What My Body Knew Before I Did: Coming Out at 35

The year my body stopped letting me pretend.

Photo by Daiga Ellaby on Unsplash

As my son grew, the distance between Aaron and me grew further. After our boy went to sleep the battles would begin. We would spew venom back and forth until I took it too far, the way I always did. The ball of rage that had been building in me for years would find its opening and I would say things I knew were damaging. That I wished I had a man who appreciated me. That I couldn’t wait for us to divorce. That I deserved so much better. The mic would drop. Aaron would stare at me, furious and silent.

Afterward I would apologize. Promise to work on myself. Mean it, mostly. But I also noticed something I didn’t want to examine too closely: I enjoyed crossing the line. I enjoyed saying the word divorce out loud. There was something in the venom that felt like relief.

We had a boy to raise. Life moved on.

When our son turned one, I hired a photographer for family pictures. At some point during the shoot she asked Aaron and me to kiss. We looked at her blankly. She thought we hadn’t heard her. Kiss kiss, she said again, playfully. We turned to each other. One head pivoted left, one right. Our lips pressed together briefly, mechanically, and then we moved to the next location. The photographer said nothing. Neither did we. We didn’t even remember how to kiss.

The same inkling that had brought my first son started sounding again. My son was three. It felt like the right time.

Aaron made a passive-aggressive joke that I only touched him when I wanted a baby. That was true. But it worked. I got pregnant with baby boy number two. Pregnancy softened me the same way it had before. A voice inside went quieter. I felt full of life, back on track. After this baby, I told myself, things will fall into place.

I kept lying to myself.

As I grew heavier with each week, and more tired of raising a three year old, I grew more distant from Aaron. Everything about him started pushing me away. His smell. His voice. The way he moved around the apartment. Every crumb he left on the floor. Every joke he tried to make. I started asking myself if I even loved him and didn’t bother answering. What did it matter. This was my life. I couldn’t be like my father. I couldn’t get divorced.

The second pregnancy was easier in that I knew what to expect at every stage. What I didn’t expect were the styes. One appeared on my right eye and wouldn’t respond to anything. Then another. Then another. At one point I had six. I was a walking Shrek, my eyes and my womb competing for who was larger. Doctor after doctor told me hot compresses, rest, boil an egg and place it on your eye. Nothing worked.

The styes stayed through the delivery, which was fast and easy, two hours and my boy was out. Afterward, when the nurse had finished tending to the baby, she looked at me and asked if I was okay. Just tired, I said. She asked again. I said yes, why. She asked Aaron to leave the room. She held my hand and asked if Aaron hit me.

I started laughing. I had just delivered a baby. What in the hell was she talking about.

She handed me a mirror.

One of my eyes was black and blue. A stye had burst, or a blood vessel, and my face told a story I hadn’t written. At least not in the way she meant.

We went home. Four of us now, though it felt more like three with Aaron somewhere on the periphery. I fell into the new routine, two kids, two schedules, twice the exhaustion. At twenty eight days I announced I was done nursing. Aaron was disappointed. He told me so.

I couldn’t care.

Something had shifted after this delivery. I felt more confident. More certain of myself. Stronger in a way I hadn’t been after my first. The styes remained but I felt less like a woman managing her life and more like a woman who was trying to own it.

Aaron’s father saw a TikTok about an acupuncturist who cured styes. It was a small thing, a father-in-law and a TikTok. But I was so depleted by then that I would have followed any thread that pointed toward relief. That afternoon I made an appointment.

By that point Aaron and I were enemies. He worked long hours, and I resented him for every diaper I changed alone, every night I was up, every plant I watered, every meal I made. His contribution, as he saw it, was the finances and the garbage. We had divided our life into two separate countries with no shared border.

I went to my appointment. Lay down as the acupuncturist asked. She took one look at my eyes and said: why are you so angry? I didn’t understand the question.

She explained that in Chinese medicine the eyes and the liver are connected. The liver is the organ of suppressed anger. She asked again. Why are you so angry?

As she pricked me with needle after needle I talked. About Aaron not seeing me. Speaking down to me. Criticizing my every move. Me doing everything. I didn’t stop until the session ended.

She put down her needles and said: you need help. She gave me her therapist’s number.

A few days later my eyes cleared. Both of them. Just like that.

I called the therapist. She was on vacation. I was traveling for work. We would meet in three weeks. I made the appointment and filed it away.

The work trip was to San Francisco. The moment I stepped out of the building where Aaron and I lived, I felt it. Air moving through my chest. Actual oxygen. I hadn’t realized how long I had been holding my breath.

At the airport, on my way to the gate, I stopped in one of those small overpriced stores that sell magazines and books nobody reads on the plane. There on the stand was a self help book about not going to sleep angry. How to save your marriage. I bought it. I was that desperate.

All week I felt calm. Hopeful. Excited about sightseeing, moving, doing. I met my family. I felt free. Like I had walked out of a prison I had built myself and forgotten to leave. I video-called my boys whenever I could. When Aaron appeared on the screen I got short. When he called just to talk I felt a flare of annoyance, as if his voice alone was enough to reach across an ocean and take something from me.

I told myself: when I get home, something needs to change.

I came home. Aaron was angry. Angry that I hadn’t called enough. Hadn’t seemed to miss him. Hadn’t thought about him. I said things I shouldn’t have, just to make him stop. Sometimes I preferred his anger to his attempts at connection.

And then I met Lana.

This is part of an ongoing memoir about discovering I was a lesbian at 35, after a marriage and two kids. The acupuncturist’s question sent me to a therapist named Lana, whose question sent me somewhere I had spent thirty five years avoiding.