Below is the first round of cuts I made to my LA Times essay that was published on July 13, 2015. The original was 2,300 words. This clocked in at 1,023. The final version, which has it’s own link in the portfolio section, was a slim 850 words.

Kill your darlings, indeed.

***

When I saw the picture of Caitlyn Jenner on Vanity Fair’s cover my first thought was of the pain Kris Jenner must be feeling. She might deny it to others – put on a smile and say how lovely Caitlyn looks, how brave she is. Inside I’d lay bets her thoughts were less charitable: that anyone looks great with a glam squad from Vanity Fair and Annie Leibowitz as photographer. Because she is still raw and angry and sad. I know this because I, too, am the wife of a trans woman.

One of the lines I’ve heard Kris Jenner utter after Caitlyn came out was, “I feel like I didn’t exist.” The words I said to my Wasband – how I refer to the person who was my husband and is now a woman – were that I felt negated, erased. If he really was always a she, then were we ever really an us? The Wasband still doesn’t understand how I can question the reality of the 13 years we were married before her big reveal, any more than I understand how she subjugated her feelings of gender dysphoria for the greater part of the 13 years.

When she announced in 2008 that all in all, he’d rather be a she, I would have killed to know there were others out there like me, who had gone through this experience and come out the other end whole. I went looking. I asked contacts from my ever-widening circle in the trans community if they knew any who might talk to me. Nothing. Noone.

Even as recently as 2008, trans issues were not often discussed, and when they were, it was with a salacious tone. People gawked like it was an accident on the side of the road, and the topic discussed wasn’t the wife or family of the trans person, but the trans person him or herself: the pregnant man or Chaz Bono. There was no peer reviewed academic literature on how healthcare professionals could help the families of trans people through their own transitions. There still isn’t.

I’m here as the object lesson for Kris. There is a way through the anger and sorrow and grief back to joy and happiness, but it takes time. The other day I looked at my son’s hands which are nothing like my hands (which are exactly like my mom’s – small, short fingers, round nails). My son has my Wasband’s hands: long delicate fingers, thin hands. They are hands that have gestures just like the man I married. When he was a toddler, my boy would sit up in bed every morning and scratch his little chest just like his father, and I would laugh at the idea that my husband, when he was an old man, would share this gesture with his son in middle age, and maybe with his son. Only there is no old husband, and here I am typing this with a lump in my throat again, so many years after the loss of that happily ever after, even though there is another man in my life – there has been for more than three years. Sometimes I still feel erased. But the grief is muted and comes in infrequent intervals.

The weirdness of my situation seems to give people permission to ask questions they would never dare ask a more prosaic divorcee. When did you know? What did he tell you? What kind of genitalia is there now and what does it look like? Getting a new phone a few weeks ago, the salesman called me Maura. “Oh, no. That’s the Wasband,” I said, giving a quick rundown of the story. “I have a cousin whose friend did that,” he said. “Did you have any idea before he told you?” It was 20 seconds into our relationship and the guy was already into my business. To me the questions feel like blame — for marrying someone I shouldn’t have, for not seeing something I ought to have noticed, for pushing him to a point that he needed to leave his masculinity behind. The last may seem ridiculous, but my Wasband has a relative who broke contact and put the blame for her sex change firmly on me. Apparently, I’m emasculating to the point that I cause men to have their penises turned inside out and made into vaginas.

In the end, what happened before doesn’t matter. What I knew, when I knew it, and how the gender dysphoria made its presence known has no impact on my life going forward, so why does it matter to anyone now?

I learned to live with the happy happy joy joy that my Wasband experienced while I was in the middle of my grief cycle. Our Wasbands are like teenagers when they start hormone treatments. One of my trans friends says it takes about two years post-surgery for the new person to truly settled into herself. It’s proved true in my case. But getting there was a journey. She would joyfully announce every increase in bra cup size, every time the electrolysis lady reached another milestone and every time there was another step towards legal or physical womanhood. And while that happy dance happened to the right of me, on the left side, my heart ached, and she was oblivious to the pain. The announcement of my husband’s death happened one Thursday night late in June, but the actual death occurred in little moments over the course of a few months.

Kris Jenner and I, and countless others have lost our spouses in a way that can only compare to death. All we can do is manage the pain, ignore the wide-eyed stares and inconsiderate comments and questions and hope we guide our families through it with a modicum of grace and serenity. Mourning ends and life begins again. The world doesn’t pay attention to our truth – the anger and grief of the wife left behind. Instead we are forced to applaud the true bravery it takes our Wasbands to come out as trans and live an authentic life. It’s not fair. But it will be okay.