Becoming Nicole

by Amy Ellis Nutt

  When Wayne came home from work one night, Wyatt and Jonas were playing in the backyard with friends. They were sword fighting, and Wyatt was wearing a pink blouse and pants.

  Wayne confronted Kelly, something he rarely did.

  “Dr. Holmes said to go slow.”

  “She said to go slow with him in school,” Kelly answered.

  She was peeved. She knew Wayne was just using Dr. Holmes as an excuse for his own discomfort. Wayne was trying to adjust to the changes, but he was afraid the more feminine Wyatt was allowed to act, the harder it would be for him to go back to being a boy.

  Wyatt compensated for the split life he was leading by escaping through a show called Winx Club, an Italian animated television series on Fox that highlighted a fantasy world of girls with magical powers. Their love interests are called “the Specialists” and their enemies are three witches who call themselves “the Trix”: Icy, Darcy, and Stormy. The witches, like most evil characters, get the lion’s share of the drama, and they look the part with long hair, tall boots, and hourglass figures. The witches are powerful: capable of manipulating matter, specifically ice, darkness, and wind.

  In his pink marble notebook for 2004 and 2005, Wyatt drew page after page of the Trix, the witches. The notebook begins with drawings of valentines, sunshine, and stars, and ends with sketches of a woman frowning and crying and a boy sticking his tongue out. Wyatt was first attracted to the characters because they were both feminine and powerful. Stormy, also known as the Storm Queen, has a cinched-in waist, purple eye makeup, and dramatic hair—a storm cloud of frizz and curls with long white bangs shaped like lightning bolts that frame her face. She is wild, even uncontrollable, and is capable of creating tornadoes, unleashing wind blasts, and stunning her enemies with shocks of electricity. As the youngest of the Trix sisters, however, Stormy is weaker than the other witches, but what she lacks in strength she makes up for in confidence and aggression. She’s proud and quick to anger, and if someone crosses her, she will get her revenge, no matter how long it takes. Proud, outspoken, aggressive, and immature: That was Wyatt all over. Increasingly he was pushing limits, and sometimes even seemed to test his father. If they were in a department store, Wyatt would go straight to the girls’ dresses, the ones he called “sassy” with their bold colors and glitter.

  “Daddy, can I have this one?”

  Wayne tried not to overreact. He didn’t want to hurt Wyatt, but his job was to keep things neutral, which was what Kelly had suggested he do if he couldn’t be more supportive.

  “Maybe for Christmas, Wy-Pie, maybe for Christmas.”

  Usually Wayne didn’t talk to Kelly about these incidents. But once, when they were discussing the possibility of Wyatt someday wearing a dress to school, he said they shouldn’t do it, that once that happens, that’s it, that’s what he’ll be forever known for—the boy who came to school dressed like a girl.

  “Well, that’s what he wants,” Kelly answered.

  —

  WITH THE START OF the fourth grade, Wyatt’s anxieties seemed to ratchet up. He pulled at his mouth, repeatedly touched his gums, pinched the skin under his tongue, and plucked out the hairs on his head one at a time. In his physical education progress report, his teacher noted: “Wyatt is very emotional and gets down or angry quickly. This behavior has emerged most dramatically in the past few months. Wyatt’s self-confidence seems to have slipped.”

  These new stresses seemed to be more about how others saw Wyatt, and him wanting to fit in with the girls. He was desperate to wear a two-piece bathing suit, but Kelly had figured out a compromise several years earlier when the twins were first learning to swim at the YMCA. She’d convinced both boys to wear wet suits in order to avoid the whole issue of trunks versus bathing suit with Wyatt, although his wet suit was orange and pink.

  Now Wyatt was pushing again, and it was getting harder to refuse him with his longer hair and his sense of himself as female growing stronger. Finally, Kelly gave in. Wyatt could wear a two-piece suit but with two conditions: no spaghetti-string top, and the bottom had to include a swim skirt. Agreed. At his swimming and diving lessons Kelly now sneaked Wyatt into the girls’ dressing room. She hadn’t told Wayne she was doing this, and when she told Virginia Holmes, the psychologist asked whether it was sensible to allow Wyatt to identify as a girl in such a public place. Kelly didn’t often cry, but this time, in front of Holmes, she burst into tears. It was hard enough without Wayne’s support, but now Holmes seemed to be questioning her parenting.

  Wyatt had his own questions. He told Dr. Holmes that kids on the bus, especially one girl, often called him names that he didn’t understand. Once, someone called him a “fruit basket,” but he didn’t know what that meant. Holmes mentioned the words “gay men.”

  “What are gay men?” Wyatt asked.

  “Men who love other men instead of women.”

  “Oh! That’s not me!”

  Wyatt seemed perfectly confident of that, but Holmes said, well, they didn’t know yet who he was going to love. But Wyatt did. Without question he did. He wasn’t gay, he wasn’t a boy attracted to other boys—that was as foreign to him as calling himself a boy. He was a girl. He was a girl who wanted to be pretty and feel loved and one day marry a boy—just like other girls did.

  CHAPTER 11

  A Son and a Daughter

  As Wyatt continued to try to assert his femininity, his fights with Jonas became more frequent. At a session with his brother and Dr. Holmes in July 2006, Wyatt told the psychologist he worried that his brother wouldn’t accept him as a girl the more he dressed and looked like one, especially in school. He also felt like Jonas wasn’t as interested in playing with him, and maybe that was because he was embarrassed by Wyatt.

  When Holmes turned to Jonas and asked him what he thought, Jonas was clear. He said he didn’t mind at all that Wyatt dressed and acted like a girl. In fact, he felt protective of his brother and at times worried about how to defend him if other kids picked on him. But mainly he said he just wasn’t that interested in playing with dolls anymore. He’d rather be outside with his friends.

  “I’m growing out of those things,” Jonas said.

  In school Wyatt contributed seven poems to the class poetry anthology, including one titled “Alone with the Music.”

  You can breathe in

  to be alone

  So now

  no one is with me

  SO IF I WANNA RUN

  OUTA HERE

  But now I know

  my heart

  Because I’ve freed

  my mind

  —

  SOME OF THE HARDEST times for Wyatt involved sports, especially swimming, because it required changing clothes and showering. Because sports were after-school activities, Wayne sometimes would oversee the boys’ locker room, where Wyatt had to change. It was a locker room with an open shower and twelve shower heads. No walls, no privacy, just a lot of high-pressure water and steam. The boys would come in slipping and sliding around, shouting, and slapping each other with towels. Jonas and Wyatt were often the last to get dressed since their father was mostly corralling the other kids. One time Wyatt was still in the shower area when one of the older boys said something to him. Wyatt didn’t hesitate. He got up close to the kid’s face.

  “You got a problem with me?” he asked.

  The other boy was at least a foot and a half taller than Wyatt and looked ready to push him to the ground when he saw Wayne headed their way.

  “Hey!” Wayne yelled at the kid, who turned and walked away.

  Wayne motioned to Wyatt.

  “What the heck is going on?”

  “Nothing,” Wyatt replied.

  “Are you nuts, Wy? If I hadn’t been here he could have really hurt you.”

  “I can handle it,” Wyatt said.

  “No, you can’t. Next time someone says something to you, you need to walk away and tell me or Mom what’s going on, okay?”

  Wyatt had never lacked
chutzpah. He stood up for himself when he needed to. This was one thing Wayne admired about his son. He remembered when the twins were in second grade, for one of the class’s frequent writing assignments, Wyatt, who had drawn himself with long curly hair, had made up a story about a girl pirate who beats up the bad boy pirates. At least Wyatt portrayed himself as a strong leader, Wayne thought.

  Sometimes, though, the insults weren’t even meant to be insults. That became clear when Wayne and Kelly signed the boys up for Cub Scouts. Wayne had a dream of his twins someday reaching the rank of Eagle Scout, the organization’s highest honor. Duty to country, to others, to oneself; respect, honor, leadership—Wayne fervently believed in Scouting’s core principles. But at the Cub Scout level, in a room full of unruly boys, Scouting’s principles were not always in evidence. At Cub Scout events, older kids sometimes targeted Wyatt, commenting on his feminine behavior. Most of the parents weren’t paying attention, but those who were did nothing to discipline their children, which deeply troubled Wayne. He and Kelly had thought Scouting was a good way to integrate into the community and a good opportunity for their kids to make friends, but how long could they expose their twins to words that might wound them and tear down their self-esteem?

  During one den meeting, a mother asked Wayne and Kelly, in front of everyone, “Is Wyatt a boy or a girl?” Kelly quickly pulled the woman aside to explain that Wyatt was a girl in a boy’s body and that if she wanted to know more, all she had to do was ask and she’d be happy to tell her about being transgender. Wayne still wasn’t there yet, mentally. He wasn’t convinced Wyatt was transgender, or maybe he just wasn’t ready to accept it. In either case, Kelly knew she had to be the one to explain to others, to be the go-between for Wyatt and those who didn’t, or couldn’t, understand what he was all about.

  The Scouting experiment was over before it barely began, and it was one more reminder to Wayne that his family was different from everyone else’s. Unfortunately, his way of dealing with it all—or not dealing with it—was just to shut down, or, lately, to go swimming in a nearby lake.

  After dinner and helping the kids with their homework, Wayne often didn’t have much time left for exercising, but one night he was determined to go for a long swim. When he departed for the lake it was nearly ten o’clock and pitch-black. It was a short drive, and there were plenty of parking spaces when he got there. The distance across the lake was a quarter mile, far enough for him to tie a life preserver around his foot and drag it behind him just in case he needed it.

  Barely a whisper of wind ruffled the lake’s surface. Wayne pushed off from the shore and began to swim, back and forth, at a slow but steady pace. He used the streetlights from a nearby bridge to guide him in one direction, and the illumination from a campsite to guide him in the other. He must have made eight crossings, close to two miles, when he finally walked out of the water an hour or two later. And when he did, he was startled to find two police officers waiting for him, wanting to know what he was doing in the lake at midnight.

  “I’m training for a race,” he told them. “A triathlon.” It was true, but not the whole story, not by a long shot.

  “Well, could you maybe train during the daylight?” one of the policemen asked.

  Wayne explained that he actually couldn’t, that this was the only free time of the day for him to work out. The officers told Wayne that if it was up to them, they didn’t mind, since he wasn’t breaking any laws, but they had responded to a call from an elderly woman, someone who lived by the lake, who swore she saw a man trying to commit suicide. Wayne laughed, perhaps a bit too strenuously, then assured the men he had no such intention. They shrugged and headed back to their patrol car.

  Wayne knew the exercising, the triathlons, the huge pile of firewood that kept reaching higher, were all about not wanting to deal with Wyatt. Actually, that wasn’t quite right. It was more about not wanting to deal with his feelings about Wyatt. He had handed everything over to Kelly in terms of decision making, and even when he objected to letting Wyatt dress more like a girl, he ultimately let Kelly be the arbiter. With two kids, of course, it was impossible for Wayne not to be involved in ferrying them to their various extracurricular activities or being shanghaied into chaperoning parties. He probably took the most pleasure in doing “boy” things with Jonas, such as Little League. Wayne spent hours teaching him the art of hitting. Standing with his back to the garage door, Jonas would wait for his father to reach into a bucket of twenty or thirty Wiffle balls at his feet and pitch them underhand. Jonas did not come by his baseball skills naturally, though. After watching Jonas struggle one day, Wyatt sauntered up wearing a sparkly dress and heels.

  “Let me try it,” he said.

  Wyatt then proceeded to hit four solid line drives, one after the other. Wayne laughed. Jonas did not. Sports for Jonas were never easy. He wanted to play, he was competitive, but as he grew older he appreciated what sports would not do for him—they would never be the way he’d feel good about himself. In a school essay he later wrote, Jonas concluded he didn’t have the temperament, or the physical acumen, to be a stand-out athlete:

  Athletics are not for everyone to enjoy, but there are obviously those who are avid followers of many different sports….To care for something with such passion is not a trait everybody has.

  Jonas’s passion was his imagination. He reveled in acting out stories in which he sometimes played a knight, fighting off enemies with sword and shield. Wyatt liked the weapons, too, but rather than play a knight or a pirate or Robin Hood, he’d rather be a sword-wielding princess.

  Still, it hurt Jonas that he could struggle with a game as simple as Wiffle ball, while Wyatt, in high heels and a dress, could step up and whack the ball. For one thing, sports was a proven road to social success in school, and Jonas wanted to play a sport if for no other reason than to be part of a team.

  Wyatt was never one to doubt his interests or himself. He knew what he liked, who he liked, and what he wanted to be. Jonas was so unlike him. He knew he was a boy, of course, but that was about it. He didn’t seem to fit the mold of other boys his age, and the more he retreated into himself, the less confident he became. He was curious, a questioner, dissatisfied with simple explanations and therefore more comfortable being alone.

  But one thing Jonas was sure about was Wyatt.

  After one back-and-forth between Wayne and Wyatt regarding feminine clothing, Jonas came up to his father and said, “Face it, Dad, you have a son and a daughter.”

  CHAPTER 12

  Transitions

  Throughout the third and fourth grades other students in his class referred to Wyatt using male pronouns. In their minds he was a “boy-girl” as he’d told them on more than one occasion. Older kids might occasionally tease Wyatt, but if there were parents who weren’t quite sure what it all meant, they kept it to themselves. Anxiety about how others saw him sometimes caused Wyatt to act out and his tics to flare up, but there was also a growing sense of self-esteem. Increasingly he was looking more feminine, and while keeping in mind Virginia Holmes’s guidance about going slow, Kelly was increasingly allowing Wyatt to wear more girlish clothes both at home and in public. He still begged his mother to let him wear skirts and dresses to school, but without success.

  Early in the fourth grade, Wyatt’s teacher, Mrs. Kreutz, gave the class an assignment to go home and draw a self-portrait that she would then hang in the school’s hallway. A couple of days later, at about one o’clock in the afternoon, Sara Kreutz scurried into the office of the school counselor, Lisa Erhardt, and closed the door.

  “Lisa, I need your help.” Kreutz held up a piece of paper. It was a drawing of a girl with long curly hair, purple eye shadow, and jewelry—actually it was a drawing of a bombshell of a girl, Erhardt thought.

  “I don’t get it,” Erhardt said to Kreutz.

  “This is what Wyatt drew for the school’s open house—his self-portrait—the drawings I told the class we’d use to decorate the hallway
s. It doesn’t look anything like him, but I want to honor his vision and I don’t know what to do.”

  “I think we should call Kelly,” said Kreutz.

  Asa C. Adams Elementary was small, with only about 260 students in pre-K through fifth grade, so Lisa Erhardt knew all the students and was comfortable and confident in her job. She had grown up in a small town in Maine. In high school she’d made money by babysitting and was everybody’s go-to friend whenever advice was needed. More than that, though, she just liked listening to kids. They had interesting minds, she thought. So did she. In the course of four years at Bates College in Lewiston, Maine, she went from majoring in biology to art history to psychology. The skipping around wasn’t so much a reflection of indecision as it was of her ever-widening interests.

  In the spring of her junior year, Erhardt signed up for her first class in the psychology department. It was a course in educational psychology, and part of the requirements included spending time observing children at one of the local public schools. She was struck by how relaxed kids seemed around her, how easy it was for them to open up and tell her what was on their minds. Maybe it was because she always treated children like people, with their own ideas and their own points of view. At the school in Lewiston where she was an observer, however, it seemed as though the teachers were too busy managing students and had little time for conversations with them.

  “Is there someone else the kids can talk to?” she asked one of the teachers one day.

  “A lot of other schools have counselors, but we don’t,” the teacher told her.

  That did it. Erhardt devoted her remaining time in college to learning as much as she could about educational psychology with the idea in mind of becoming a school counselor. After graduation, she picked up a master’s degree in the subject through an accelerated program at the University of Maine in Orono.