Permission to Live
Once upon a time there were two girls. One was very sad most of the time, she kept her head down and did what she was told, because she could not imagine ever being strong enough to do anything different. She hardly knew what it meant to dream, to have goals and ambitions, because her life was already mapped out for her by others, she just had to follow the rules and be the person she was supposed to be.
The other girl was very afraid, she had been told her whole life that she was a boy, but secretly she knew she was a girl; she also knew that she could never ever breathe a word about it to anyone, because being a girl born with a boy’s body was wrong and impossible in the world she lived in. So she did the best she could to hide any part of her personality that could betray her secret.
The girls met, married, started a family, and fell in love.
Those girls were my wife and I.
The month of March was the four year anniversary of when Haley came out to me as Trans, the first time she had dared to speak it out loud to anyone. That was in 2010, we were still in ministry, still very Christian, still believed that god punished people who didn’t fit inside the box.
The next two years were a scary exhilarating exhausting ride, as we talked and talked, and opened up more and more, and the questions! Omyword, all the questions we had never dared to ask, now we asked them all at once, reading and studying and discussing and challenging each other. We faced losing everything, and when we came out to the world in 2012 we really did lose a lot.
I wrote about how we got to that point of coming out to the world in my series “Unwrapping the Onion” that I published in the summer of 2012, and many people have asked me since then if I could share more of what happened after that. What happened after that last post where we moved, came out, and started over? How did we adjust? What were the reactions we got? How did we cope?
That’s what this series is about.
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