A GOOD WIFE

“I’m a lesbian trapped in a man’s body.”

I made this declaration, on a dare, to my wife’s mom and stepfather. Our relationship was in its infancy, but I had already met Fran and Paul, and was pretty confident about what I could and could not get away with. Had it been our first meeting, I probably would’ve passed on that dare, but I felt pretty sure my “confession” would get an awkward laugh, or maybe a dismissive look at worst. I got one of each. A confused laugh came from the eternally easy-going Paul, while Fran shot me a playfully dismissive look. After helping Cecily pick her chin up off the table, dinner seamlessly continued.

Seventeen years later, this moment has become part of the iconography of my story with Cecily; evidence of my ability to charm her conservative parents and her no-nonsense mother in particular. I wasn’t coming out that day, or during any other moment I made that statement before or since. I was being cheeky. 
I know better than to say that sentence again. Gender dysphoria isn’t something a privileged, cis white male should casually claim if it isn’t true, especially while people are under attack, simply because they want to live and love authentically. 

My provocative juxtaposition of those words against my decidedly masculine 6’3” frame has an ennobling, if misguided, origin story. I started using this phrase in my early twenties as an act of rebellion. It was a riskless repudiation of the kind of Christianity I practiced as a teen; the kind that othered gay people straight to hell. Making this claim was also a “fuck you” to my stepfather John, who delighted in trying to quash anything about me that struck him as effeminate. “Someday, Tommy,” he would say if he saw me helping my mother in the kitchen, “you’re gonna make someone a good wife.”

I’ve reached the point in my autobiographical project where John is the focus, and I’m having a difficult time detangling who I am from who he was and how he carried himself. This is because I see shadows of him in me. On the surface and the whole, he and I have always been very different. What we have in common; though, what my first marriage could not survive, is our need for the world to be a certain way, along with an ability to make everyone else miserable when the world invariably fails to comply. I can be thankful that I’m nowhere near as bad as I used to be with this – even as I own just how bad I was – but every so often John pops up and taps me on my shoulder, or whispers in my ear, and I worry about something like money.

​Writing about John has me thinking about labels and expectations, and how living happily gets muddied by social constructs we disguise as biological imperatives and/or spiritual truths. I am pretty sure that if John is out there breathing still, he doesn’t understand the assignment. He’s probably in full agreement with J.D. Vance, Harrison Butker, and others who hated Barbie and think the world is going to fall off its axis if we all shit in the same toilets, or if a woman becomes president. I’d guess he’s still miserable, too. 

John was an archetypal “emotional parent,” the most infantile of Dr. Lindsay Gibson’s four types of emotionally immature parents. According to Gibson, emotional parents, “react to small upsets like the end of the world and tend to rely on external factors, like other people or intoxicants to soothe and stabilize them.” That was John. Once I left for school with my bed unmade, and came home to a ransacked room. One of his trademarks was to come home from work, and throw off his clothes piece by piece on his way to his room to change (jacket here, tie there, trousers over there, and so on). Then he’d come out and explode over how messy the house was.

Ultimately, John was the real victim of role confusion. Society told him he needed a family; that he needed to be the head of said family, which meant acting a certain way. He was so woefully ill-equipped for the job, and he knew it. But, like my mother, he tried. He got a pretty wife, a house, a nice car, and a dog. John got those things, but still felt empty. As much as I want to hate him, I have to acknowledge that he kept me fed and clothed for nearly a decade – no easy task given the way I ate as a teenager. Plus, I’m not sure he wanted any of the things he worked so hard to get but treated so poorly.

John didn’t really know what he was doing when he married my mom and took on her kids. I think he felt empty and depressed, so he reached for what society said was supposed to make a man happy and complete. Wanting a family, a nice home, a good job – none of these things are “bad” in and of themselves. Neither is cake decorating, or wearing make-up. It’s when these things become proscribed and gendered that they become troubling, and when people use them to gatekeep – that’s just dangerous. Cooking meals for my wife should not be off-limits to me because I have a penis. Not having children and loving cats does not mean you can’t be relied on to make good decisions for the children in your community.

When John couldn’t beat and berate us into the sort of family that would make him happy, he turned to porn, and then cocaine, and then to other women. If he ever possessed a kernel of self-worth, he either didn’t know it or believe it. Having met his parents, either scenario is plausible – but we all would’ve been so much better off if he hadn’t pinned his happiness on us, and measured us against the arbitrary standards he saw on TV growing up (only his version of “Ward, I’m worried about the Beaver” was “Patty, you have to do something about your kids.”).

John would never claim to be a lesbian trapped in a man’s body. He would be more likely to say something about how he and lesbians can agree on at least one thing. You can probably figure out the punchline. I’ll be writing more about John in the coming weeks because he is me; or, more accurately, I was him, or – something like that. He is the part of my story that comes after “Strays,” and telling that story has helped me unravel and frame a happier, healthier me. No, I am not a man trapped in a lesbian’s body, I’m also not the man John wanted me to be, or tried to be himself. I love to cook, I cry at Jane Austin films, and I listen to Chappell Roan. And, dammit, I am a good wife.