From the Beginning

It was near my birthday (August) and we were laying in bed, in the dark, and Camdin was acting very strange. I hate to out you like this sweetheart, but Camdin is a very big...

Cuddler.

And he wouldn't even touch me; he kept trying to roll over close to the wall. I instinctively knew what was coming. I held him tightly to me and he cried and cried and pulled away from me.

"I'm scared." That was all he said, and cried some more.

When Camdin told me that he felt like a he - it sounded about as redundant as that very statement. He was a he. Of course. If only that is where the complications ended. What I am saying is, that revelation did not come as a great shock to me. So that made it very easy to be supportive and to move forward more quickly than if I had to get over the initial step of seeing him as a man.

At this point, Camdin and I had been together for about 9 months. At about 9 days I knew I was going to marry him.

It seemed like for two weeks, it was all we talked about. But at the same time, he wouldn't talk to me about anything at all - never how he felt, just about what he thought he wanted or didn't want. Neither of us really knew any specifics on the process, me much less than him. He told me he had been looking at pictures of chest surgeries on transster, so we looked at them together. We didn't look at any bottom surgeries - at this point he was not interested in either that or taking hormones.

Looking back, for the first few weeks I was pretty desensitized to everything. Honestly, part of me believed that he would go as far as he wanted to with this, but I just knew it would never come to surgery or hormones. I clung to that for a long time, actually. It wasn't until our one year anniversary that I can actually say that I supported Camdin with my entire heart and soul.

Months before that we sat down with his mother and told her together that Camdin was thinking about chest surgery, but that he did not (yet) want to take any further steps toward transitioning. No one other than she and I knew. I think this helped me rationalize my fears. I was so busy trying to be supportive of Camdin, and considering all of the things that he might be afraid of, or that he might need or want that I was really just covering myself so that when Camdin finally decided he didn't want to go through with any of this, he could never think that I didn't love him or support him and want the best for him.

I put a lot of time, thought, and consideration when I was away at school into research on surgery, hormones, legal issues, and stories of men who had gone through the same things as Camdin would. The more I learned, and even the harder I realized this was going to be - the more I realized that this really was the best thing for him.

Camdin came down to Champaign (I was attending the University of Illinois) for our anniversary (November); we had gotten a hotel room for the weekend just to enjoy the pleasure of each other's company in private. Our conversations now seemed to always find their way back to this topic, and tonight was no different. The only thing was, this night I fell in love with my man for the thousandth time, and this night I finally realized that he was my man - with one word: Dad. He didn't care about being a son, a brother, an uncle, a boyfriend, or even a husband - he just wanted to be a dad. And I wanted to make him one.

In that instant I knew I could be a Mom to his Dad, a wife to his husband, a girlfriend to his boyfriend and I knew that that was what I wanted to be for the rest of my life with him.

His starting therapy has been exciting for me, and I hope for him too, because we can finally move forward on everything that we have only been able to talk about and overthink for the past six months. Since the day we got together I have told Camdin that I only want for him to be happy, and healthy, and safe.

We're getting there.