Stand-up for Yourself: And Become the Hero or Shero You Were Born To Be by Shelley Bridgman

Author:Shelley Bridgman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Stand-up Publishing
Published: 2014-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

7

CHANGE AND ACCEPT ANCE

“The ultimate lesson all of us have to learn is unconditional love, which includes not only others but ourselves as well.”

Elisabeth Kubler-Ross

There are days in one’s life that are imprinted on your memory forever. My second daughter’s birthday was one such day and not only for her birth but for very different reasons to the usual experience of fatherhood.

My struggle with gender identity continued on throughout my life in waves. At times I put it to the back of my mind but it came back, crashing down on me and consuming every waking minute. On many occasions I wondered if this experience or that event might cure me and enable me to accept a body and a gender role I hated. From playing football to boxing, from sex to marriage and parenting children, nothing, but nothing, overcame the desire to be female.

When Marie and I discussed children, my head said it would be wrong but my heart reasoned that this at last might provide conclusive proof that I could make it as a man. It didn’t happen when our first child Laura was born but perhaps it would happen when Susie arrived?

Susie’s birth was another miracle. It was just as special as Laura’s arrival. Marie went into labour in the late evening of 13th June 1983. Just as with Laura, after a fourteen-hour labour I held my daughter and cried tears of joy and amazement. After Marie and our baby were reunited I went home to share the news with parents and close friends, before picking Laura up from her nanny to come and meet her beautiful new sister.

When I arrived home I had an overwhelming desire to look in the mirror to see a female image. But it was the same old masculine image staring back at me. My home was silent for once. I heard a song thrush talking to the wind in the garden and my neighbour closing a car door before driving off to work. My heart was pounding in my chest. I broke down.

Something inside me snapped. I looked into the mirror and I choked out, “When will you accept that you are transsexual?”

I dissolved into floods of tears and pleaded with God and the universe. “Please, please take it away. Make the unbearable pain go away. Please cure me. I have a family to take care of.”

Deep down, I knew I’d bargained with God for the last time. My life changed and there was no going back. Even if I didn’t like it, I’d finally accepted who I was. Susie has been a great gift and her birth was liberating because I finally knew that even ‘fathering’ not one, but two children was not going to block out the woman inside me bursting to come alive.

Finding a way to accept yourself is the Holy Grail of the Self-Help sections of book shops everywhere. I’d never uttered the word ‘transsexual’ in the context of myself before but finally owning it brought me a sense of great relief.

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