My Lover is a Woman and it Saves Me
My lover is a woman and it saves me.
I did not have a standard childhood: femininity was withheld from me as a child. My earliest memories consist of being told by my mother that I am too much of an active child for girl clothes, that I wouldn’t look good in certain clothing. Part of me yearned for beautiful dresses and pretty things and perhaps that’s why I relate to trans femininity so, but regardless. I remember getting my first skirt—part of a uniform for school—and holding it close to my chest. For years that’s all I wore. It’s everything I wanted and then some and yet it still was not quite right:
I was not a girl. This, in some alternate universe, would be a boy-child (what I could most closely describe my childhood as) discovering he loves femininity and embraces that, and that would be the fairytale ending, but it wasn’t. Sitting in my beautiful skirts I realized I was not like the others sporting the same uniform: in my heart I was more akin to my peers in slacks and blazers, somewhat self-segregated to the other half of the room. So I wasn’t quite right.
I still loved dresses but it was easy to pretend I didn’t. Boy clothes, boy styles, boy behaviors—I could learn them all. I could fit in. It was easy to fall in love and let them pretend I’m the kind of man who would lift mountains and provide even if I weren’t. That’s what you’re supposed to do when you’re a boy. You banish the pink laces to the back of your closet because that’s how you become a boy. You could be just like everyone else.
They, the others, saw something in me—the way children do. Perhaps it was the way I couldn’t shed my adoration for painted nails, perhaps it was my long hair. I could never be a boy the way others did and that troubled me. If my masculinity isn’t even good enough, then where does my femininity go?
My lover is a woman and it saves me.
I started seeing my lover in a time of my life where I, now with short hair and plain nails, thought I could still be a boy the way others did. I paled at the sight of skirts—the way others did, shook my head at wearing pink—the way the others did, left my femininity to her—the way others did. I could kill the lace clad thing in my heart that way, I thought, I could finally make myself a boy the right way.
But my lover needed makeup advice. She needed someone to braid her hair and buy her clothes. So, as a good man would, I sat down and learned (and for some, relearned). I tried things I would teach her on myself because I was a good man and ignored the way it made my stomach turn. I could still be a good man.
I buy myself that shirt, a small bow embedded in it. It is ill-fitting and the wrong color, but it quieted something in me for a while. There is a hunger that could be satiated with this one thing—a command: go, be silent, you have this one thing.
It wasn’t enough. I buy myself that lipstick, that blush, that skirt. I look at myself in the mirror and wonder who I am. If I was still a good man this way. If I was still a man this way. The thing in me did not care for my dilemma—it only asked for more. More laces, more frills, more of the pretty things you wanted and were deprived of.
Your lover does not turn her head away from you and it saves you.
You don’t know who you are when you look in the mirror. You do not know of a man who looks the way you do. You seem to be something else entirely but you do not know it. But you do know your lover has not turned her head away from you and you hang onto that. You are ashamed, yes, you won’t be the kind of man you were made to be. You feel guilty in girl clothes, like you were pretending to be something you’re not, but you continue because the alternative is suffocating. You don’t know who you are but you know that your lover is a woman on her own terms and then you think maybe you’ll figure it out someday. And it saves you.