In the Curated Woods: True Tales from a Grass Widow

By Ute Heggen

Ute Heggen’s husband revealed a shocking truth: he’d started a secret life and no longer identified as male. Ute, a mother of two young sons, thus became a grass widow, a woman whose husband, during a personal crisis, forged ahead into opposite sex identification.

In this poignant chronicle, illustrated with fifty original nature photographs, Ute Heggen reveals the stinging betrayals, recent trends of mother erasure, and as well, sweet remembrances of her young sons’ childhoods. As she writes this memoir, Ute plants and weeds, finding ultimate healing in the curating of her beloved woods and gardens.

In the Curated Woods: True Tales from a Grass Widow is a powerful narrative of modern life and natural beauty that gives voice to women in all walks of life. Ute Heggen tells further true tales of women discovering their voices again at uteheggengrasswidow.wordpress.com.

“Ute's story is one of unimaginable gaslighting and heartbreak; it shines a glaring light on the financial, emotional, and societal repercussions of becoming a trans widow …”
—Isabella Malbin, founder of Whose Body Is It?


We see a woman, a mother, facing and finding herself, overcoming. One feels the life undone, yet through a trial of the self, understanding. Ute Heggen’s tales retrieve the light from the darkness.

Donovan Cleckley, writer, womenarehuman.com

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Apr 13, 2022
• ISBN: 9781663231048

Ute Heggen

Ute Heggen, a trained early childhood specialist, taught in public school and other settings for more than twenty-five years. After three decades in Brooklyn, New York, Ute purchased a small wooded parcel in the Hudson Valley and began a new life of gardening. Ute Heggen's articles about ex-wives and other family members affected by their husband's, children's or sibling's cross-sex ideation appear at uteheggengrasswidow.wordpress.com. Today the mother of two adult sons is a citizen scientist. Ute's specialization is violet cultivation, for great spangled fritillary butterflies, which do not migrate, but overwinter locally. Ute urges all to "Live, love, plant!"

Book preview

Copyright © 2022 Ute Heggen.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical,

including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written

permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views

of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

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since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not

necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models,

and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

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ISBN: 978-1-6632-3103-1 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-6632-3104-8 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2022904565

iUniverse rev. date: 04/08/2022

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Contents

Dedication

Preface

Chapter 1     October

Chapter 2     November

Chapter 3     December

Chapter 4     January

Chapter 5     February

Chapter 6     March

Chapter 7     April

Chapter 8     May

Chapter 9     June

Postscript

About The Author

People Ask

People ask me

when it comes up

what it was like

being married

to

a man who

says/said

I, a woman,

old name

dead name

not me

I did, I didn’t.

Watched, thought

maybe—not.

It is beyond me

to

understand though

I tried.

—Ute Heggen

Dedication

For Rose Schneider,

my Brooklyn Yiddishe Mama.

You saw it all, never batted an eye.

Preface

Preface1.jpeg

A long, long time ago, my motherhood became a shadow. I couldn’t have imagined it or anticipated it. I gave birth and breastfed. I cooked and cleaned and wiped. I sang lullabies, inhaling the smell of my babies’ downy, warm heads. I thought I was working for my family’s future when I waited for my sons’ little bodies to drop into that infant sleep on my chest. My husband then was and still is the biological father of my children. My boys have grown to be men. The man I married is no longer a man, so he says. His journey transformed me into a grass widow, a woman whose husband, so he says, is no longer the man he started out as. There are drifts and rivers to be told about this widowhood, and I do that. The tale is of the fullness of my motherhood, a muscle both deep and exposed. With a similar sensation, I recall my own mother’s wrinkled, downy skin, my grandmothers’ knowing voices.

I watch the shadows of the trees on my land, lines of the absence of light. Objects, like trees, block our sunlight. Trees are sundials as their shadows creep across the forest floor, revealing the position of the sun. I stand like a tree, blocking sunlight, proving by my shadow that I exist. I stand, a woman, revealed in my shadow, though it’s distorted, lengthening my features. I am an adult human female. A changed world repositions others’ shadows, drawing me back through seasons, years, decades.

This book documents nine months in my natural bubble during our pandemic. I sheltered mostly within its confines, finding solace while learning my land. We still do as we will to contain the contagion and don’t know when it shall finally fade away. My narrative, with botanical notes, is written in the vein of Henry David Thoreau’s notes on wildflowers and their bloom times, from almost two centuries ago. The nine months recorded in my habitat complete a just and honest rendition of an ebb and flow in the seasons of my mind, my recollections of joy and sorrow. Learning and curating my woods carried me along and told parallel tales to weave in with my past.

I am a grass widow, my name for a woman whose husband, during a personal crisis, forged ahead into the process called sex change. For me, grass widow and the oft-used term, trans widow, are interchangeable; the former phrase originated in northern Europe in the fourteenth century. This footnote in women’s history informs us that not all women lived with their husbands. It may indicate a spark of independence we’ve been unaware of. The grass, but no grave, to mourn at. This is now euphemistically called sex affirmation surgery and transition. My expectation is that the sector of society supporting this path will condemn me, as they do others, and try to cancel my writing and voice. They will attempt to force the removal of my books as they’ve attempted to ban shows and interviews of others. They claim our words, no matter how truthful or humorously ironic, are damaging, even threatening. I will be accused of fabrication and exaggeration. Individuals online, sounding like Olivia Mayward, Walter Walker, or Shegerath will lurk online, trolling me. Other grass widows, when they’ve recalled their unexpected surprises in the public sphere, have experienced pile-ons through social media and even in person. We are vilified as religious right-wingers as we express our logic and common sense. The younger generation of grass widows fear being put out of their careers.

Such is the case of Christine Benvenuto, the author of Sex Changes, published in November of 2012 by St. Martin’s Press. Benvenuto was accosted at book signings, where her voice was drowned out. Thus, the voices of grass widows have been suppressed in a free society. As I finished this book, I scoured my paragraphs one by one to weed out any sentiments too vague or inexact or possibly inflammatory. I give you my reality as I know it, as I felt it, and as it unfolded. This isn’t a diatribe but a thoughtful presentation of my experiences. I have the right to tell these true tales, and I will. All names have been changed, where appropriate, and I write under a pseudonym. I have pulled back the curtain on some of the practices in the movement called gender ideology. Gender ideology is the belief that biological sex can be changed through pharmaceuticals and/or surgeries, even through statements of personal preference. As a courtesy, I call my former husband Neddy to avoid identifying him.

I call my sons not by their beloved given names, inherited from their great-grandfathers, but instead by well-chosen pseudonyms. In my first drafts, I couldn’t rename them. I called them My Progeny, The Older, and The Younger, as in a Viking saga, to give myself the distance I needed to allow the memories back. I’ve substituted this idiosyncrasy with new names. My firstborn is Ilan, the Hebrew name meaning tree. Tree was the password to my father’s first and only email account, and memories of Dad struggling to adapt to the internet put a smile on my face. My second born is Oren, the Hebrew name for cedar. Cedar is a strong, vital wood, and my house is covered in cedar shingles. I sincerely wish I’d had the option when they were born, to name them independently of names past and given my sons these tree names. Through my thoughts and words, my sons inhabit my woods now too, just as they once lived inside my womb.

I chose Neddy as a neutral, uncommon name to avoid the taint to any particular actual name. The non-certified woman, whom Neddy went to see for sessions to qualify for surgery, I call Ruth, the Charlatan. She practiced medicine without qualifications, pronouncing diagnoses that shattered lives of other wives and children. Ruth stated openly that she had no special training for this field. I spoke to her twice. Her words are burned into my brain all these years later.

Neddy, who now identifies as a woman, is the COO, meaning chief operating officer, of a tech company, a business that has listed annual earnings of many millions for many years. Neddy is by no means living a downtrodden, marginalized life, unable to find reasonable employment. The company is listed as having Certified Small Business, Disadvantaged status to obtain US federal government contracts through the General Services Administration (GSA). This contractual status with a government bureau is publicly available and has been posted as a company webpage on the internet.

I note that in 2005, the year this contract started, I was just rising from the financial struggles of my first phase of single motherhood involving multiple jobs and a master’s degree completed at night school. I didn’t receive the stipulated child support. It appears, from the government contract information, that my former spouse, equity contract from the tech firm in hand, gained this GSA provision for preferential treatment based on the claim that it is female owned. Public information about the other executives at this firm shows they are white males, not qualified for the disadvantaged status Congress created for minority and female business owners.

It took a day or two after I discovered this detail to recognize the inner meanings for me. The full meaning is that Neddy’s claim in court during 2007 that he wasn’t paid a salary much higher than mine was a misstatement. I suddenly realized that the missing piece of the puzzle was just a garden-variety ex-husband trying to hide his wealth. He was partially compensated with equity in the company, an asset to be cashed in later. The government accepted him as the female owner. In 2005, Kings County family court accepted his flimsy work documents, which didn’t include tax returns, during a reconfiguration of his financial responsibilities to support our children. I didn’t know he was on the path to the executive suite, from back then until this last spring, when I learned of his position as chief operating officer. In other words, he’s the boss. In other words, he got away with fraud.

For clarity, I use male pronouns for the man I married, then divorced. To tell of my life back and forth in time and call him anything other than what he was, is to commit linguistic robbery. I won’t allow my authenticity to be stolen out from under me. I used to carefully toggle back and forth between male and female pronouns in my own chronicling until my words didn’t sound like my own. It takes too much time, and most importantly, it makes my reality a falsehood. Christine Benvenuto followed the same practice in her book, subtitled A Memoir of Marriage, Gender and Moving On. While it may be disturbing for our former spouses to read our wordings, it is necessary for me to firmly tell my reader how the situation was in my eyes. These tales hold a place in women’s history, contemporary society, and public discourse. Those who find the topic unfashionable or unsettling are invited to put the book down and return to their sphere, where compelled speech and programmed thought follow their rules. I make no apologies for following my instincts and telling my story in concise, accurate language. I hit the wall of mangling my own history when Neddy’s wealth and the hiding of it were the last artifacts to come out of the closet. To set off the true tales of Neddy’s narcissism, I often use the introduction, This is the true tale of the first sworn affidavit, for example. I am sure of my voice, the need to claim it, the need for all grass widows to witness their own lives. We do not advocate acts of violence, revenge or aggression of any kind; we do advocate for the return of women’s sex-based rights, the right to be identified as the one and only mother of our children. Fathers who are compelled to wear dresses are going to have to get over themselves and be honest.

It would have made a difference if Neddy had respected me for my sacrifices, creativity, and motherhood. The exhaustion of mothering babies is never fully appreciated. Mothers deserve unique recognition. I especially deserve better for raising our children, answering the questions their father wouldn’t, and supporting them on my own finances. There is an interesting phenomenon on the financial page of that tech firm’s website that signifies the extent of Neddy’s entitlement toward the female persona, manifested in avatar dimensions. Instead of actual photos of the various principals in the company, as in all other sections of this tech website, there are cartoon avatars for all but one staffer. Neddy’s little moon is the most feminine looking, a sort of Jane Jetson, appearing twice. To me this is the secret world where his fatherhood doesn’t exist. Therefore, my sons and I are also nonexistent to those work colleagues. Based on my sons’ lack of exposure to that actual physical place and all I’ve gleaned from the other web videos and sound bites, I believe my children and I are absent, nonexistent, in Neddy’s personal backstory. We are chunks of a jigsaw puzzle from an inconvenient past.

Many states in the United States now provide legal protection for biological fathers to list themselves as mothers on documents and papers pertaining to their children. This is the manifestation of gender as a word replacing sex in the law. The word gender hadn’t yet replaced sex in legal language when my divorce was finalized in 1998, so Judge William Rigler wrote into my document that I would be the only person listed as the mother of our two sons. Subsequently, despite this, Neddy often wrote his name in as mother in violation of that contract, a contract he had signed on the same day as I. At the time, I felt I couldn’t afford to go back to court to litigate relief since in my view this action constituted impersonation. Now in my state I would have no legal language to identify myself as the natal mother of my children. The term for this issue is mother erasure. There is a significant segment of the next generation who express that a birth mother has no unique claim as the mother due to beliefs surrounding gender identity affirmation. Science, especially biology, has become political, an obstacle to be changed with chemicals and the scalpel.

A recent demonstration of female erasure in the news shortly before this memoir’s publication was the rewording of a well-known quote from Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg so two of her words—woman and her—were omitted. The American Civil Liberties Union tweeted out the neutralized version. I wrote a response comment, published on September 27, 2021, in the New York Times, briefly describing my own mother erasure. The op-ed I responded to had mildly criticized the ACLU for changing this historic quote. For a time, on the day my comment appeared, it was the top editor’s pick, and responses to it were often from women in my generation expressing shock that a major equal rights organization could take liberties with a feminist icon’s quote. I crowed with excitement as I watched the recommendation clicks on my comment grow to 336 under my pen name, Ute Heggen. Then, at about eight in the evening, it was no longer on the NYT Picks List, but it had been relegated to All Comments, where so far it is second, because of the hundreds of recommend clicks. Comments were closed later that evening after more than twelve hundred responses were published. Even with their moderators working overtime, trolls got through and accused me of lying. One SpiderBug or some similar moniker said I had never worked a day in my life; they knew who I was. False claims about grass widows are very, very common.

Ruth, the Charlatan, suggested that Neddy and I could work it out to stay in the marriage, but I never considered staying, even to have more time with Ilan and Oren. During the first phase of Neddy’s process though, I lived in a kind of servitude with his unpredictable moods, jealousies, unexplained absences, and secret shopping habits. According to Neddy and Ruth, if only I had been less of a traditional creature, I could have joined this journey as a supportive partner, going to Ruth too for her soothing voice—cash only, thank you! I could have been with my young children for more time, as I’d had during their babyhoods, if I had stayed. To save my sense of self, I marched into my one appointment with Ruth to make sure both she and Neddy understood that for me, our marriage was over. For me, there was no validity to the suggestion that I should have recognized my spouse’s quirks and opposite-sex qualities, which meant I should engage in deep restructuring of my own sexual orientation. I, Ute, must actually have a lesbian sexual orientation. Hadn’t I seen that somewhere deep in my consciousness? No, I hadn’t. My many lesbian friends laugh and call me "that flaming heterosexual girl," a good and loyal friend of theirs, but not belonging to the L club. They did not see Neddy as a lesbian either, telling me of book groups and lesbian circles that fell apart when someone like him intruded and dominated their conversations.

As it happens, I had suppressed my attraction to other men, especially during my twenties, while pursuing a career in dance. Neddy had a secret inner life, and I will never know how often it manifested physically and behaviorally in my sphere. I didn’t respond to or talk about these other men’s come-ons, though, or the propositions I turned down. For me those were part and parcel of working in the world of dance, of having a stage persona and interacting with musicians, living in the moment. I believed in monogamy and still do. I wonder though, if there was an aura of emotional neglect that haloed me, a faint Peter Pan shadow, that some men detected and responded to, thinking I might need their companionship.

At this late age in my sixties, I am only now learning what is my own voice. I don’t call myself a cis woman, and I consider this new term to display a lack of understanding of what it means to be female. I also take offense. I don’t consent to someone else co-opting my truth. I have gone through all the stages of womanhood: girlhood, puberty, marriage, pregnancies, nursing, mothering, working, teaching, retirement. I’ve finished menopause. I strive to age gracefully. I need no prefix. I wear my crow’s feet and age spots without regrets.

I took early retirement in 2016 from teaching public school kindergarten, early grade science, and pre-K. Ilan and Oren had grown, gone through college, and launched. My elderly mother was nearing the end; I needed flexibility and a different setting. I sold my Brooklyn co-op and moved to this little woods. It is beautiful here. If I listen well, the woods will speak. Perhaps the voices from my past, the ghosts that haunt my dreams, might go back to the labyrinth where they belong, and new words of my own will be my home. I will hear new songs, I will sing.

I hope to inspire others to work at planting and curating in a habitat, a front or side yard, even a window box. We can change our outside space through small gestures and tiny appreciations. I connect my healing to my efforts out in the natural world and believe in the centeredness found in gardens and woods. I see my wanderings in the woods as a metaphor for the places of repair, of healing, where our lives take us. Moving through life, we find there is no map to guide us. There is no wise woman in the little cottage, found deep in the forest, telling us which way to go. I foresee a day when grass widows will be asked to tell their tales, and here I offer mine.

Chapter 1

OCTOBER

Oct1.jpeg

Yesterday in the wind, leaves fell with force, a storm of floating, dappled sunlight. The remaining leaves seem less eager to fall into the amber drifts below. Chickadees and cardinals flit companionably between the flowers. A flick of something prompted them to fly away, followed by a flittering rush to the fence tops, then into the trees. Probably it was one of the outside cats, who live off the hospitality of my neighbors. One of the smaller cats guarded the gate of my Border Garden recently, its eyes latched on the birds.

Cats hunt even when they are fed, and I am relieved to see my little chickadees and dark-eyed juncoes fly up to safe perches. The cat loses patience after a time and slinks around, back into the woods. I call him Panther, because of his black fur. Settled in the comfortable red armchair, I study the Border Garden and little woods, my little curated woods. The yellow leaves drift down in syncopation. A slow sashay, a drift left, a quick drop to the base of the dahlias. Sitting here this year, at my bedroom picture window, has become a morning routine, something to do to postpone listening to the news.

Black-eyed Susan vines, more technically named thunbergia, finally cover the bamboo teepee in the rear quarter of the enclosure. They have climbed the bamboo poles to form triangular screens of green and white. I anticipate this wall of flowers all summer. The little white flowers, slow starters, now live up to their potential. The black eyes, dramatically framed with a ring of white petals, face toward the overhanging boughs of a Norway maple. It’s as if they’re silently daring the leaves above to let go, to trust in the last floating drop to earth.

The gardening season of 2020 is drawing to a close. Growing flowers for bees and especially butterflies is my occupation. Indeed, I call it my salvation during the repeated shutdowns. I have largely created my own secluded life, not trusting to put this old body into the wide, microbial world. When all becomes reliable again, I will relearn how to venture out. I stopped going off the land much at the end of February last year. Unfortunately, my premonitions of this era, of the deadly effect of deadly nanoparticles, proved correct. Even I was surprised at how right the black mirror in my mind proved to be.

When you’re my age, you suddenly think that life is perhaps not going to last so much longer. Memories from the past drift down as if they too, but a moment ago, detached from their branches. I often think of Grandma Jennie—her hardworking ways, her doughnuts, her oatmeal cookies for breakfast. The gift I miss the most is the hand-sewn Raggedy Ann doll with the yellow hair, made from a sweater she unraveled. The twisted yellow fibers she carefully wove and stitched onto Ann’s head. Grandma embroidered the face so precisely that you couldn’t tell the difference between my Raggedy’s face and the faces of the ones in the stores.

This is the tale of the last time. Uninvited memories arrive, like the last time my then-husband and I had sex before I discovered he had been taking estrogen. His motions were different, had a vacancy in them; there was a neglect of my breasts, a stiffness in his reaction to my embraces. His errant hand thrust intrusively between us, to explore my orgasm, felt cool and clinical. It was a sudden and voyeuristic gesture. Intuitively I knew it was the last time and that I’d always remember. I felt dissociated, emotionally confused. I was so disconnected—unusual for me, the former dancer. I assume it was the last time he ever had intercourse using his male parts. It is an odd reality, probably the only orgasm I remember with an approximate date attached, on account of random events remembered, before and after. He wore a shirt despite my preference for naked sex. About six weeks later, I saw his developing breasts. I thought I had forgotten that night, but there it came, as if on the shafts of light slanting down between the branches, while I wandered around the woods, craning my neck, trying to identify the oaks.

I have three significant oaks, a wondrous fact. Oaks support many, many insects and animals. I spread my palms across the Central Oak, one of two trees I’ve named. I’m trying to transfer my memories into its tough, ridged bark. The woods, oblivious to the plight of our illogical human race, grows on, drops limbs, decomposes. The trees feed and shelter insects, which nourish birds, and on and on. They welcome the occasional fox. Perhaps the trees are bemused at me for chasing off the deer visitors with my clanging antique school bells. Tick-devouring possums harbor here. Squirrels perform leaps of skill and daring, and the light continuously changes, never slanting through along the same angles as seasons pass. I find a way to do good in my little forest bubble, this habitat.

In the imagined ancient tale of my woods’ history, I will find the spaces between the lines and recognize the patience of trees. I curate this little spot, rip out the wrongful weeds, set in the native plants, and log out the tree intruders, the ones that shouldn’t be growing here. After years, will I see my plans and hopes come to fruition? Will I see more of the finery I draw forth, the butterflies, myriads of bees, dragonflies, hawks, and all? They are the collateral beauty of Mother Nature, seen when we only stop to notice.

In a mood of predictive dread, at the end of February, I resigned from my little teaching jobs, because suddenly I needed not to be around children. Both of my supervisors replied, perplexed, to my urgent message. They didn’t think it would be so bad, no need to do something so drastic. I let them down, they thought, frustrated. I do regret being right but knew I was and persisted in quitting something I had loved to do for so long. I didn’t admonish or explain about my overly accurate crystal ball. From the warnings of a friend’s stepfather, the only epidemiologist with whom I have some small connection, I understood this pandemic to be quite real. That researcher had put forth dire warnings for decades. My friend would mention this casually over the years, between news of the divorce, this school principal, that boyfriend, and the growing up of our beautiful offspring.

My life became solitary then on this long-neglected, dumped-in little pocket of wildlife in New York’s Hudson Valley. It came into my ownership, my stewardship, in the spring of 2017. Plunked in a corner formed by two adjacent cemeteries, it is a quiet parcel of quarried-out limestone, threaded with creeping myrtle and garlic mustard, along with thankfully a few mighty trees, my oaks, black cherries, and basswoods. One hop hornbeam stands out, with its distinctive bark, another valued native. There is Virginia creeper on the forest floor. Long ago, in history I cannot find documented, we can assume it was part of an early land grant or one of the railroad land grants. I reconcile the rusty metal tools, which periodically thrust themselves up from crevices, cracks, and gullies. The realization arrives when the snow melts that this place is affordable to me now, because it was the dump. It’s become my craggy hectare.

The farthest back owner to be found is Catherine Rial, sometimes spelled Riel, most likely a descendant of the family of John O’Reilly. I relish a female name in the record. This popover-shaped plot was first dated 1864 in the oldest of the county’s record books. As evidenced by the lines of holes drilled into rock slabs, it was seriously quarried. The holes were then left to fill with water, freeze, and thaw again and again until a block of stone separated and sheared off or was sheared by the blunt force of sledgehammers. A face may drop off still in my lifetime. As it happens, a rusted metal pike is marking the center of the woods. It is another sundial, an Arthurian sword, waiting to be pulled from the stone. Many quarried stones, abandoned here and there, have regular geometric shapes: a rectangular