“Good morning, my precious angel,” he said, mimicking the tone I used with him.
He had climbed out of his crib, walked upstairs, and found me in my bed so he could wake me in the same way I greeted him every morning. Of course, my heart melted at his sweetness. And I was thrilled to see that my boys were absorbing the love and nurturing with which they were showered.
Those were the happiest days of my life. I was married to a wonderful husband, who was a great partner and the most athletic, high-spirited, energetic, easygoing, manly man imaginable. I had two beautiful, healthy baby boys. I had two great stepchildren. Life was just about as good, and as normal, as it gets, which was all I had wanted when I left Graceland and followed my heart out on my own. I had found all I had dreamed of in my life, and I was blissfully happy.
I didn’t have a clue what was lurking on the horizon.
“Miracle Who Could Ever Love You More”
(Every Mother’s Lullaby)
You’re my life’s one miracle
Everything I’ve done that’s good
And you break my heart with tenderness
And I confess it’s true
I never knew a love like this ’til you
You’re the reason I was born
Now I finally know for sure
And I’m overwhelmed with happiness
So blessed to hold you close
The one that I love most
Though the future has so much for you in store
Who could ever love you more
The nearest thing to heaven
You’re my angel from above
Only God creates such perfect love
When you
Smile at me—I cry
And to save your life I’d die
With a romance that is pure in heart
You are my dearest part
Whatever it requires
I’ll live for your desires
Forget my own—your needs will come before
Who could ever love you more
There is nothing you could ever do
To make me stop … loving you
And every breath I take
Is always for your sake
You’ll sleep inside my dreams and know for sure
Who could ever love you more
LYRIC: LINDA THOMPSON
Chapter Fifteen
I Married a Woman
In early 1985, when Brody was about eighteen months old and Brandon was about three and a half, it felt like we had really hit our stride as a family. My first priority was always my boys, and having two little ones now did not afford me as much opportunity to travel with Bruce, as I had before. But he was very understanding about my desire to stay home, and he never gave me the impression that he felt neglected as a husband.
When Bruce was traveling for work, I never worried about our time apart, as I knew he was a faithful and loyal partner. I did miss him, though, and we tried to travel as a family as much as we possibly could. I felt like we had built the foundation for a rich and rewarding shared life, and I couldn’t have been happier.
And then Bruce came to me one day with a very somber look on his face.
“There’s something about me that I really need to tell you, something you need to know,” he said.
I thought he might be about to tell me he’d had an affair while on the road. As it turns out, that would have been the good news. However, his being unfaithful seemed highly unlikely to me, since I truly did trust Bruce implicitly and had always known him to be a devoted, loving husband. But an affair was not what he wanted to confess to me.
“I identify as a woman,” he said.
“I’m sorry, what?” I asked. “What do you mean you identify as a woman? What does that even mean?”
“I am a woman trapped in a man’s body,” Bruce declared.
“Whoa, Bruce, honey, have you looked in a mirror lately?” I protested. “You are not only clearly a man—you are the very epitome of the ideal man!”
“And therein lies my problem,” he lamented. “For as long as I can remember, I’ve looked in the mirror and seen a masculine image staring back at me, where there should have been a feminine reflection. I have lived in the wrong skin, the wrong body, my whole life. It is a living hell for me, and I really feel that I would like to move forward with the process of becoming a woman, the woman I have always been inside.”
My immediate, uneducated response was “We have to get into therapy to see if we can fix this!”
Since Bruce publicly transitioned to Caitlyn in 2015, people have asked me, “Were there any signs or clues through the years that Bruce might have had this issue? Any evidence he wore your clothes or exhibited any feminine behavior?”
No. Not a clue. Nothing. Nada. Never.
I would venture to say that thirty years ago, very few of us were adequately educated about the world of gender dysphoria. I certainly wasn’t. I was living in my little Malibu cocoon of marital, motherly bliss with my world-champion, muscular, athletic, handsome husband, and my two perfect baby boys. So my reaction to Bruce’s shocking declaration was one of utter confusion, even desperation.
Nowhere in our house felt safe. When I looked at Bruce, I had no idea who or what I was seeing anymore. Visually, he was pure man. The man I had planned to spend the rest of my life with, who had fathered my two sons, and whom I still loved. Every fiber of my being rebelled at his words, which echoed in my head like a cruel taunt. How could he be a woman? He was very clearly a man in my eyes and in my heart. In that moment the very foundation of this new life I had built with my family, and my whole world, began to crumble.
When I was with the boys, I felt the excruciating pressure of trying to act cheerful, to create a façade of normalcy, so they’d have no reason to feel upset or scared themselves. At the same time, being with them only made me worry all the more about what our futures might hold. How could I possibly help them to handle a revelation I had no tools to understand myself? I needed help, but I didn’t know where to turn. I couldn’t tell anyone what was happening in my life and in Bruce’s mind.
My suggestion that we go to therapy right away was a sincere and urgent attempt to remain connected to my husband. I resolved to make an effort to understand fully what Bruce’s issue was, and then to determine if it was something we could overcome or “fix.” I was naïve. As I said, I was pretty ignorant of the fact that being transgender isn’t something that can be overcome, fixed, prayed away, exorcised, or obliterated by any other arcane notion. Being transgender, like being gay, tall, short, white, black, male, or female, is another part of the human condition that makes each individual unique, and something over which we have no control. We are who we are in the deepest recesses of our minds, hearts, and identities. But at this moment in time, back in 1985, I still had to learn that life lesson and apply it to my own expectations for my future and the future of my family.
I found a therapist who specialized in gender dysphoria. Her name was Dr. Gertrude Hill, and we began going to her right away. She was a lovely woman who very calmly, and as gently as she could, massacred me with the information that broke my heart into a million pieces. She confronted my denial in one of our first few sessions.
“Linda, this is who Bruce is,” she said. “His identity is that of a woman, and that will never, ever go away. You have a choice to make. If Bruce goes through with his gender reassignment, as he is now planning to do, you have the option of staying with him after he becomes she, or you can divorce him and move on with your life.”
She told us that 25 percent of transgender people commit suicide because they are so depressed and feel so hopeless. I resolved I couldn’t let that happen, even if I had to face some hard truths and make some seemingly impossible decisions in order to help prevent it.
As we tried to work through both of our feelings, Bruce told me he was considering traveling out of the country, possibly to Denmark, to try to have the gender reassignment surgery anonym
ously and then come back to the United States as female.
“What about our children?” I asked Bruce.
He thought maybe he could reenter their lives as a female relative. He was grasping for a lifeline, and it was a desperately confusing time for both of us. If Bruce wasn’t who he had represented himself to be for all the years we were together, to whom was I married? And what did our marriage mean anymore? I didn’t doubt that he loved me and felt attracted to me because he’d said he wanted to stay married to me. I desperately yearned to wake from this hideous nightmare that was destroying my perceived reality, and just make it all go away, and return our life to the paradise it had been up until now. Even in light of Bruce’s revelation, I still looked back on the time we’d shared together as a little slice of heaven.
I’d been there. I’d lived it. I knew that the feelings we’d had for each other were real, and the intention in starting our family genuine. Without a full understanding of what was going on with him, it was hard not to wish Bruce could have just kept pretending for our sakes, as he’d done for so long. But every time I felt that way for a second, I corrected myself immediately: Living this lie was clearly making Bruce miserable. I wanted to be a good enough partner—at least a good enough friend—and a good enough human being to support him in the brave choice he was making, even if it was painful for me right now.
As utterly devastated as I was, my heart bled for Bruce and what he must have lived with his entire life. It’s impossible for those of us who are comfortable living in our own skin to fully grasp what an imprisonment that must feel like to be born into the wrong body. I know it’s difficult to understand, to emotionally, or even intellectually, wrap your head around. Believe me, no one understands the complexity of emotion that the concept evokes better than I. It was extremely difficult for me to comprehend, and adjust my life accordingly, to the realization that the man I had married—the very masculine, gorgeous, ideal, wonderful hunk of a man who had fathered my children—would be no more. The human entity was still alive, but it truly was like mourning the death of the person I had grown to know and love, and with whom I had planned to spend the remainder of my life.
Throughout the spring and summer of 1985, we continued to see Dr. Hill, whom we’d begun calling Trudy. She also met with both of us privately. Bruce confessed to having dressed up in his mother’s and sister’s clothing when no one was around to notice such behavior. He also told me that he still loved me, and after he transitioned, his wish was to stay married to me and continue living together as a family.
For my part, I talked about how I wanted to support my husband, but I was having difficulty digesting his words and their meaning. I still mostly thought of him as the most masculine of men, the man I had married, the man who had given me the greatest gift of my entire life, my two sons.
But with all this new information and even with therapy, I couldn’t comprehend how we could move forward together. I’d fallen in love with a perfect male specimen, not simply because he was handsome and fit, but because of all the traits that had made up his stellar character and winning personality. His fierce drive and focus. His indomitable positivity. His simple goodness. I didn’t know if the woman he planned to become would possess those qualities as well because I didn’t know her. I wasn’t even sure if Bruce knew her yet, either. But even if she was the same person he’d been, I wasn’t sure I could continue. I had never been sexually attracted to women. I didn’t want to be married to a woman, even if she were the same living, breathing entity that was my husband, Bruce.
To say I was brokenhearted with my head spinning would be a gross understatement. His revelation made me wonder who Bruce even was, and what else he might be hiding from me, or even from himself. I couldn’t see a way for us to make it to the other side of all this, at least not as a married couple.
I had already begun grieving all that I was about to lose. My supposedly ideal life had become even more surreal than my incomprehensibly exaggerated life with Elvis. I thought I had traded in one fairy tale for another, but now I was going to be forced to let go of the illusion of my lovingly devoted relationship and perfect family as well. I was struggling to adjust to the new actuality that had been presented to me, and it was a confusing, emotional, deeply painful process.
Still, we kept our promise to see where therapy would take our relationship and we kept trying to understand and be there for one another. In the meantime Bruce continued to present himself to the world as the very masculine Bruce Jenner. On one occasion during this time, Bruce had to be in New York City for an appearance. He really wanted me to meet him there.
“Why don’t you come and be with your husband in New York?” he implored.
Husband is the word I’ve been waiting for, I thought. He referred to himself as masculine. That’s what I’ve hoped to hear all along. Okay, I’ll give our marriage this last-ditch effort, try to have a romantic weekend, and see if this is something he can bury again.
I was probably trying to convince myself there was a shred of hope this was all a bad dream, and I might awaken to the very happy life we shared before Bruce’s revelation. I so hoped to bring Bruce back to that masculine persona with which I’d fallen in love, I tried to block out everything else he’d told me in the past few months. I always had uneasy feelings about leaving my children for any amount of time when they were so young, but I hoped this brief weekend rendezvous would potentially breathe new romance into our relationship, and allow us to save our family unit.
When I arrived at our hotel room in New York after the long flight from Los Angeles, I knocked on the door with hopeful anticipation that my romance and marriage might be rekindled on this trip. Bruce opened the door dressed as Caitlyn. Full wig. Full makeup. Heels. A nice feminine dress adorning his muscular body. And a big smile on his red lips.
I crumbled right there, and burst into tears. It was a devastating moment for me. All my hopes and dreams came crashing down in that hotel hallway. I came all this way. I left my two little babies to travel across the continent to be with my husband, to try to make some sense of all of this with him. Then, I’m met at the door by this woman.
“Oh, I’m sorry,” Bruce said, upon seeing my complete and utter devastation. “I feel bad that I surprised you like that. I just wanted you to see who I really am. It’s time you saw me as I truly am. This is me!”
At that moment I was able to fully grasp who she really was. This woman had emerged from inside this very masculine man. I had to pick myself up and face what was before me. This is what she’s been trying to reveal to you, I thought. This is who she believes she authentically is. Accept it and deal with the reality. Clearly, as Trudy had told me in therapy, this wasn’t going away. It dawned on me with the very greatest irony that Bruce had in fact, left me for another woman: the one who lived inside him.
Up until that point, Bruce and I had continued to share our home in Malibu as man and wife. At least that’s how it appeared from the outside. I still loved him and felt like he was my family. But you can’t unsee what you’ve seen. You can’t unhear what you’ve heard. Now he felt more like my best girlfriend to me than my husband. I was not attracted to him anymore, and we didn’t have sex again. The few times we traveled together after that, we had twin beds in our hotel room and slept separately.
Despite these differences, we remained, or so I thought anyway, best friends, which was a huge comfort to me. Although I might have been losing my husband, I was relieved to find that the people we were at our cores, regardless of gender or the title by which we referred to each other, were still intact. And we both clearly still felt a tremendous amount of love and respect for each other. At a moment when nothing else was certain, I was sustained by this constant in my life.
I was slowly gaining some new perspective on some unusual behavior Bruce had exhibited during the past few years, which I’d explained away because I was so happy in my marriage to a man I viewed as almost flawless. During my pregnancy with
Brody, I had been surprised when Bruce seemed agitated with me once or twice. This may seem very insignificant, but for two people who got along as well as we always did, it was startling.
We were traveling together one day, as we had done without incident on so many previous occasions. While in line to board our aircraft, I asked him a simple question.
“Do you have the tickets?”
He wheeled around and glared at me.
“I told you three times I have the tickets,” he snapped.
“Okay, okay, I was just asking,” I said, shaken.
Such behavior was so unlike him, I almost couldn’t believe it was happening. The same was true on another occasion, when he was driving us somewhere in Malibu. The windshield was smudged, and I was concerned about our limited visibility.
“Can you see?” I asked.
“Yes,” he said.
After watching Bruce drive for a few more minutes without making any move to clean the windshield, I couldn’t contain my apprehension and spoke up again.
“Are you sure you can see?” I asked.
“I’ve already told you I can see,” he snapped at me.
Okay, I guess I was being kind of annoying, I thought. But, again, this short fuse was so unlike him that it gave me pause.
Not long after that, my sister-in-law, Louise, was visiting us. Bruce acted in the same way in front of her. I didn’t snap back at him because I recognized it as a small lapse in our normally congenial relationship and nothing to turn into a major fight. But I was still so shocked by this new side of his personality that I couldn’t let it go entirely, either.
When Louise and I next had a chance to speak privately, I brought it up to her.
“Is it just my imagination, because I’m pregnant and overly sensitive, or is Bruce being very difficult?” I asked. “Did you happen to notice him being rude?”
“He’s being a real ass,” she said, without hesitation.
Louise is a devout Catholic and the nicest person on earth. So for her to speak about her brother-in-law so harshly confirmed I wasn’t alone in my perceptions.
A Little Thing Called Life Page 26
