THERAPISTS: HIS, MINE, AND OURS

Wegner argues … the loss of … joint memory … helps to make divorce so painful. “Divorced people who suffer depression and complain of cognitive dysfunction may be expressing the loss of their external memory systems,” he writes. “They were once able to discuss their experiences to reach a shared understanding.… They once could count on access to a wide range of storage in their partner, and this, too, is gone.… The loss … feels like losing a part of one’s own mind.”

—The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell

One afternoon driving my children home from their three schools, we passed a billboard announcing: STRESS AWARENESS MONTH.

“Look,” I told the kids. “It’s Stress Awareness Month!” I began to laugh, helplessly and with perhaps the slightest edge of hysteria. It was one of those times when everyone is both smiling and looking a little worried about Mama.

I feel as though I could laugh that way when I read that people going through divorce complain of cognitive dysfunction. Cognitive dysfunction. I like that.

If you have ever lost a longtime lover, you’ve probably had the experience. You’re walking past a bar on Polk Street in San Francisco from which you catch the barest strains of a Billie Holiday song that is a favorite with you both. Your child says, “I want too much love.” Someone tells what he thinks is a funny story about your ethnic group and expects you to laugh. You look up, physically or metaphorically, to share it—the look, the smile, the shrug, the memory of accumulated occasions that makes this moment mean what it means. There is one person on earth who shivers, grows misty-eyed, or clenches his fists just as you are, at least knows that that’s what you are doing and why. But— Oh. No. There isn’t. That person is gone. You catch yourself. You have to catch yourself. There is no one else to catch you, and if someone doesn’t do it, you will fall.

Cognitive dysfunction. You lose your partner and your access to his memories. One day he comes to you in different clothes, with different hair, and in a travesty of his voice he tells you that his name is something other than the one you have always known him by. He tells you that he has been posing as your partner, a fictitious character of his own and perhaps your invention throughout your relationship. Tells you every memory you’ve stored needs to be rewritten. This person, the one standing before you now, who looks and sounds and moves in a manner that strikes you as being just about as authentic as a child playing dress-up, tells you: I’m real. The man you knew was not.

It’s like losing a part of one’s mind.

*   *   *

This, though, is what I was determined not to do. I hung on to my own mind, all of it, sometimes by my fingernails.

“You’re sick,” Tracey told me when I protested against any aspect of his behavior. “You’re mentally ill. No one in the world thinks the way you do. Everyone else thinks what I’m doing is great.”

“Well,” I pointed out, “none of these people are married to you, are they?”

But it turned out I wasn’t married to Tracey, either. That is, not to the man I believed I knew, the man who loved me. That man never existed. Tracey told me that the past twenty-odd years of my life had not actually happened. Wasn’t the fact that I had lived a fantasy for two decades proof that I was insane?

When he wasn’t actively questioning my sanity, Tracey undermined my self-confidence with threats and intimidation, chiefly by claiming that I had no rights, legal or otherwise, when it came to my children. After Michael’s visit he began to accept that if he was going to live the rest of his life as a woman, he couldn’t live it married to me, but he belligerently insisted that the children and our home belonged to him. He shook my emotional equilibrium by making and breaking promises about what he would and wouldn’t do to his appearance, where he would do these things, whom he would tell.

For a long time, his bizarre blossoming took place in a hothouse atmosphere. In self-imposed isolation, I was vulnerable to his bullying perspective. But when he told me I should see a therapist because there was something wrong with me for not greeting his transformation with fireworks and confetti, I resisted.

When Tracey found himself a therapist the summer it all began, I was frightened, as I was frightened by all the steps he took. I knew he would choose a therapist who was accustomed to working with transgender issues, and I wouldn’t wish him to do otherwise. My fear in those first months when I was still grasping at diminishing hopes that he could ride out the crisis and reconcile to being male was that a sympathetic therapist might encourage him to feel that there was no alternative to stilettos and Wonderbras. At the same time, I knew that Tracey needed help. He was losing weight and complained of feeling ill constantly. He was palpably, miserably depressed. Occasionally he spoke of suicide, which was frightening even if it wasn’t meant as a serious threat. He was on the edge and I knew the wrong therapist might push him over. He needed someone who was knowledgeable and compassionate, someone he trusted to help him sort out his feelings. Someone to whom he could speak freely and who could be there for him, without his or her own agenda. Someone I could not be. Tracey said he had found all this in the first therapist he went to see. He assured me that she had no fixed ideas about the feelings he was grappling with. She was there just to support him. Because of the concern and caring he said she showed him, I viewed his therapist as my ally as well as his.

I’m not sure when I began to have doubts about the therapist I’ll call Dr. Q. That she was there for him was indisputable. At first she was there for him in their once-a-week sessions, then in phone calls in between, then in several sessions a week and phone calls that happened daily or more—I never got a final count. She saw him when he could come up with the co-payment his insurance required and accepted the beaded jewelry he began making, or nothing, when he could not. When Tracey reported that she thought I should have a therapist of my own, I naïvely took it as recognition that Tracey wasn’t the only member of our family who needed support. What she actually had in mind turned out to be more support for Tracey, with a therapist for me acting as channel.

As I’ve already described, Dr. Q didn’t share my concerns about Tracey’s behavior with our children. She wasn’t worried—but I was—when Tracey casually mentioned that he had sent photographs of the children via the Internet to a transgendered person he’d “met” online.

“You sent their pictures to someone you’ve never actually met?” I couldn’t believe this was Tracey’s—even the new Tracey’s—idea of responsible parenting. “To a stranger? And now they’re out there somewhere on the Internet?”

“You only say that because my friend is a transsexual! This is just more of your prejudice and phobias!”

“It has nothing to do with that! How do you even know the person is really a transsexual if you’ve never met?”

The next time he saw Dr. Q, Tracey reported that she had backed him up. “She said what I did was fine.” Adding coolly on this and several other occasions, “She said I should just tell you I won’t do it again to placate you.”

Dr. Q became so involved with Tracey that I would ultimately hear through the grapevine that her colleagues were concerned that she had breached the emotional barriers usually thought necessary in a healthy therapeutic relationship. Dr. Q and I never met. Based on Tracey’s description (“She’s an ordinary middle-aged married woman”), I concocted an image of a woman with a Talbots-Burberry look, lots of plaid, short gray hair and pearls, and a trans suicide hidden in the family closet, maybe a son or daughter whose gender identity she could never accept and was hell-bent on atoning for. With my husband. With my family. With me.

Through Dr. Q—by which I mean Tracey’s reportage of their sessions, of course—I began to experience for the first time from a source outside my marriage the curious pressure to get on board with the program. His program. Only a hopelessly conventional woman, the message went, would be less than thrilled to watch her husband shrink into a violet. It wasn’t that conformity was bad. It was that I was to conform to their particular specifications. My job was to be his wife. To support him, period. To stick with him, whatever, whenever, however. It wasn’t merely my own life, my deepest feelings, my sexuality, my very identity, that I was to sacrifice for his transformation; it was my children. According to Tracey, his therapist, and ultimately his other supporters, my role was to strong-arm my children into accepting him as a woman, not when they were ready but yesterday. However this affected them—not that this camp could admit that a child might have any trouble getting over the loss of an adored father and accepting in his place a cross-dressed stranger whose personality had changed more and faster than his underwear—wasn’t anyone’s concern. What mattered was what he needed.

In this bizarrely retro transuniverse, my spluttering insistence that I had a right to make my own judgments—what I quaintly called feminism—was the height of political incorrectness. For the first time in my life, I was landing on the right (wrong) side of liberal. Not long before our odyssey began, one of my children’s teachers had taken the kids on a class trip to an event in support of same-sex marriage. Upon hearing that the teacher had received some nervous flak from the principal for this excursion, I’d written a letter praising the decision, and the principal had read it aloud to the entire staff. Now, expressing some delicate feminine reluctance—okay, I was kicking and screaming—to radically alter or give up my own sexuality on command made me a gender nazi. I support other people’s right to be in a gay marriage! I wanted to shout. Does that mean I have to be in one myself?

*   *   *

For months I resisted their pressure—Tracey’s and Dr. Q’s—to see a therapist. I didn’t believe I had a problem that psychotherapy could solve. I rejected the idea that my husband’s desire to live as a woman, or my lack of enthusiasm for this desire, constituted neurosis, at least not mine. In the end I decided that I needed someone safe and safely private to talk with.

“These are people Dr. Q thinks won’t frighten you,” Tracey told me, handing me a list of therapists.

I didn’t even bother to point out how condescending this was. At first ignoring Dr. Q’s list, I began making calls, putting potential therapists through my prepared privacy drill. Obviously I didn’t approach anyone whose name I recognized, but in my rural area there is never more than a degree or two of separation between any two people who think they don’t know each other. I didn’t want to see someone professionally I would then run into socially. I explained as much and told each of the therapists where my children went to school and what my Jewish affiliations were. They were patient with my questions. One who sounded nice was also someone I might end up interacting with in Jewish contexts. While debating the risk, I decided, in lieu of other options, to try one of the names on Dr. Q’s list. As soon as I heard N’s voice on her answering machine, I had a feeling she was my girl. When we met, I knew it.

After fielding my questions, most of the therapists, N included, had one for me in our initial phone conversation: “Why are you seeking therapy?” I refused to answer. “I know you may not be able to help me with my particular issues,” I explained, “but I need to discuss this in person.” At this point, eight to nine months after Tracey’s momentous June announcement, I had yet to tell a single soul what was happening in my marriage. I had a strong conviction that saying the words aloud for the first time—breaking the silence—would be a powerful experience and that I needed to be looking the person I told in the eye when I uttered the words.

When we met, N repeated the question I’d declined to answer on the phone. “Why are you seeking therapy?”

I couldn’t put it off any longer. I took a deep breath and said it: “My husband is a transsexual.”

N looked startled. The subject isn’t shocking in her neck of the woods; she’s a transgender specialist. I took, still take, her reaction in two ways. First, as a mirror of what I was feeling myself as I spoke these words for the first time. Second, as a reflection of a thought process probably identical to what she would have gone through if Betty Crocker had uttered this sentence. Something akin to, Sitting before me is clearly the most conventional wife and mother in the world. Her husband is trans? Poor girl!

Ultimately, hearing my side of the story became part of a reevaluation of N’s received wisdom on gender dysphoria. Although she wouldn’t tell me this for a long time, her expertise in transgender issues—her training in the field, her reading of the literature, and her experience with clients—made me a challenge for N. Until I walked into her office, she had been in the habit of taking the transsexual’s point of view for granted. Not surprising, given that it was the transperson coming to her for empathy and counsel, not to mention a psychological visa stamp to hormone treatment and gender surgery. For the first time in her practice, she was being asked to consider the ramifications of switching gender not for the person who chooses it, but exclusively for the partner and family members he leaves reeling in his wake. The people without choice in the matter.

N’s clientele range from soft-skinned boys with hips who have never developed masculine personae to begin with to middle-aged macho Republicans agonized by their desire to dress up in women’s clothes. It includes lesbians who have decided that what they really want is to be men, and among this demographic she has worked with both partners in couples, female-to-male transsexuals and their female partners.

Of course I asked her, “How do the women in these couples feel about their partners becoming men?”

“They usually hate it,” N told me. “They say they’ve chosen to be with women because they want to be with women. If they had wanted men, they would have been in heterosexual relationships.”

Some of the women end up leaving their partners and some end up staying, but none had a vote in the gender change and none would have ratified it if they had. Sounded familiar. Also funny, since I had it on Tracey’s and Dr. Q’s authority that I was the last pigeon-brain on earth to have trouble with her partner’s gender makeover.

Talking to N took this thing that had consumed my life out of the realm of nightmare and made it real. Not that it hadn’t been real all along, as N made sure I understood at the end of that first conversation, with a question spoken in the matter-of-fact, pull-no-punches style that was already becoming my lifeline into the future. A question to which I responded in the affirmative and with equanimity but that in actual fact skillfully sliced away the very last clinging strands of hope connecting me to a twenty-plus-year marriage even as it confirmed my sense that Dr. Q was not the agenda-free mental health professional Tracey claimed. I can still hear N’s exact words:

“You understand that if he’s seeing Dr. Q, he is going to transition?” she said. “You know that train has left the station?”

*   *   *

For me, Tracey was Tracey. I didn’t know if or how he was typical of transsexuals or entirely his own … er, man. “Whatever I feel and whatever I choose to do about it is dictated by my condition,” he insisted.

I remained skeptical about many of his claims but had no idea what was normal in the realm we had entered. N was able to offer me a perspective on Tracey. For example, whereas he had once brought caring and intelligence to the dialogue about our children that we’d begun sometime during my first pregnancy, he now had only one thing to say:

“What’s best for me is what’s best for them. The kids need me to be happy. They need me to be a whole person. When they look at me they need to see my true self.”

Actually—wrong, wrong, and wrong. Children don’t care about these things. On the contrary. As a parent, and in particular as a single parent, it is tempting to believe that what is good for me is good for my kids. Within tight parameters there is some truth to that. Put your own oxygen mask on first, airlines tell parents, and in our house the oxygen mask is the first cup of coffee it is in everyone’s interest that Mama have. That’s because a parent who is not conscious and functioning can’t meet children’s needs. Their own needs are the business of children. Their happiness, their wholeness, their true selves. That’s just the way it is. It isn’t personal.

I reported Tracey’s assertions to N. “Intense narcissism comes with the territory,” she explained, voicing an opinion later echoed by others on the sidelines of gender transformation.

N said she tries to get the transpeople she works with to speak about why they want to change their appearances, their bodies. “Why do you want to live a cross-gendered life?” she asks them. “What does being the other gender mean to you?” Few of her clients are articulate about why they are doing what they are doing. Over the years, she has distilled what they do tell her to two constants. “What I’ve found is that when women decide to become men they want power,” N noted. “When men decide to become women they want beauty. Both are envious of what they perceive as the special access to these qualities enjoyed by the gender they weren’t born into.”

When N told me this, I recalled an early moment in our odyssey when Tracey said with intense poignancy, as if this were the most tragic risk of his endeavor—as indeed to him it may well have been—“I might not be beautiful. That will be okay.”

On the other hand, N had never heard or witnessed anything like Tracey’s physical symptoms: his claims that not wearing a dress in a given situation could cause him loss of consciousness or even death. At a point when our children knew how Tracey dressed when he wasn’t with them, but weren’t ready to see him go all the way, his costume for parental visits—women’s jeans and the like, no makeup—was female but not overtly feminine. His now long hair and pierced ears remained constants, his voice was the high-pitched whine he preferred. In other words, he dressed the way women all over America do to care for children. But Tracey said that dressing this way—not being who he really was, as he described it—made him ill. Dizzy, on the verge of fainting, on occasion actually blacking out. And suicidal: thus the threat of death. To Tracey, I think, this was proof that he was really really feminine. To N, it was proof that there must be something else going on with Tracey.

Many people who listened to me describe the new Tracey’s unstable personality posed this question: “Could it all be female hormones?”

Like the laws that once banned women from giving (unreliable!) testimony in court, this explanation didn’t sit well with me. I resisted the suggestion that to introduce estrogen into a highly intelligent, rational, moral being is to create a mental and ethical jellyfish. There was also the problem of timing. Tracey began to display dramatic personality changes prior to his first prescription. He has now been taking hormones for years and, like all transsexuals, will continue to ingest them daily for the rest of his life. Were the meds acting on him like the female adolescence he says he was embarking upon at the start. Do all transsexuals undergo radical personality shifts?

N offered a different view of hormones. “Apart from their physical effects,” she said, “in my experience a man taking estrogen is likely to become more emotional. Possibly cry more easily. He won’t become a different person.”

But she added that she had encountered a lot of instability among her trans patients, both male-to-female and female-to-male. “Sometimes this is because they have intense fantasy lives and resist coming into contact with reality.” N recalled the sixty-four-year-old client who was dissatisfied with the A-cup breasts his estrogen pills produced. N tried to warn him that he might find big implants a lot weirder than he imagined. He poo-pooed the warning and had the implants. A month later, hating the sudden appendages on his chest, he had them removed.

Did Tracey’s unbalanced personality lead to his decision to start life over as a forty-something woman? Or did he become unbalanced by suppressing a desire to be female all those years? N didn’t speculate about cause and effect.

One result of Tracey’s transformation that took me by surprise was that in the process of feminizing he began to exhibit some of the aspects of femininity he’d once decried in his family—namely, weakness, emotionality, and illness, particularly mysterious, often incapacitating illness. He suffered from lingering malaise and lingering doubts about the nature of his ailments. He also adopted small foibles of (feminine) familial behavior with our children, such as offering them continual shopping as a pastime.

Well, duh, N said—she said it more eruditely, but that’s what it amounted to. “When Tracey was with you and was a man,” she pointed out, “he was strong, healthy, and successful. Now he’s weak and unwell all the time.” On the other hand, even N had no guesses as to why Tracey, bullying and blustery, simultaneously seemed more male—more like his father—when exiting our marriage than he ever did in it.

More important, I told N that Tracey said our marriage had never happened. She was dismissive. Refreshingly so. “Of course the marriage happened. It was a good marriage. You loved each other and took care of each other for over twenty years. You built a family and a life together. Then Tracey changed. The marriage ended.”

This statement gave me back my past.

The ending of the marriage didn’t negate what had gone before. If Tracey needed to rewrite history to justify what he was doing now, I didn’t have to accept his edits. It was my history, too. I’d been there.

I wasn’t insane.

*   *   *

I don’t mean to give the impression that N has merely served as a reality check when Tracey and transgender issues were at hand.

Trusting people. Trusting people to be what they seem to be. To mean tomorrow what they say today. These have become problematic for me. I trusted N when I was able to trust no one else. From the beginning I relied on my direct experience of N, ignoring the fact that she had been referred by Dr. Q and was intended by both Dr. Q and Tracey to serve Tracey’s ends. This wasn’t easy to ignore: when I started seeing N, Dr. Q took to phoning her regularly to complain about me and demand that she convince me to do whatever Dr. Q and Tracey thought best—best for Tracey. Her complaints dominated the twice monthly sessions that were all I could afford, squeezing out time I desperately needed for myself (while Tracey, of course, could rely upon daily contact with Dr. Q). She became increasingly intrusive and inappropriate until N, who considers Dr. Q a friend, finally had to ask her to stop calling.

N became not just the first person I could talk about Tracey with, but one of the first people I could talk with instead of Tracey. Tracey had once been my go-to person for chewing over (almost!) everything. From the quick chats about day-to-day parenting concerns to the rich twenty-some-year conversation about politics, art, and God. All the other conversations in between. A therapeutic relationship couldn’t replace that kind of deep communication, but it could and did begin to fill the gap. And so much more: for the first time I experienced a talking partner with whom I had to hide not almost nothing but, simply, nothing. In contrast with the enclosed, exclusive, even claustrophobic rapport in which conversation with Tracey had thrived, talking with N led beyond itself. Became a model of openness. A demonstration of the possibilities for connection everywhere. Convinced me that I didn’t have to be limited to knowing and being known by just one special person. Communication and connection could happen simultaneously with a motley and unlikely crew of disparate souls. Talk therapy indeed.

One of the reasons I trust N and one of the reasons I like her: She tells me what she thinks. She tells me things she knows I don’t want to hear. She is not a therapist who sits in tranquil silence nodding sagely, smiling, saying, Yes, you really need to look at that, don’t you? Saying, You have to figure that out for yourself. She thinks therapists who do that are wasting their clients’ money and time. I have gone into her office moaning, “I want you to tell me what to do!” To which N has calmly replied, “I’m going to tell you what to do.” And then did. This is real life, so often I didn’t do it. At least not right away.

Among the things therapists do, at least therapists who have to answer to insurance companies, is diagnose. N would not consider herself to have diagnosed Tracey when she uses certain terms to describe him—narcissistic, as I mentioned earlier, also borderline (borderline what? it seemed to me that whatever Tracey was, he was it wholeheartedly, no borderlines in sight)—but I like to think of it that way. At some point early on, I saw the diagnosis of me that N was offering to my insurance company. “Husband a transsexual” is not one of the recognized categories. Instead, N had written that I was suffering from grief reaction. As with stress awareness and cognitive dysfunction, I found this phrase initially startling and ultimately helpful, even comforting. The phrase carried simple recognition of loss and simple recognition of sadness. Sadness it was quite usual to feel. In fact, when I looked it up in medical literature, I could congratulate myself that I was really doing quite well. There were so many symptoms of distress to which I was not prey, from breathlessness to loss of muscular power to inability to stop sobbing. Physical symptoms, behavioral symptoms. Occurring in the immediate wake of a loss or long after. Lasting a few weeks or years. Acute but normal, or pathologically morbid. In other words, have it your way. An umbrella called sorrow. What I liked about my diagnosis was not its specificity. I liked—I was surprised by—the word grief. It made me feel seen. Understood. Drawn into the normal human realm of anguished survivor-spouse. The way I had lost my husband, my children’s father, was not common. The reaction was. Talking about the dead person might resolve the crisis. Alas, the diagnosis had nothing to say about my stickiest complication. The dead person wasn’t really dead.

I didn’t have an especially high opinion of therapists and therapy before I met N. I had very little patience with people who raved about their therapists. A statement such as “My therapist has saved my life” would have had my eyes rolling. Now I am one of those people. N has saved my life many times. Or it feels that she has, which amounts to the same thing. A religious person who takes the idea of God very seriously, I have been known to claim minor deity status for N and to refer to her as a goddess, small g. At my absolute lowest moments, I have told myself that I owe it to N not to turn my story into something she’d have to chalk up to a professional failure. That may be a pathetic hook in survival, but survival is survival and a single mother of three will take any hook she can get.

Speaking of those three children. At various points throughout our—their—odyssey, my children have spoken with private therapists I’ve found for them and with counselors at their various schools. All of these people have been intelligent, caring, well-meaning individuals. All have attempted, under varyingly pressured conditions and with varying degrees of success, to support their clients—the children—while simultaneously coping with the fears and demands of two hyperverbal adults at war with each other—the parents. I don’t kid myself. It’s been rough. Rough on the therapists, I mean. (Even rougher on the children, but that’s a separate story.) I don’t kid the therapists, either. I try to tell them what they are letting themselves in for (me! Tracey!) when they take on any member of our family. It’s like trying to describe combat to a raw recruit who has never seen a battlefield. We all start off on good, if uneasy, terms. Then one of us (generally Tracey) begins to feel that the therapist is siding with the other parent’s concerns. Complaints and demands are made. The therapist, overcompensating, goes out of his or her way to show sympathy to the slighted parent, with the result that the other (usually me) accuses the therapist of caving under pressure and putting fear of the offended parent ahead of consideration for the child. Tensions ensue.

To the therapists around at the time of our divorce, however, nothing we brought to the couch caused so much as a butterfly flutter compared with their dread of the law. The court dismayed all the therapists with the threat of subpoena. Evidently mental health professionals are extremely reluctant to appear in court and make legally binding statements about their take on the experiences and condition of a child of divorcing parents, thus laying themselves open to malpractice suits from any and all sides. My suspicion was that the therapists who had seen my children would have skipped town before allowing themselves to be dragged into court. It never came to that. My attorney’s view was that having the therapists make statements would help my case and harm the children. (Tracey, perhaps advised that the therapists would not help his image, stayed out of it.) As minors, my children have no right to confidentiality under the law. I could have given my consent to the court to subpoena their therapists, utterly violating their privacy and the trust they had placed both in the therapeutic process and in me. It was a no-brainer.

*   *   *

It will be clear from all this that as our marriage turned to dust, our ability to parent our children together through present and future crises disintegrated with it. It was a hopeless situation, but we had to go through the motions of doing something to improve our chances of co-parenting without acrimony. We tried to communicate about the children with a third person in the room, two separate third persons at different times. At least, I thought we were there to communicate about the children. In both situations, Tracey was there to rehash our relationship. To make his case, as he was doing over and over again to me, that our breakup was entirely my doing and none of his. Yes. According to Tracey, “I developed an illness, or I decided to switch jobs, some kind of change happened in the course of my life—and you dumped me.”

Again, N provided a much needed perspective:

“Tracy says I am breaking up our family, not him. That there is no reason we can’t go on together.”

“You can’t just change your sexual orientation.” N shrugged. She was breathtakingly matter-of-fact about it. I didn’t have to—I couldn’t—simply give up being who I was because Tracey told me to.

So we made two stabs at facilitated communication, one with a therapist, one with a rabbi we’d known and admired in our past lives as a couple. To call the situation with the rabbi facilitated is a bit of a stretch. Let’s call it less-is-more facilitation. The rabbi agreed to let us speak to each other in her presence. This was her offer precisely. She would not counsel, mediate, tell us what she thought. Wouldn’t intervene in any way except to hold a kitchen timer in her hand and try to get whoever was talking to stop when the timer dinged, signaling that two minutes (it might have been three) were up and it was the other person’s turn. We went back and forth this way for something like an hour on two separate occasions. I remember nothing about the first session except that it was utterly useless. The second session was useless, too, but I remember the details. For that occasion, in the middle of a hot Sunday afternoon at the rabbi’s home in our summer-deserted town, I showed up in a pair of my son’s outgrown khaki shorts, a T-shirt, and gender-neutral walking sandals. Tracey wore a floor-length velvet skirt, a bodice-hugging V-neck long-sleeved black sweater, high heels, and lots of jewelry. This was the second time I was seeing Tracey “dressed.” The first time had also been our first meeting in court, and he had gone all out in an effort to rattle me (not hard!). My attorney had kept me as far away from him as the situation allowed, had had me keep my eyes on her and my back to him, lest I get hysterical or lose my cookies. When she greeted me at the door, the rabbi was clearly entertaining similar fears. She murmured, “Someone’s already here,” which would have sounded oddly coy if it was not so obviously strained. This time, as I sat opposite Tracey in the rabbi’s small living room, there was no looking away.

We were supposed to be reaching consensus on high-stakes issues like child custody so that we could finalize our divorce. Every time he spoke, Tracey made lengthy and heartfelt statements about our relationship. I played it cool. I can’t claim that playing it cool is my usual style, but I brought it off, to a point.

Tracey spoke.

I said, “Look. What matters right now is completing the divorce negotiations.”

Tracey spoke.

I said, “Look. We disagree, but that doesn’t matter now. We need to hammer out an agreement so we can go forward.”

Tracey spoke.

I said, “Look. I’ve moved on. We need to conclude this process so that we can both go forward with our lives.”

Every time my turn dinged to an end, I ceded the floor to Tracey. Every time Tracey’s turn ended, he kept talking. “Just a minute,” he said. “Let me finish this thought.” His turns went longer. And longer. The rabbi started waving her hand, a little more frantic each time. I tried to gesture that it was okay with me. Let him talk if he wanted to. It wasn’t okay with the rabbi. Guarding our equal time was the limited role she had assigned herself, and she took it seriously. We were getting nowhere.

I said, “Look. We aren’t going to work all this out now. Maybe someday we’ll be on better terms. We’ll get along, maybe. Not now. Maybe in the future we’ll be able to have dinner. Maybe we’ll be friends, even. Of course we’ll never forget—”

That, it turned out, was the wrong thing to say.

I had tripped myself. I had been doing so well. I was tough and calm and collected, eyes on the prize of finishing the divorce, no emotion, no rehashing. And I’d said the wrong words and tripped myself. Of course we’ll never forget. The we who would never forget, the we I had in mind, was the children and me. We would never forget the father and husband we’d had. The family we’d been. Even when we were all such great friends and had those chummy dinners together. I choked on my words. Everyone sat in silence. I tried to regain control. Failed. After a moment, I said I was sorry but I had to leave. I got up and left. I never heard from the rabbi again, and Tracey and I never referred to these two conversations. They had no impact on anything.

*   *   *

At another point, Tracey and I tried seeing a therapist together. We lasted three sessions.

“Can we agree that while we’re in this process you won’t do anything like take out a restraining order against me, or try to get custody of the kids?” Tracey asked at the outset of the first session.

These were actions that, amazingly enough, I might actually feel forced to take. To explain why I couldn’t agree, I related an incident (which I’ll detail later) in which he had terrified me that he might make off with one of our children.

“I did nothing wrong,” he protested.

“I’d like to hear what you think,” I said to the therapist.

She demurred.

I insisted.

Under pressure, grudgingly, she said, “Ideally things like that should never happen.”

After this session, Tracey phoned the therapist (without telling me) to complain that she seemed sympathetic to me and that if he saw signs of that again, he’d walk. He never saw it again. The therapist, a sharp and caring person, clearly felt she had to be very careful to toe his line thereafter. After two more sessions, realizing that she couldn’t find a balance between us—likely more than any human could accomplish—I called it quits.

In a phone conversation following our final session, I told her that what I had needed was to hear her tell him: You destroyed her dreams. You have to take responsibility for that. He wouldn’t have taken it in, I knew. He would have brushed it off as he brushed off the few nonprofessionals—my son, me, one or two friends—who suggested he take responsibility for what he did to our family. Still. I would have heard it. I would have heard someone outside myself saying that I mattered, too. That the children mattered. Saying it to him.

To her credit, the therapist apologized. “I wish I had said it.”

What the therapist had said in that last session she had said to me. “You need to stop agonizing about what he does. You need to go on with your own life. You have to accept that you can’t control his actions.” Tracey would soon be leaving our home and going public in his female persona, something he had not yet done at the time in our community. “You can’t keep this a secret much longer,” the therapist told me. “You need to hold your head up high and stop caring what anyone thinks about it.”

The freedom of not caring that she suggested—the possibility for a new life, a new me that it contained within it—rocked me to the core. She was right, of course, and even at the time I knew it. I also knew that I was absolutely not ready to hear it.