The Other Woman

By Kylie Jones

In 2007 life was humming along quite nicely. Happily married for 28 years to the love of my life, three gorgeous children and now living in idyllic surroundings, it was like a dream. That dream was soon to turn into a nightmare. When my husband took me for a walk along the beach one March afternoon I did not expect to come back facing a completely different life and wondering what on earth I was going to do next.

Like all families we had our ups and downs but we always seemed to sort ourselves out. However, my husband’s revelation as we walked along the beach together was going to be a hard thing to work through. How do you hold it all together when you husband tells you that he has always wanted to live as a woman? With no experience and very little knowledge of what transgender meant I naïvely believed that it would be possible for me to support my husband and keep our family together.

This is the story of the impact on all of us of Colin’s transition from male to female and the sometimes absurd happenings as I searched for new love and romance. Our story is one that hasn’t really been explored yet but it is worth learning about as the journey applies to many people out there who are stoic and determined, sometimes to their own detriment and that of their families, who are coming to terms with the loss of their partner, father, brother or son.

If there are any lessons in these pages, they are that what any of us does has a direct impact on those who love us and as hard as it may be, there are times when it just can’t be about us; try to remember that those around you deserve your support too.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tellwell Talent
• Release date: May 31, 2016
• ISBN: 9781925447675

Kylie Jones

The history of her life is within the pages of this book however Kylie Jones now lives in the South Eastern suburbs of Melbourne with her youngest daughter and has recently left her 9 to 5 job to get ready for her next big adventure, a trip to Europe and the UK. The search for love and romance continues...

Book preview

Chapter One

March, 2007: A simple conversation changes everything

It was another brilliant weekend on the island.

On this particular Saturday, we had been sorting the washing - very mundane, life as usual - and I could hear a familiar voice in the lounge room. It was Jon Faine, the ABC radio announcer but his voice was coming from the television. He was narrating a documentary.

M2F: a journey in gender identity; a documentary about men who were living as women. Their stories were very touching and you could see how difficult it was for them. I remember commenting how hard it must be to find yourself in that situation. After it finished, we went on sorting the washing, we didn’t discuss it further and I didn’t think any more about it.

It was a quiet weekend and the weather was lovely. Saturday had been very laid back and so like any other Sunday, we headed down to the beach. I loved it when the skies were blue and Colin and I could walk along the beach and not meet another soul for hours. Sundays were the best; we’d usually have gotten the housework out of the way on Saturday and Sunday was our day to spend time together. We must have been like hundreds of thousands of couples doing that. Our time meant going for a walk along the beach. Very cliché, I guess but nevertheless I loved it. We tried to spend a few hours together, just the two of us, every weekend. Of our three girls, Emma and Leesa were still living with us and by now were old enough to be without us for a few hours, which gave us a chance to catch up with each other.

Colin drove this time, which wasn’t usual but didn’t concern me at all. We parked up near Erehwon Point and he took my hand as we walked down the stairs to the beach; he was very quiet.

We didn’t always talk a lot on these walks. I remember pinching myself sometimes to make sure I was actually there. If you’ve ever walked along an empty beach you’ll know what I mean; sometimes there are just no words that can describe the peace you feel when you look out at the great expanse of ocean and empty sky and realise just how small your problems are. That’s what our walks meant to me. A time to just hold on to each other and know that whatever happened, we could work it out. We regularly solved ours and the world’s problems on these walks.

Apart from the beach, we had one other place where none of the world’s problems could reach us and that was our bed. It was our oasis, our island where we were safe from the troubles of the world, like lack of work which equalled lack of money, which equalled frustration that we couldn’t buy a better car or take a holiday. As complex as they were, problems never made it into that space, while the walks were the place where we could keep pace with a problem and sometimes even outrun it.

I didn’t know it then, but this was not going to be one of those walks.

I was looking forward to this one in the same way I did all the others, our peaceful time together. We hadn’t gone very far though, when Colin stopped and turned to me. What would be the worst thing I could do that would make you stop loving me? he asked. What a strange question, I thought. I looked at him and it was clear he wasn’t joking.

What do you mean, what would be the worst thing you could do? I repeated, bewildered. I’m the sort of person who takes most things in my stride, but this was strange question by any measure.

I don’t know – murder someone; molest a child – why are you asking me something like that? I half-whispered, terrified at what the answer might be.

Because I want to tell you something.

He looked at me with such conviction that I was suddenly very afraid. What on earth could he have done?

What do you want to tell me? I asked.

His grip tightened, he held me with both hands and looked me straight in the eye, without blinking.

I’ve always wanted to be a woman.

Just like that, no ums or ahs, he just said it, as though he’d said the sky was blue.

I stood there taking it all in. He was still holding me as I looked at him and wondered what on earth I had just heard.

Then he took my hand and we started to walk again.

As we walked along the beach that used to be my peaceful haven, Colin told me he had felt this way since he was about four years old. He told me that the feelings had come and gone over the years but he knew now that he wanted to be a woman. He explained that, when each of our girls was born, he’d found relief from the feelings that would have otherwise overwhelmed him. That there had been times in our lives when it didn’t matter but that hadn’t happened for a long time now and so he knew this was what he had to do.

I don’t remember saying anything very much.

I didn’t ask any questions.

I just felt numb.

I didn’t cry or yell or do much of anything really.

I just kept listening. I thought maybe I had misheard, maybe he hadn’t said that at all, maybe he’d said he knew a woman….

I don’t remember a lot of what followed; I know Colin talked for a while. He said he knew it would be a shock and that’s why he drove and kept the keys so I couldn’t leave without him. Funnily enough, I don’t recall thinking that running away was ever an option. I guess I was grateful he hadn’t killed anyone or molested any children but a lot of what he told me that day went in one ear and out the other. Even looking back on it now, I can only see fragments of the conversation. Mostly, I see myself looking at the man beside me and wondering Really, you want to be a woman?

Colin being a woman, becoming a woman, is not something that I had ever imagined. In bad times, when you’re angry with your partner, maybe you imagine this big fight that will bring all your issues to a head and you finally tell the other what’s been bothering you for so long. Things like ’Why won’t you get a job?’, ‘Why isn’t dinner ready when I get home?’, ‘Why can’t you do a load of washing in the middle of the week?’ You know, not the world-ending stuff but the small stuff that you overlook time and time again because, in the scheme of things, it’s not really important at all, but nevertheless it drives you crazy at times. But not this.

I can truthfully say that it had never, ever occurred to me that Colin, my husband of twenty-eight years had wanted to live as a woman.

For starters, there was nothing even vaguely feminine about this man. Colin was six feet tall, a big man; some might even say overweight. That day, he was dressed in shorts and a T-shirt. The same thing he wore every day of the week, eleven months of the year. Even in winter when it was freezing cold, he would wear shorts and a T-shirt. In his explorer socks and his Blundstone boots, he could have been any tradie walking off the job. Colin was a bloke. He farted, he told really bad jokes, he mucked about in the shed and he rarely talked about his feelings.

There had never been anything vaguely feminine about him. For the first eighteen years of our marriage, he had worn a full beard and his hair always cut very short - number 2 or 3 clippers all over. This was not a person who appeared to me to be in the wrong body; and he had certainly never behaved like it.

I had always thought of my husband as a bloke’s bloke. Not a guy, or a man: a bloke! A bigger, wider Crocodile Dundee; fearless and very loyal. He was a fire fighter, he drove great big fire trucks and he looked like a bloke, tall with broad shoulders and muscular legs. I loved him; he was my big burly bloke.

He had a bit of a temper, although he didn’t show it so much with me. The girls tell me now that he would often get angry with them when I wasn’t around and his colleagues at the Fire Brigade certainly knew if he was pissed off. For the most part though, he worked hard to avoid confrontation. He was funny and loving and we were a team.

I had often joked that we’d done the role reversal thing early on in our marriage. When our eldest daughter Rachel was nine and after a period of illness, Colin left work and stayed home to recover and to look after her while I continued working full time. It made sense, I enjoyed work and I was well paid (compared to Colin anyway) and so it seemed like the perfect solution; no more childcare for Rachel, Colin could recover his health and I could continue to do what I liked to do.

Although we had taken on different roles to many of our friends, I still did the cooking and the cleaning and the other womanly duties so to me there was never any question about who was the woman in the relationship.

While Colin would sometimes get angry, sulking was more his style around me or complaining endlessly about something until I would just give in and either agree with him or let it slide. My place was peacemaker in the family. Compromise was my middle name. I did it well and I never saw it as a problem, it was just the way we did things and, as far as I was concerned, it worked just fine.

Colin was in no way, shape or form, a woman.

Certainly not on the outside and he’d shown no signs of it lurking in the inside either. I know the stereotypes of femininity and masculinity are a bad yardstick but, let’s face it, they’re stereotypes for a reason. My husband liked to fish, he liked to water ski when he was young. He had funny stories he would tell about getting drunk and wrapping toilet paper around his best friend’s house in the years before we were married.

Colin liked aeroplanes and trucks, he read adventure stories. I could rely on him to kill spiders and mice and any other rodent that dared to show its ugly head anywhere near me and he could fix stuff.

I remember one time we were coming home from seeing his parents and it was raining heavily. Rachel was nearly asleep in the back seat when suddenly the windscreen wipers stopped working. There we were in torrential rain trying to pull over out of the traffic and wondering how on earth we were going to get home when we couldn’t see where we were going.

After a few minutes of swearing and me deciding we’d have to find somewhere to stay for the night and trying to work out how we could actually pay for that, Colin ran to the boot of the car and grabbed some rope. Blokes have rope in the back of the car; women have an umbrella, if we’re lucky, but never any rope.

I had no idea what he had in mind but, somehow, he loosened the bolts on the wipers and attached the rope to each one. He fed the rope in through the windows, one end through the driver’s side and the other through the passenger side and handed them to me.

Pull. he said. I looked at him.

Pull?

Yes, he said. Pull this one, pointing to the one nearest him. And then pull that one.

So I did what I was told and pulled first one then the other and, lo and behold, we had working windscreen wipers! We laughed so loud, we woke up Rachel. For the next forty-five minutes, I operated the wipers while Colin drove us home. It is still one of my fondest memories.

The following day, with no money to get the car fixed, Colin decided he would have to fix the problem himself. Colin’s experience around cars was restricted to filling it with oil and water so I didn’t really hold out much hope but, as they say, necessity is the mother of invention and so with absolutely no experience as a motor mechanic, he proceeded to take the wiper motor apart and put it back together again. The wipers worked from then on and were still working when we sold the car several years later.

So here I am standing beside my big, burly bloke on the beach where no problems exist and he’s telling me he’s always wanted to be a woman.

I’ve known him since I was sixteen, since he was twenty-one.

How is this possible? What the hell did I miss? More’s the point, what does that mean? I’ve always wanted to be a woman.

I am a woman and I don’t ever recall consciously reminding myself that I was a woman or wanting to be one. I just was one. Even setting aside the fact that, once a month, I hated being a woman, I still didn’t ever consciously think about it.

Maybe when I was pregnant, I may have marvelled at the fact that I could do that. Grow a whole human being inside me and then deliver it to the world with so much noise and fanfare that the midwife told me to behave myself or I wouldn’t be able to talk for a week. Those times were the best. I loved being pregnant, absolutely loved it. I thought I was so clever and I was really proud of myself but other than that I don’t think I ever consciously thought of myself as being a woman. I was just me.

There are twelve years between our first and our second child. Not because we didn’t want more children or because we didn’t enjoy the act of making them. We just loved our first girl so much we couldn’t imagine ever being able to love another child as much and she was so much fun to be with. We just never really got around to talking about it really. When we did decide to have another child, it was just as I remembered it and again I loved every minute of it. Of course, we did love the other girls just as much when they came along and I thought we were the best family we could possibly be.

None of this mattered at that moment though, because now my husband was telling me he wanted to be a woman and how I felt about being a woman wasn’t even a question. With the first grenade thrown, we found a bench and sat for a while. I still didn’t have any questions; nothing was entering my head at all. I didn’t ask why or when he had decided that now was the time. I didn’t even ask how he knew that’s what he wanted or even if he was sure that’s what he wanted.

I just accepted it. That’s what he wanted; he wanted to be a woman.

We sat for quite a while. Eventually it dawned on me that we had children at home. We gathered ourselves together and decided that until we got our heads around it, the girls didn’t need to know anything about it. After all, I wouldn’t even know where to start given I knew nothing myself right now.

We got in the car and I looked at him. Really looked at him. How did this man, this bloke, sitting beside me suddenly find himself in this position? What could possibly have happened that led us here?

I have asked myself these questions over and over again in the years that have followed; I still don’t have any answers. After this conversation, there wasn’t a lot of time for contemplation – things changed, big and fast – and for the most part, I think it would be safe to say that I worked actively to avoid thinking about it. Thoughts were there though, just under the surface, every now and then rearing their ugly heads and making me take notice. But to begin with, I didn’t ask questions because I was pretty sure I wouldn’t like the answers. It was a short drive home.

I knew I needed to put on my best ‘everything is sweet’ face and get on with life. As we pulled into the driveway and he turned off the car, I put my hand on his shoulder and I told him everything would be okay. We’d work it out, everything would be fine and you know, somehow I believed it. At no point did I consider I’d have to leave or that he would. I didn’t once imagine our lives without him in it and I didn’t once think I didn’t love him or that he didn’t love me.

Chapter Two

1975: Young love – where it all started