Craigslist Confessional

by Helena Dea Bala

  When I was in eighth grade, my sister started dating this guy and I couldn’t understand why she was dating a boy, because I liked girls. In tenth grade, I wrote a love letter to one of my friends. It was very poetic; I saw myself in a different role, as a male courting someone. I tried to explain to her that even though I looked like a girl, I was actually a boy. I told her that I loved her. I think she was curious and flattered at first, but eventually I got called down to the school counselor’s office during English class. My parents were there; hers were, too. My adviser told me to stop writing letters, and I remember that—at some point in the conversation—somebody used the word lesbian. I didn’t feel lesbian.

  For the longest time, I knew who I was, but other people did not. Despite what they said, I felt like a boy who liked girls. I’d spent the previous three years of my life asking my mother when I’d become a boy. I was holding out hope even after I got my period. I took care of that part of my anatomy, but I didn’t identify with it psychologically. I was in my early twenties when I realized that this would be “it” for the rest of my life.

  Really, who I was became a problem for me only because it was a problem for others. I was very active in the church and wanted to be a minister, but I knew that the church didn’t accept “my kind,” so I ended up leaving. In the meantime, I decided to camouflage myself as best as I could until I was able to get out of my small town. I knew that I needed to move somewhere far away from my family and everyone who had ever known me as a woman. I got a job and, with $400 in my bank account and a car that was perpetually breaking down, I moved to a different state—a bigger city. I slowly started building a group of friends who were like me—other trans people—and eventually I started feeling comfortable and safe enough to start transitioning.

  I was forty years old when I began to transition. I think, subconsciously, I was waiting for my mother to die. She was very religious, and my transition would have killed her. It would have shamed her in her community, or it would have made her question her faith. I couldn’t do that to her. So I waited. I went to counseling for a little over a year, which is required before one starts the process, and then I started using a testosterone patch. After eight months on the patch, I started giving myself testosterone injections, which I’ll have to keep taking for the rest of my life. I wore a fake mustache every time I went out, mostly because picking bathrooms was becoming a problem.

  My first surgery was a double mastectomy. Up until the surgery, I had been wrapping my breasts with ACE bandages, which was not only a hassle to do every single day but was also becoming pretty painful.

  I can’t describe to you how free I felt after that surgery. There’s this paranoia that you carry around with you as you’re transitioning that someone will figure out that you’re not who you claim to be. I had nightmares that I would be somehow “discovered” as an impostor. After the surgery, I had moments during my day when I’d be going about things at work and then—all of a sudden—I’d feel this sense of relief and peace wash over me, and I’d start crying. Hope kept me going. I hoped that where I was headed was better than where I was. I hoped to feel better. Hope gave me courage. It gave me courage to suffer, even with no end in sight.

  My second surgery was a total abdominal hysterectomy. I had my ovaries and my uterus removed. I had been disassociated from the anatomically female parts of my body for such a long time that I felt no emotional reaction to the surgery. However, the lack of estrogen sent me into menopause. At the end of the injection cycle, when the testosterone levels were also at their lowest, I would get hot flashes and night sweats. During the most trying periods of my life, I have found that my sense of humor keeps me afloat. Objectively, I found the fact that I was having hot flashes hilarious.

  The last surgery I had was a metoidioplasty, in which the doctors cut the suspensory ligaments that hold the clitoris intact, and from the skin and surrounding area, they make a penis. Then they can put testicles in the labia majora. I was in pain for months afterward, but when it was done, I felt like myself for the first time in my life. I finally felt that I belonged. Imagine that—I was forty-five and experiencing my true self for the first time. I felt like a teenager all over again. Except I was a teenager with male-pattern baldness, because I lost some hair on the crown and back of my head.

  The first person I dated as a man was my wife. I met her a few months after my full transition, and I explained my story on our fourth date. She said she needed to think about all of it, and then I didn’t hear from her for a few days. I understood her hesitation, but my heart was in such pain. I kept thinking that rejection, after everything I’d gone through, would be the final nail in my coffin. But then she called me, and all she said was: “Eh, what the hell, let’s give it a shot.”

  Give it a shot, we did. We worked around our sexual issues, and there were a few: namely, my size was not adequate for penetration. I could have gotten a different procedure, a phalloplasty, which would have been a better procedure for penetrative sex. It involves getting a piece of your own skin transplanted to form the penis and a balloon inserted to help you get “happy,” but it has a higher complication rate.

  She was a very patient and giving person. We ended up getting married. I loved her so damn much. I loved her in a way that was so new to me: I so hated for us to be apart that even our time together was painful, because I’d torture myself with the inevitability of having to part ways. So I could never quite enjoy her, because the joy was tinged by the thought of having to leave her to go to work. It’s almost like the universe sensed my fear: we’d been married for six years when she was diagnosed with breast cancer. We fought it for three years. It took me a year after she had died to stop fighting—cancer, death, loss, the world—to realize she wasn’t there anymore. I lost my best friend, my wife, and the only person who ever really knew me.

  After she died, I isolated myself. I shut down and I felt so alone. Part of me never wanted to try again, to find another connection. Part of me was desperate for it. I wanted it all to have been easier. I wanted it to not have been such a fight. I wanted to be loved. I want to be understood. I want so many things, and, especially right after she died, I felt like I had nothing. I went to a bar one night, blind with rage, and I got blackout drunk. I went home with a guy, and I tried to have sex with him. He had to drive me to the ER because I nearly bled to death. I was desperate, though. I was desperate to feel “normal” and loved.

  Some days, I still wake up angry. Those are wasted days, and there are still far too many of them. Now I have to start all over again, and it feels so late. How do I explain to a stranger who I am? How do I even start bridging that chasm? My identity makes my partners question their own sexuality. If they’re attracted to someone who is male but used to be female—what does that make them?

  Right after I lost my wife, I contemplated suicide. I thought of jumping off a bridge. But my sense of humor and my relationship with God kept me going. The church might have turned its back on me, but I have my own set of beliefs. God is my buddy, and God saw me through it. Plus, I had an uncle who committed suicide. That wasn’t an option for me—it’s the only decision you can’t change. You can’t change death.

  I can’t get my wife back, and I can’t help but feel as though I’ve been ripped off. Not by a person, and not by God. Just by circumstance. I would like to be with someone who is okay with me, how I am, but it feels like it’s too late, now. Women my age are used to men who are genetically male, and they’re used to sex as they know it. Nothing else. And I can’t be that. I can’t be eighteen again, either. I can’t get my time back.

  Sometimes I start feeling sorry for myself, and I think to myself, What a fucking rip-off. I start to fear that I’m forgetting her, and I become guilty and angry. Other days, the memories we made feel clearer than they’ve ever been before. It’s almost as if she’s leaning over me, whispering, Remember when…?

  Frank, eighties

  I met my wife, Joyce, when I wa
s in my early thirties. We’d been together for about a year and we were going on vacation to Vienna when I asked her to marry me. I didn’t ask her because she was beautiful—although she was—and I didn’t ask her because I was in love with her, although I was. I asked her because she was wonderful with children. I thought to myself, This woman will make a wonderful mother—and she did. We’ve been married for over fifty years, and I don’t think we’ve ever spent more than a few days apart. We have children and grandchildren, a comfortable home, and we lead what most people would consider to be a life of privilege.

  Joyce was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s a couple of months ago. I first started noticing that something was off because she was becoming uncharacteristically short-tempered with me. She started forgetting where her things were, like her car keys, and she started misplacing things altogether. I remember, once, she had put the laundry detergent in the fridge. I spent hours trying to find it. When she started showing these first signs, I lost my patience with her. I could not understand why she couldn’t find her car keys all the time, or why she would say unintelligible nonsense. I yelled at her once, and I think I frightened her. I didn’t know she was ill. Now that she’s not there, I feel that I wasted her only chance to enjoy our last few days together.

  I am a very religious man, and I became a rabbi at an early age. I have always had faith in the hand of God, but I find myself arguing with him more and more. I argue with God about my wife and why he took her beautiful mind away from her. Her illness has shaken my belief. Just about the worst thing you can experience at my age, when you’re getting ready to write the last chapter of your life, is a crisis of faith. But at the same time, I have to believe in him. I have no choice—even though I cannot reconcile her illness with my faith. The Old Testament explains that Jacob mourned Joseph for over twenty years because he didn’t know whether he was alive or dead. It was a terrible limbo that he felt in his heart, and that is what I feel, too. Joyce is alive, but God has taken her memories. She is an empty vessel now, and she doesn’t know who I am.

  It wasn’t long after Joyce was formally diagnosed that the kids and I decided to move her to an assisted-living facility that’s just outside the city, about a forty-five-minute drive away from our apartment. The grounds are absolutely gorgeous—lush, green, and peaceful—and the place is state-of-the-art. There’s a café, a gym, a common room, a game room—there’s a room for everything. The resident doctors do an amazing job overseeing and managing the needs of every patient, and the daily schedule is tailored to Joyce’s particular needs. I vetted the place myself before anything was decided. Even still, I am very torn about sending Joyce there, and there isn’t a day that goes by that I don’t consider bringing her back home. But I can’t take care of both of us. I am old myself. A couple of winters ago, I took a bad spill, and now I have trouble walking. I still drive and do my own cooking and laundry—I pride myself on being self-sufficient at my age—but doing all that and taking care of Joyce, it would be too much. I’ve toyed with the idea of hiring a live-in companion to help me with the chores, but mostly to keep me company. I feel very lonely. The kids all have their own families; they barely visit anymore. So I find myself eating my meals alone, going to the ballet alone.

  Even though I made a very good living and continue to work, Joyce’s treatments are starting to add up. I struggle to pay for everything. I wrote a letter to my representatives, telling them that it is unfair for me to have to be poor before the state will pay for my wife’s assisted living. I think it should be covered by Medicare. She’s only been there for two months, and as it is, I’ll run through all our savings in under a year. So there’s that to worry about, too.

  I visit her several times a week, and I think the people there treat her well, but it’s not a good place for me to visit. I become very depressed. It’s not unusual to be greeted by a screaming or crying patient, for example. There’s a gentleman in his sixties there who has to have his food cut into tiny bits and fed to him by an occupational therapist because he can’t even do that himself anymore. He’s only a few years younger than my children! I feel like I’ve abandoned Joyce in hell, and I fear that in a moment of lucidity, she will recognize this.

  When I went to see her one time, one of her aides asked her whether she recognized me. She said, “Yes, that’s the garbage man. He’s come to help me take care of the garbage.” Of course, I was not offended. But I was hurt.

  Another time, I heard screaming as I approached her room. It wasn’t Joyce, thankfully, but her neighbor, Deb. The aides explained that Deb had refused to get dressed that morning and had hit one of the aides. Joyce witnessed it, I gathered, and she seemed really distraught in the aftermath. When we were together, she kept saying, “It’s not right. It’s not right to hit. They hit her. They hit Deb.” I just didn’t know what to make of it. It’s entirely possible that her disease warped the situation and she misremembered it. But it’s also possible, of course, that the aides hit Deb. You hear all sorts of horror stories, and I’m not there to protect her. I worry.

  My children tell me to visit her less, but I can’t seem to stay away. I go often and in the mornings, hoping that she’ll give me a sign that she forgives me. If I go to see her early in the day, she’s usually present, but in the afternoons, she starts sundowning—her symptoms get worse as the day wears on—and she’s heartbreaking.

  I love my wife, but I haven’t always been a good husband to her. Joyce wanted a romantic love—a love that you see in the movies—and I couldn’t give her that. I gave her the only love that made sense to me, a practical love. I provided for her, I was a good father, and for the most part, I was a good husband. I always took her with me when I traveled, we always went out to dinner, and she had free rein over spending. I was the type of man my baba had been: a family man, strong and intimidating, but somewhat distant. Once we had children, we stopped being just Joyce and just Frank—we became Mom and Dad, and that changed our marriage. So I looked for a bit of excitement elsewhere, and I had affairs; I think she suspected many and confirmed a couple throughout our marriage.

  After one of my longer affairs was discovered, she left me. She moved out and abandoned me in our apartment, alone with everything we’d gathered throughout decades of marriage. I left the other woman almost immediately and resolved to get Joyce back. I courted her, put her first, showed her I planned to be different. But she seemed to be enjoying her independence—she was flourishing. It struck me, suddenly, that she was better off without me, that I’d been the one holding her back. Ha! And I couldn’t function without her. In my life, she was indispensable, and I had taken her wholly for granted. I had been careless. It took me almost a year, but I got her back. And I was good afterward—no more affairs. I put her first, always.

  I can’t help but think that I contributed to her disease, though. I know I didn’t, and my children tell me that I didn’t. But sometimes, what you think and what you feel are two very different things. When Joyce gets agitated, she becomes violent and kicks me or hits me. In those moments, I believe she knows me, she sees all the wrong that I’ve done, and she’s doling out punishment.

  A few weeks ago, Joyce had an appointment with her neurologist. We went into the room together, and I helped her up onto the exam table. The doctor performed a few tests on her, the same ones she’d done times before—looked at her eyes, all that. In the meantime, I told her that Joyce had lost a lot of weight and that I was concerned about her—concerned that perhaps she doesn’t have long to live. She’d also started to walk strangely, shuffling her feet instead of picking them up. And most worrisome, she’d begun to rest her chin upon her chest, almost as if the weight of her head had become unbearable. The doctor listened patiently, and then continued with her assessment.

  “Do you know who this is?” she asked, pointing to me.

  “That’s Frank,” answered Joyce. “He’s supposed to be my husband.”

  “Joyce,” the doctor continued, “do you know the
names of your children?”

  Joyce shook her head.

  “Do you know what month it is?”

  “It’s February.” It was the end of December—the lobby was still decorated with garlands and lights from the holidays.

  “Do you know where you are?” the doctor persisted.

  “I’m in Vienna,” she said, visibly flustered by the barrage of questions. Had she forgotten about our life in New York? About our kids and grandkids, too? Had her memories stalled at the beginning of our love story, all those decades ago in Vienna?

  “What is this?” asked her doctor, pulling a pen from her pocket and showing it to Joyce.

  “That’s a pen.”

  “And this?” she asked, pointing to one of the buttons in her white coat.

  “I can’t think of the word right now,” Joyce said, defeated, looking down at the floor. Hunched over the way she was, her legs dangling over the exam table, she seemed to me the young girl I’d met many years ago. Except she was no longer bold and fearless; time had worn her away little by little. I wanted nothing more at that moment than to scoop her up in my arms, to save her, to make it all okay. I wanted nothing more than to tell her she is safe with me, that I won’t let anything happen to her. So much for not being one for romantic gestures. Anyhow, too little, too late.

  And so it is. Sometimes my wife doesn’t know who I am. She’s dead and alive, and it’s killing me. But, sometimes she looks at me with the love we had many years ago—when we sat together on a park bench in Vienna, she knew my name and loved me in spite of myself. And in those moments, I am glad to have that glimmer of her.

  REGRET

  Jane, thirties