Alexandra Heminsley - Some Body to Love: A Family Story

Alexandra Heminsley is an author, ghostwriter, journalist, broadcaster and speaker particularly known for encouraging women to enjoy sport and fitness. Her bestselling books include Running Like a Girl and Leap In. She lives in Hove with her son, and proudly co-parents her LGBT+family.

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

Ex and the City

Running Like a Girl

Leap In

For Damian and Mike:

I am as blessed with my logical family as with my biological one.

Love does not begin and end the way we seem to think it does.
Love is a battle, love is a war, love is a growing up.

James Baldwin

This is my story, but of course it overlaps with that of my immediate family. I have tried to find the right balance between living an open and honest life and affording them their privacy. As such, I have not used full names but initials for those closest to me.

In the first half of the book I have avoided using male pronouns when referring to D. They are now entirely inappropriate and would have been hurtful to use. I have, however, after a lot of consideration and discussion with D, kept the term husband in places. I would love there to be a less gendered term for what I understood my relationship to be at the points where I use it. I sincerely hope that this decision does not cause any hurt to any other members of the trans community. All views and experiences in this book are my own, and I am in no way attempting to represent the views or experiences of others.

I also hope that as our understanding of trans and non-binary lives and the issues that surround them evolve, so will our language. For now, I have done my best to honour both my story and my family in terms that get as close as possible to the experiences I am sharing with you.

Today I sat on a bench facing the sea, the one where I waited for L to be born, and sobbed my heart out. I dont know if I will ever recover.

This is a note on my phone, written on 9 November 2017.

I forgot about it for a couple of years, but when I look at it now I can remember typing it as if it were yesterday. The seagulls squawked overhead and the sun dipped into the sea, melting slowly as it met the horizon. I had been sitting there so long my hands were too cold to type. I put my phone back into the pocket of my winter coat, checked the babys hat and blanket were secure, and turned the buggy to face home.

The conversation seemed un-haveable. But we had to have it. The vacuum in which my husband had been living since we had returned home with our newborn was now unbearable. The silences, the sadness, the sense that while there was boundless love between us, something had come loose and was now unspooling irrevocably, was intolerable.

The baby was six months old. He was so small he couldnt yet sit up without my hand in the small of his back to support him. His head had just about stopped bobbing around uncontrollably if left to its own devices. Only a week or two before, he had outgrown his newborn rocking crib, the little wooden cradle which had sat first next to me, and then at the end of our bed. The new, larger cot had just arrived. We had decorated his bedroom next door, me constructing the cot while D hung the mobile of floating paper clouds. I felt an ache like scar tissue on a cold day when I realised the three of us would no longer sleep together. My eyes were wet with tears as I placed him gently on his pristine new bedding a few hours later: our beloved angel on a puff of cloud. As D and I walked back to our own bedroom, there was nowhere left to hide. A few days later, after my return from that sunset walk, I took a deep breath and pressed my fingernails into the palms of my hands.

I think you need to have some therapy, I heard my voice say.

You keep changing things about your appearance instead of accepting who you are, I continued. Its whats inside that matters, you must know that. Youre wonderful, we both love you so much. I wish you could relax and enjoy that.

My husband replied slowly and reluctantly knowing in advance just how the axis of our family was about to tilt. Yes, I do need to see someone. But its not because I cant, but because I have finally accepted who I am.

What do you mean? I asked, unsure if the news was good or bad.

I mean that I have accepted that I am not this. A hand gestured at the body I had lain next to each night for the last five years. I have accepted that this body doesnt represent who I am.

I almost heard my world crack in two.

I sensed my peripheral vision going fuzzy. The last time I had felt this was in the moments before passing out in a queue shortly after donating blood. By the time I had realised that the monochrome fuzz meant I was about to faint, my body was already halfway to the floor. A half-second of blissful surrender: there was nothing more I could do. The next thing I knew, a kind lady in an M&S tabard was offering me a sip of water.

This time I didnt hit the floor, but the sense of blissful surrender was the same. I felt myself falling, and I knew that there was nothing I could do about it. After so long, so many unasked and unanswered questions, and so much sadness, I knew in that instant that my husband was finally admitting to the need to transition.

It wasnt just this final revelation that tipped me off balance. It represented the latest in a series of destabilising experiences which had slammed into me like waves over the course of the last couple of years. In another life, this last piece of news might have destroyed me. I knew that many of those around me feared it still might.

The cumulative effect of medical misadventure, sexual assault and early motherhood in a marriage which felt inexplicably fractured, had left me spat out on the shore, unable to tell what was my body being churned through the water and what was the shingle moving away beneath me.

This bizarre succession of events had been so unexpected, and so intense, it left me reassessing essential truths not just about myself, but about what it is to be a woman, and what it is to live in a womans body. As I watch my fingers type these words I cannot believe these hands belong to me. And that I survived. Not just that I survived, but that this strange and lonely period opened up the world, opened up my outlook and opened up my understanding of what beautiful variety we are all capable of.

This was not where my love story was supposed to end up. When D had appeared at my door six years earlier, drenched by a walk from the station in a seaside rainstorm and confessing, I love you, I felt my world expand, turn from black-and-white to technicolour, and sparkle in ways I had not known were possible. We had been close friends for some time, and now we were a couple. I always resisted the idea of a romance making me feel complete, but this time life simply felt right. D with love, humour and boundless empathy had the power to make my life seem as if it was being lived entirely in Portrait Mode: I was just a little sharper, a little better, a little more me. And everything else was a little blurry, a little less imposing than it used to be. As we moved seamlessly from couple to engaged couple, I never doubted that it would continue for ever.