Gender Inconclusions II

"How can you be a woman?" I asked, five years ago. It tortured me to pain him. I had spent nearly fourteen years encouraging him in his every pursuit. The deep and lengthy peace of our marriage rested on a foundation of mutual respect for one another's autonomy. But this was too much.

"I can't explain it," he told me. I hated it when his eyes got so big. I did not know him.

His hands opened rigidly, helplessly groping the air as he shook his head. Those hands, so large, strong, and capable. They once reached for mine, tentative and longing in our early days of courtship. They cradled our infant sons, and a finger protected their first steps. They built our homes and fences, caught and carried me over and over.

"What is a woman, then?" I asked, angrily.

"I don't know," he said quietly. "I just know I am one."

I laid in bed in the dark, working this out for myself. A woman served. But a man served also, in his way. A woman stretched beyond stretching, beyond even herself to be sure all needs were held. She was more malleable and capable of squeezing through impossibly small spaces, only to show herself full-scale on the other side. An octopus.

"It's not possible for you to be a woman," I told him in the morning. "If you were, you could live with this and not make any outward changes. You could just be who you are on the inside, to hold our family together. For us."

Even as I said it, I knew the poison of my words. How could I tell him how to live? To put me and the children first? How could I make these demands and be a woman, myself?

But if I didn't insist on his place, then who would I be? The former wife of . . . someone. How could I be, or have been, a wife if my husband was a woman? What was a wife? I sat down heavily on a heap of laundry waiting to be folded. Underwear I did not recognize glared back at me. "Who are you?" they asked. "Who have you been? Who will you be?"

I am white, defined by black edges, I said. I am a wife because I have a husband. I am mortal because there is death, staring me down like every iron grey hair that meets me in the mirror. I am a woman because I have grown quietly into that identity, filling its container as others have defined the edges.

"Walk like a lady, not a logger," said my mother. Growing up, I baked, I cleaned, and I took care of my younger sister. Our father laid on the couch watching television and entering contests by mail. Tough luck.

"You cannot be a woman," I told her, "because you have not been raised like one. Not only have you not been properly conditioned for this gender role, but you have no identity formed around the resistance to it. Does that make sense?"

"Yes, it does," he said, tired. I was winning. I hated the feeling of triumph as much as it filled me with hope. "I don't know what to tell you. I just can't go on as I have been," he said. "I am not a man."

All of those classes in college, the gender studies, the literary theory -- they only suggested the map of this treacherous territory I found myself lost in.

No man's land.