Love Lives Here by Amanda Jette Knox

Author:Amanda Jette Knox
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Canada
Published: 2019-08-12T16:00:00+00:00

FIFTEEN

aftermath

“OKAY, AMANDA. Bring it back, bring it back. You’re okay.”

That was me, talking myself down from all the wailing. I had to be my own therapist in that moment. Besides, what exactly would I say if someone gently tapped on the window to check on me? “Well, see, I have a really hard time with change because I have an anxiety disorder and a bunch of old trauma, and I was just starting to feel good about my daughter coming out last year, and me not realizing I was actually kind of transphobic, and having to learn how not be a terrible human about things I don’t understand, and now I just found out I have a wife instead of a husband, and I feel like a terrible human all over again.”

That would be a great way to get someone to slowly back away from the car. I was going to file that away for a handy occasion—like the next time I got pulled over for speeding.

I needed to unload to someone I trusted. Liliane was at work, and besides, she couldn’t be my only confidante in a time of crisis. I had to call in the reinforcements. I composed myself just enough to send a text to my friend Sarah, the one who had welcomed me to Kanata two years earlier. She works in a school and was home for the summer with her kids. Sarah was a safe someone to tell news that could leave you sobbing in a Chevy Malibu Hybrid outside a weight management clinic.

Shaky fingers typed out a message on my phone. “Hey, I’m in a really bad place right now,” I said. “Can I come over?”

“Of course!” she wrote back. “Come on over. I’ll be waiting for you.”

Sarah met me at the door, arms outstretched to welcome me into a hug, and I practically collapsed in her embrace. “Come on, I’m going to make you a coffee,” she said kindly, leading me into the house. She knows me well—I never pass up a coffee.

Over the next two hours, she did all the right things. She listened supportively, and when I used up the box of tissues, she brought me another. And another coffee too.

Sarah understood the shock I was experiencing (“How did I miss this a second time?” “What are we going to tell the kids?”), but she had no problem with my spouse being trans. She was more concerned with the fact that I was reeling from the revelation.

In fact, no one I spoke to in the following weeks demonized my wife; instead, they fully supported her. But they also supported me by honouring where I was in this journey. And I was at the beginning, at the very hardest part, buried under waves of panic and uncertainty.

While I sat and talked to my friend, I wondered who she had to talk to. She, the person I’d thought I knew inside and out but didn’t. She, the person I had built a life with but wasn’t sure I could continue my life with.

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