” standing awkwardly in a group of guys at one of the few parties we had hosted back then. I could see she was feigning interest, trying to make conversation on topics she cared little about. She held her body stiffly, looked uncomfortable and awkward. Why did my partner have such a hard time relating to my friends’ partners? It always set us apart from them, and I was sure it was one of the reasons why we weren’t invited to a lot of couples’ get-togethers.

  In the kitchen, where the women had gathered to make small talk and snack on appetizers, I blended in easily with my friends. After glancing over at us a little too often, my partner told the guys she was going to grab more chips and made her way into the kitchen, where she lingered outside our circle of women. She laughed at some of our jokes, made a few comments and visibly loosened up for a short while. And then, like a light suddenly being switched off, her body tensed again. She turned away, refilled the empty chip bowl she had been carrying and made her way back into the living room to rejoin the testosterone-charged group she had been told she was a part of for life. The men were talking hockey now, rather loudly, and that uncomfortable look with the fake smile crept back onto her face.

  I had always known she wasn’t one of the guys. I just didn’t know to what extent.

  Another flashback: We were in our current home a year ago, watching the My Little Pony reboot with the kids one weekend.

  “This show is so good,” she said. “I’m kind of a fan.”

  I thought she was saying it for the benefit of our youngest. I’ve always called Jackson our Little David Bowie. He identifies as a boy but could often be more fluid in his presentation and preferences when he was younger. He loved having his nails painted (I once wrote a blog post about this that made its way onto NBC’s Today show) and thought high heels were great. But as he got older, peer pressure seeped into his world and he started to push out some of the more “feminine” things. I thought Zoë, still presenting as his dad, was trying to lead by example. So I joined in.

  “I love that you’re a fan. It says a lot about a man when he can say he likes something and not care what other people think.”

  “So you’re a brony!” Jackson declared. “That’s what they call guys who like the show.”

  “I guess, sure,” Zoë mumbled, suddenly tense. The rain cloud was forming again.

  I found her response a bit odd but chalked it up to a dislike of the title, not a dislike of how the world saw her.

  I remembered another occasion a few years earlier. She was cutting the grass of our half-acre lot in the scorching heat. First the lawn tractor, then the mower, then the trimmer. It was a job she never looked forward to doing. Most guys I knew loved yard day. It involved a couple of cold beers, good music and some time alone with their thoughts. I remembered my dad escaping into yard work and seemingly enjoying every sweltering minute. But I tried not to stereotype; not all men like the standard masculine things. I already knew I was the one with the spouse who didn’t like hockey or golfing or going out on the boat to drink beers and catch fish. Why should cutting the grass be any different?

  “Just take your shirt off!” I called out the front door. “It might be less awful in this heat if you did!”

  “No, I’m fine!” she called back over the lawnmower, pushing and pulling it in and out of the ditch in front of our house.

  “I don’t get it. Why not? It’s one of the nice things about being a guy. I can put some sunscreen on you. I’ll go get it, okay? You’ll feel so much better!”

  “I said I’m fine!” she yelled back, a little too harshly. “Just drop it. I’m good. Thanks.”

  I stepped back into the house, wondering what I had done wrong.

  And then I remembered the Pride parade, when Zoë and Alexis got those matching face paintings: purple sparkly butterflies. I thought she was being a modern dad.

  She was trying to tell me, “This is who I am. This is who I’ve always been. I’m just like her. Why can’t you see that?”

  No, I truly had no idea until that night at Quitters. I wasn’t looking for it and
I never suspected. I asked the right question, that’s all.

  Now everything was starting to make a lot more sense. It was like watching a movie when you already know the ending.

  * * *

  —

  I have a close circle of five female friends. They had all known each other for years before I turned up, but I was still welcomed into this group of funny, eclectic, good-hearted people. We had a routine of meeting on Wednesday mornings in a food court at a local mall. It’s an awkward place to tell your friends that your husband is, in fact, your wife.

  When I had confided in them about Alexis, their immediate response was to offer unconditional support. They were kind and comforting at a time when others were walking away. I counted myself lucky to have them as friends.

  But with Zoë coming out too, I wondered how much change this circle could take. How would we be viewed now, as a family with two transgender people in it? Would friends be able to wrap their minds around that as easily as they had Alexis’s situation? Would these women love us through it a second time, or would I be picking up a box of comfort crullers on my way out of the mall? Did they taste as good behind a steering wheel while sobbing?

  I hoped not to find out.

  The food court was busy that morning. I grabbed a coffee and sought out a quieter area. I sat on a hard white chair and breathed deeply and mindfully, enjoying the relative solitude and anonymity of a mall full of people. I had come to relish alone time. With the kids home for the summer, I had to wear fake smiles all the time, and I was walking on eggshells around Zoë, not wanting to make her feel worse about something she couldn’t help. Leaving the house whenever I could became a necessity. It meant I didn’t have to pretend that everything was fine, that I was fine. I used work as a guilt-free excuse—I was writing for a large online parenting publication, and I penned articles at Starbucks under the guise of needing a disruption-free environment.

  “But your room is quiet,” Alexis would say quizzically. “Quieter than Starbucks, for sure.”

  But Starbucks had lattes with extra foam and no emotional load. It had genuinely happy people in it, which made me genuinely happy, if only for a few minutes. I just couldn’t explain that to her.

  And I still didn’t know how to explain this big life change to my friends. One by one, they trickled into the food court. We greeted each other with hugs, grabbed food and drinks, and settled down to make small talk. I tried to take in this moment, the laughs and inappropriate jokes, the complaints about someone’s tween not getting up for school on time, the lament about how messy someone else’s house was. It was so normal, so everyday, with typical struggles and typical complaints—a stark contrast to how I felt in my own life right now. I missed caring about how messy my house was.

  “You’ve been pretty quiet,” one of them said to me after a while. “What’s new with you?”

  The spell broke, the moment of blessed ordinariness fell away, and I was now staring at five faces I had grown to love.

  “My husband came out to me,” I said, ripping off the bandage. The smiles hung for a second, then dropped at the realization of what I had just said. “It seems I have a wife.”

  There was a pause. Then one of them said, “Oh, honey. What happened?”

  I spilled it. The pain and fear of the past several days poured out of me: the trip to Pride, the parking lot conversation, all the worry I had been holding in about how this was going to change our lives. “She could lose her job,” I said. “And how are her parents going to take things? And oh my God, the kids are going to be devastated.” I spoke quickly, feeling light-headed, my breath shallow.

  They leaned in closer.

  “That’s a lot to deal with,” one of them said. “I can only imagine how she’s feeling. And it’s going to be a shock to the kids. But how are you? Are you okay?” she asked, looking in my eyes. The empathy was palpable. I had to look away so I wouldn’t cry.

  My hands shook as I stared down at them. “I don’t think I can do this. It’s too much. I can’t,” I said softly, my voice breaking. “I want to, but I can’t.”

  “It’s okay,” another friend said.

  “I love her,” I continued. “I’ll always love her. But I don’t know if I can be in love with her. I don’t think we’ve known love in a healthy way for a long time as it is. So many things are going to change, and I don’t know if I’m strong enough to keep up.”

  Someone reached for one of my shaking hands, but I don’t remember who. I just remember how much it meant to me.

  “My marriage is over,” I said, the tears finally hitting me in the middle of a freaking mall. “My marriage is over, and I don’t know what to do.”

  Anyone walking by the Mexican stand that morning would have noticed a group of five women closing ranks around one, their arms around her shaking shoulders, holding both her hands and telling her things were going to be okay. Love in action.

  * * *

  —

  Surrounded by work colleagues, Zoë was invisible that morning. As she walked down the hall from the cubicle farm on the fourth floor to the coffee station, she was greeted by polite nods and good-mornings along the way. Still, she felt unseen.

  They didn’t see her because they didn’t know she was there. They had no clue about the life-changing revelation she’d made. They had no idea how she saw herself, had always seen herself. They didn’t know she was a woman, and instead saw before them a familiar man with a slight build, shaved head, dark bushy eyebrows and two-day-old stubble. They saw someone but not her. She was invisible to them in the most important of ways: her identity, the core of who she was.

  She had loved computers her entire life and had been encouraged by her parents to follow her passions. As a teenager, she built systems from spare parts after school and on weekends. She worked on a neighbouring sheep farm for an entire summer to get enough money to buy a state-of-the-art computer on which she could code more powerful programs. She was the youngest member of the Peterborough Tech Enthusiasts Club.

  Computers also gave her a way to hide. Even with the invention of dial-up modems, which allowed users to connect to and chat with others, you could still hide behind a screen; your name and identity could be anything you wanted. Zoë, the girl Peterborough knew as a boy, loved technology because it was interesting, but also because it allowed her to bend the rules, to play female characters in games and to escape society’s expectations of her.

  After a rough few years of attempted self-destruction, Zoë eventually decided to try to build a life again. At nineteen, she landed in Ottawa, where she studied computer science and scored the best internships. She’d been working at a global telecommunications company for the past twelve years, managing a team of software developers.

  She felt like she knew everyone there. She felt like nobody knew her.

  High-tech is still a male-dominated field, and Zoë knew her abilities had been more easily recognized and rewarded because of her perceived gender. She had set goals for five, ten, even fifteen years from now, and wondered how living outwardly as a trans woman—one of the least-respected and lowest-paid demographics—would affect that. Some trans people are dismissed from their jobs when they come out, even though there are laws against that very sort of discrimination. Some feel forced out due to intolerance or even outright aggression in the workplace; they simply can’t continue working in a hostile environment. Employment rates and earnings among trans people are some of the lowest in the country. As the primary breadwinner in the family, Zoë worried deeply about this. If she lost her job for being herself, what would happen to the life we had built?

  For now, her job was as secure as it had ever been. But the genie was out, and soon she would be too. What would that mean for her future?

  “Hey, man,” one of her colleagues said as he walked by her in the hall.

  “Hey,” she replied, smiling faintly.

  Seen, but invisible.

  SEVENTEEN

  dissolutio
n

  I WANT TO go on record as saying that I tried really hard to be a supportive partner in the first few weeks after Zoë came out, and often failed miserably. Miserably.

  An internal war was unfolding—one I now call the War of Two Amandas, an epic struggle that will likely be turned into a movie one day. Logical Amanda (played by Gillian Anderson, obviously) understood why Zoë needed to outwardly live as Zoë after years of suppressing her. And she knew why Zoë hadn’t told her before. The tipping point for trans rights was now, in 2015, and not five, ten or twenty-two years ago. People were slowly arriving at a place of tolerance for, if not outright acceptance of, transgender people. It was starting to become easier to find good medical support, to change names and gender markers on ID, to be recognized and respected by people you know and to finally live life as the person you are.

  Zoë had also seen the love shown to Alexis when she came out. She had been embraced by family, friends and neighbours. Not everyone was on board, but it was enough to form a giant support circle around her. It was something Zoë had never thought possible in her lifetime, and it was both a comfort and a catalyst for her own transition.

  Then there was Emotional Amanda (played by Kate Winslet, who could totally pull this off), ruler of Cruller Kingdom. She was the unfortunate relative to my logical side, the blundering monarch in a folklore tale. Even though her heart was in the right place, she said and did all the wrong things.

  Emotional Amanda couldn’t see the big picture. She couldn’t understand why her partner had kept this secret for two decades. She was sadness with a face, anger with language, heartbreak with lungs.

  “Hey, girl. Maybe you should let me handle this,” Logical Amanda would gently suggest, guiding Emotional Amanda to a comfy spot on the couch. “I don’t think you’re…uh, equipped right now. How about I make you some tea?”