If You Really Loved Me by Emma Cantons

Author:Emma Cantons
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: transgender, transexual, Emma, Cantons, Victoria, Wife, Partner, Love, transition, intersex, relationship, marriage, autobiography, non-fiction, family, overcoming, challenge, transvestite, journey
ISBN: 9781782343271
Publisher: Andrews UK
Published: 2012-10-03T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter Six

As the Autumn went on, Spring arrived. The effect of not living together all the time and regular sensible counselling began to work. There were signs of the person I knew and loved re-emerging. Vicky began to face the painful consequences, not just of her condition, which she couldn’t help, but of her actions, which, up to a point, she could. She saw that the people she loved had been hurt. She also began to understand that everyone around her was not against her but actually trying to help get her through this process with an intact family.

For the first time in months I felt I could see our future together again. I wasn’t kidding myself. We weren’t through the tough stuff yet, after all we were still living apart, but Vicky I think, was beginning to see our separation as a temporary situation necessary to undo the damage caused previously. Sometimes she even seemed to understand that her step-daughter did still love her and even, sometimes, missed her. That understanding, transitory as it was, helped relieve the fear that fueled so much of her anger.

If it hadn’t been for Vicky’s terrible fear Ellie was lost to her, life might have begun to get back to normal, but she just could not leave it alone. Nor could she see the solution as in anyone’s control other than Ellie. It was a terrible responsibility to lay at the door of a teenager. As much as she shouted, ‘why can’t she understand, nothing’s changed, I’m the same’ I wanted to shout back, ‘everything has changed how could it be the same?’. These dual convictions, that Ellie was lost and only Ellie could put it right, were the hurricane that continued to tear through our family.

Ellie would open up to me about how distressed she felt to have lost the only father she ever felt proud of, and how much she missed him. She missed rock climbing with him, going to the movies, playing carpet football. These were huge huge steps and it required insight beyond her years to even begin to attempt them. I tried, more fool me, to share this with Vicky but her response was always the same - ‘she hasn’t lost anything, when is she going to understand that?’. What Vicky couldn’t understand was that however many things she could still be to Ellie, Dad wasn’t one of them.

My family certainly thought enough was enough. If Vicky wasn’t willing to give anyone time to adjust to her reality, they were certainly giving her no more time to ‘get it right’ with Ellie or with me. Standing outside the situation, the solution seemed clear to them, and if I didn’t see it, then I needed to have it explained to me.

My sister decided to explain it to me a week later. I had driven her husband and her to a local hospital where he was having minor surgery. Once he was admitted we went for for lunch. As we waited for our food to arrive my sister began to tell me how worried she was.

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