Tag: hubby

Tacoma Point Defiance Zoo (date)

DATE DAY:
Where: Tacoma Point Defiance Zoo
Links: Point Defiance Zoo and Aquarium (PDZA) https://www.pdza.org/
Date: November 10, 2018.

We have really been wanting to go see the zoo since we moved here in July, but with my jobs switching around and just the stress of transition we haven’t gotten out. Finally we decided to go anyways.

The zoo was sadly smaller than anticipated, but I loved the jellyfish and Dari the tiger the most. However, pretty much everything came over to check us out. According to the worker, Musk Ox had never gotten that close or walked towards people that she saw before.

The arctic foxes were cool enough, but their area was full of plastic garbage. Don’t get me wrong, I am absolutely sure they were there for a purpose, to entertain them. I also realize that they don’t have the budget of the Woodland Park Zoo. That being said it still was uncomfortable to watch (same with penguins).

The jellyfish photos came out better than I expected. The rest of my fish pictures sucked (and got tossed), except for the “disapproving fish”. I need to learn better techniques and get additional equipment for aquarium photos.

Dari the tiger however was my favorite. She is a gorgeous animal and was intently interested in a toddler and then me… is that saying something about me? If I wasn’t color blind I would have played with the color levels to get the picture even better, but that is the last thing anyone needs me to do.

She noticed a toddler across from her
She noticed me

I don’t think we will visit in the short term again. If we get money up (I am now going to be unemployed) I want to hit the other sites around first. Still, we had a great time and some of the animals were awesome.

DATE GALLERY!!!
(video clips below that)

She noticed a toddler across from her
Dari is a beautiful creature
She noticed me
Just as she arrived
The jellyfish just looked awesome
Most of the elephant pictures game out too sad, this one was the best
She was staring at a family
Only one pic of them came out and not very good, made me sad.
Disapproving fish captured my heart
Well, maybe hubby captured it more
Through a piece of glass
Elephant cages
Never seen Muskox or OomingMak as they are called by others.

 

Money and Job Worries

I woke up this morning terrified from a dream I can’t remember, anxiety about things coming up, and obviously some self dislike at the least.

As I talked about earlier I am hoping this week to give notice to my current employer. If things work out I might just mic drop and walk out of the job since it will never appear on any sort of linked in, resume, etc. I have only been here 8-10 weeks in the end, so it isn’t something I am going to use for future job growth.

That being said, we can absolutely afford me taking a couple of weeks off before starting my new job, but I woke up anxious about my pay from the new job. I woke up terrified I was screwing us. It isn’t necessarily the wage I am making more than an adequate job to live, but a large drop in what I make now, about $20,000 a year less then my current job. To be honest even with almost $140k in student loans we can make the payments and have a really good life, even if we would rather go back to working at a coffee shop/book store.

The cost of my FFS is what is freaking me out. A very rough estimate is in itself $20,000 for the surgeries I want, plus up to two weeks in a hotel, two flights down to Arizona and back and anything sundry. I am worried I am making my husband work at a job he is not fond of to be our primary support. We both make about the same, but there are multiple other surgeries coming up that makes my work erratic (orchiectomy, breast implants, probably a tummy tuck from my extreme weight loss and even a thing on my neck/chin – close to a face lift). All of these combined is more than my student loan.

Let’s not even combine the fact that I am on the higher end of 40s. Not like I have 40 years to pay this shit off… well hopefully I do but that means retirement sucks.

I logically know we are doing a good thing. The funny thing is, if this was for the hubby I wouldn’t even blink. I would be down for it and insisting he do all the surgeries he needs to be who he was and never feel bad for a single moment. It is because it is for me that I feel that way. Even knowing this logically it makes my stomach hurt and me terrified I am fucking up things for us. Especially that I might be fucking him over.

I realize I am going to have to get over it, there are other more real issues such as dealing with the public now that I am almost to the point I will be public. I just can’t get over shackling my husband with “golden chains” for my needs. He deserves so much more than that. That is what I woke up terrified about, that I was going to hurt my husband.

Gender Odyssey Convention and Traveling

Friday, the day after we met up with Dr. Meltzer and Dr. Ley, we headed into the one panel I was interested in. It dealt with surgery options for Facial Feminization Surgery, Breast Augmentation and Body Contouring. I realized I would probably know most of the stuff they would say, but I wanted to double check.

The commute into Seattle from Tacoma wasn’t the worst, but I slept poorly from my anxiety of meeting the docs the day before. I am really excited to do this, but it does make me anxious to think about them cutting open my brow and front of my sinus, cutting it into pieces and rearranging it, along with grinding my brow and jaw down and moving my scalp forward.

The hotel we saw the docs at

We arrived at the convention and I will admit I was intimidated. I am very fortunate to know some very awesome trans people, but I had never been around that many. That brought up a whole slew of anxiety that maybe I will talk about later, but this isn’t the time.

When we got there, just a few minutes before the panel, we found our case manager Raeylean… she is fantastic. I had brought her a flower to thank her, and she seemed overjoyed. She is incredibly huggy as a person and we got to talk for a little bit until it was time to go in to the panel.

The panel itself was very informative actually. Some of what I thought was no longer the case for surgical techniques, and even more importantly I found out that before coming to Meltzer’s office, Dr. Ley had been a pediatric craniologist who specialist in working on the skulls of small children… I have a huge head so that means I should be easy for her. Way more reassured I am going to be ok. The panel was worth it just for that.

We left and visited a little more with R, then headed out to pick up our friend straybits. He is as close as any family and we have been friends for decades. He just got back from Southeast Asia/India for the last year and will be going back for a few months. He was heading back up to Bellingham, so we told him we would take him up.

 

Hubby and straybits

On the drive up we got caught up on everything and just enjoyed being with around each other. It was a nice drive with me, hubby and straybits. We got some food in Everett and 3 hours later were in Bellingham. During this time I came out to him and he just gave me a hug. I am not sure what I was worried about.

Straybits and myself

In Bellingham we dropped him off. We are really hoping we can see him before he leaves again, but if we don’t we know we will always be there with each other.

straybits

We then got to go see my brother. He is doing really well, sober and thinking straight. He seems to be accepting my transition and was very positive. We stayed with him for awhile before we moved on.

Hubby and brother
brother and myself
brother felt the need to give me a kiss.

By now it was about 7pm, but we wanted to stop by my parents grave (both of them are together) and pay our respects. That only took a few minutes, but I realized we need to clean it up when we come back up in a few weeks.

Hubby at mom and dad’s grave.

We then drove the 120 miles home and went to bed. It was a really good day, but a really exhausting day. We are still recovering now, a week later from the trip. It was worth it to see family and get reassurances about my surgery.

Stress Day… Freedom Day?

This morning is going to be big, I am giving my notice to the Department of Defense. I am probably committing career suicide with my changes. Transitioning even at its most successful will reduce my privilege by a lot, and if the transition isn’t as successful as I want then it will impact it even more.

That being said, I can’t work for the toxic Department of Defense. I listen to fellow auditors talk about “guys in dresses”, make fun of Caetlyn Jenner and Chelsea Manning and just talk shit. I am fortunate, they have never talked shit about my husband who is FtM and they knew it, but “he was different then the rest” is how it feels coming from them.

My hubby got harassed a lot by certain members of management. They even sent out an email to there management saying that the hubby was “crazy because he had the lower surgery”. Hubby was brave, he filed a complaint and three weeks later the person in charge of the “investigation” said there was no proof it was harassment. The things that supervisor did would have gotten anyone fired anywhere (and it didn’t help that they were already under investigation for racist harassment of others).

That told me all I needed to know. I have been on hormones for a little over two months, and I can’t be here. If nothing else I need to stay sane, plus I am tired of participating in the production of weapon systems designed to kill others (usually in an unjust war on top of that). 

phobia

So the decision is good. I am going to have my soul reclaimed by doing this. However I will lose my seniority and probably not make that much money again. I am hoping I can earn half that with any jobs up coming (now there have been some frustrations on interviews as well, but that will be a different post).

We are moving to a cheaper apartment, and soon the husband will be the only one working. I am going to cash out my retirement and come close to paying off all our short term debt. If this occurs (the DoD/Fed government takes months to cash you out) it means he can support us, actually he can support us with only part of it paid off with my vacation payout.

I don’t mind being poor, but he is stressed, I am stressed and his car that we still make payments on but doesn’t have a warranty is having problems. I gotta figure something out. Maybe I can work from home if I can’t get hired on somewhere.

Well this is the start of my “Freedom Day”…. maybe? I will report back on how good or bad it went.

So much going on

I have been incredibly quiet, but not because I forgot to post here. There is a lot of things happening and to be honest I haven’t had the time.

Physically I am doing great. I feel so much better then I did before this process started. The hormones don’t seem to have any ill effect except the expected results of testosterone blockers (but nothing overall bad), just caught off guard, this will be a future post.

Bicalutamide
Bicalutamide an antiandrogen or testosterone blocker

I have lost more then 45lbs since March, and not from any specific diet, purely because I stopped eating junk food. I also think this ties into my mental state as well as I have way more energy.

Mentally the transition is also spectacular. I haven’t felt this good since I was a teenager. My depression symptoms have left and I feel better about everything. Don’t get me wrong, there is a lot of stress about quitting my job in three weeks and the fact I will at the minimum lose 30k a year for whatever job I do get (if I get one).

The job loss though I think is also contributing to this better feeling in its own way. The Department of Defense is incredibly toxic in general. The election of Trump and Pence has given informal permission to every bottom dwelling conservative who wants to discriminate a way to speak out about their hates.

I think leaving this job makes me feel better in general, and especially makes me feel better concerning the transition. There are a ton of other reasons I am glad to leave (pretty much everything but money) but that is the biggest one right now.

planhappiness

The other stressor is our move. We already have a place lined up, we should be ok financially to do the move, and if the hubby gets cashed out like he is supposed to it might even pay the car off. We even have it figured he can just break even supporting us both if I am unable to find a job.

It is a cheaper place, but with nice amenities, and close to the hubby’s work. I think it is a good place to start on our journey out of here both DoD wise, and Seattle wise.

There is a lot more going on, but that is enough for one post, will have to post about the other things separately.

Until then, take care.

Some unreasonable worries

My husband is a spectacular guy, he means the world to me. He always has and always will. I know logically and emotionally that he loves me, no matter if I look like a boy, a girl, something that fits between. He thinks I am attractive if I am chubby as I am now, or skinny when he first got with me. I totally, unconditionally know this logically.

Then why do I continuously worry that he will look at me and find I am not what he signed on for? Whether its in 2 months or 2 years I just have this weird anxiety that he is going to want to leave. It is nothing he has done, he has been nothing but loving and supportive of everything. I realize it is purely the gerbils in my head.

I worry that I may not be able to transition far enough to “pass” like he has going the other way, that he will find me unattractive. I worry he will miss me being a boy, or miss being in a gay relationship. I also totally realize he had these same worries about me when he transitioned, and I am sure he has no doubts about me, exactly how I felt about him during his transition.

I also logically realize that my anxieties are far more extensive then that, and really aren’t even associated with him. He is just the focus I have. There are a lot of anxieties, and I think in this blog I will talk more about my feelings than I am used to. In my last blog I was more focused on things logically, I didn’t get as personal as I wished I had.

So I guess I am going to start being more personal. It will probably be a bit weird, but I am ok with that.

 

 

It happened

It happened, on Tuesday, March 13th 2018 my journey has officially begun and I am nervous as hell. I officially told my husband I wanted to transition to a woman and it was the most nerve wracking thing I have ever done.

Not that I logically needed to worry. After all, my husband is transgender himself. He was my wife for over twenty years and has been my husband for more than four and I walked every step I could with him on that journey.

What I found though, was that my emotional brain still didn’t care about logic and was freaking out. I was so terrified he would laugh, or even worse just leave. Of course, he didn’t do any of that, he just hugged me and said he would help me through with it.

It isn’t like it is a surprise at all. I have always thought I should be a girl. In fact, growing up I got a lot of shit for liking more girly things and disliking more typically masculine. Don’t get me wrong, I had my own set of toxic masculinity (and I still do, though I am trying to stop it). However, I have always loved frilly things, pink, baking, and don’t get me started on the whole shipping of characters or focusing on relationships in games. I have always preferred all of this over working on cars, liking football or doing anything super macho. I can’t really post right here all the details, but I am sure I will unpack myself in a lot of future posts.

As a 46 year old person I didn’t think I could ever get myself to do it. I always joked “maybe next life”. I am seen as a big guy (6’2”+ and about 300lbs) and I just didn’t think it would ever work for me to transition. Even now I am fully aware I may not ever reach the ideal “passing”, but that is ok. I am fortunate, I have seen my husband’s transition and while FtM is different in a lot of ways, it still prepares me and lets me know some of what to expect. I have a loving husband who wants to support me in whatever I need.

In fact, he is so supportive that within the hour he was looking for where to get me clothing, and especially shoes that fit my size 14w feet. He is excited because he stopped sewing women’s clothing when he transitioned, but he loved the sewing itself and now he has an excuse to do it.

I am still freaking out in my head, hamsters are running wild inside me and this post probably won’t get any clearer so I will wrap up here. I am just letting the world know I finally made it official with my husband, so now I get to start planning on how to do this.

…more to come.

 

Almost larping (dream)

It was a seemingly innocuous dream, but for some reason it bothered me a lot.

The hubby and I were with a group of people, some of whom we know from other larping events. We were all discussing a new larp and we found that it really wasn’t a very interesting thing. The weird thing is hubby was still my hubby (yes still Wolsey), but I can’t remember if this was pre-transition hubby or my new improved hubby. All I remember was he had short blonde hair and I still remembered him as my husband, not my wife.

This is how hubby’s hair appeared, but I think it might have been post transition.

Then all of us plus a bunch of new people were sitting at a restaurant, it appeared like some sort of Denny’s or Sharis. It was sunny outside, not super warm, but warm enough that no one was bundled in hats or heavy coats.

Hubby was still there talking, and I was working on something about a larp, or maybe it was tabletop, but I do think it was a larp with a map. I was marking a map indicating how we the group should travel. It started somewhere southwest, went west to the coast, then up the west coast and into Canada.

I couldn’t tell you why but I was so pissed about something. Nothing had happened in the dream, but it was there.

All of a sudden hubby got up with a group of people and started walking away down the street. He hadn’t said a word to me and I was confused. I started to get up but he indicated not to make it a big deal and let him walk off.

So I just grabbed my backpack and started walking the other direction super pissed. Even in the dream I wasn’t sure why he was walking off, for some reason though I absolutely hated the group he was walking off with, no explanation in dream why.

That is when I woke up.

Overall the dream lasted most of the night, although I did get a good amount of sleep. The annoyance I felt in the dream was reminiscent of some of my larping times. Mostly it was when the hubby (pre-transition) would wander off with a specific player/character at a game. That player, let’s call him E, was a douchebag to women.

It wasn’t that I was jealous of my then wife roleplaying dating someone else at the time, it was specifically him that set off everything.

Wolsey had in-game dated others and it never bothered me, but for some reason this dream set off the feelings of dislike I had for this one gentleman, even though there was nothing about dating at all in the dream.

I think I will unpack this today and maybe post something reflective later.

Dream: Corner Store

I woke up this morning with not a horrible dream, but there was something urgent to it. I think it was mostly me processing the hubby’s surgery.

The hubby and I were wandering around, getting him dressed in new clothes. This was post bottom surgery in upcoming November (2017) and he was looking good. As we wandered around the store the looks only got better. I am not sure, but at some point it time I realized it was a bodega that sold clothes he liked. Which is ironic since he hates bodegas.

After a lot of walking and talking that I don’t remember now that I am posting, we wandered up to the cash register. Before we got there to pay, I heard a car pull in and looked out the window to see a pickup truck come rolling in to a stop. It was a rattle canned Mazda pickup that we owned in the mid 9os, but it was the color of our GMC pickup we gave to my dad 10-15 years later. The truck was a conglomeration of two different time periods that we owned a truck (we have owned a truck three times in our relationship).

Out of the car stepped the hubby, pre-transition. He (appearing as a she at the time) was wearing boots, a red dress and had bleach blond hair. I looked back at my hubby and was really confused, as was he. It at least reassured me that my hubby was still beside me, and that he saw “her” as well. The young lady form of him walked up to the counter in a spastic manner that the hubby does even now, paid for something and walked out. I grabbed my current incarnation of a husband and said something about a time loop, or maybe a parallel world (yes, I guess a gamer might think that).

This is what he looked like

 

This dress was the focus

I stepped outside yelling one of Wolsey’s old names (the dress was before our mobile home which means it was 2000 but he looked like when he was 34, which was 2005-6, both of these facts were when he had different names, the dress was before he had taken my last name, the person inside the dress was before he changed his first name to what it currently was). 

We ran out there, but that is when the dream sort of fizzled out. I felt like I couldn’t catch up with my pre-transition husband to tell him something important, and it really was making me anxious.

I think it was to tell him it was ok. Not yet determined specifically what “ok” was, but now I get the impression it was to tell him it was ok to transition. This would be about 10 years earlier then he did judging on how he looked in the dress. I felt like I was failing that person in the dress by not catching up to them, thus failing the person beside me. That is when my eyes opened up and I was awake.

It wasn’t a bad dream, I am sure it is me processing his surgery, but I woke up anxious. Not angry, scared or upset about how he is looking currently, he looks great, I find him hot. It did wake me up though anxious that I am not able to run quite like I did 20 years ago to catch up with him.

The red dress was one of two dresses he wore that have always stuck with me. The red dress in that picture above, and a purplish/tie-dyed sort of effect krinolin dress he wore when we originally got together. Both of those dresses always stuck with me in dreams when he appeared as himself pre-transition.

I guess I still have a whole lot to unpack.

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Surgery Trip: Day 2

The first full day in Scottsdale and I woke up and wandered around outside. It was a chilly 78 degrees (sarcasm) but a beautiful sunrise.

Sunrise

There are a lot of businesses around our hotel. The Lo-Lo’s I talked about yesterday, a Denny’s, a horrible Albertson’s that didn’t have anything we needed and an old school Safeway. The most unique thing I forget is in other states is the over advertisement for guns. Especially when they offer to sell you guns, and give you loans in the same place. Seems weird to be desperate enough to need to get a loan, but hey, while you are here go ahead and buy a gun. I realize this is in Seattle area as well, but not nearly as common.

We then went to the hubby’s pre-op appointment and spoke with Dr. Meltzer and Dr. Ley. It was great to see them again. The Doctors both checked the hubby and everything was good to go. We then got to meet Dr. Webb, the OBGYN that will be doing the hysterectomy, oophorectomy, and vaginectomy. I was amused by Dr. Webb, he seems pretty laid back. Overall seeing all three doctors really reassured me.

In pre-surgery visit

We didn’t do much the rest of the day. We went back to the hotel room, napped a bit and waited for the hubby to start his prep for surgery. While we were there, our friend Torie was kind enough to go feed Ghost (our cat). Here he is waiting in the hubby’s computer chair, disappointed we haven’t come home.

Someone was terrified while we were gone (thanks Torie for taking care of him)

Finally at 5pm it was time for the hubby to start his preparation for the surgery, it involved a very uncomfortable drink and a long night. Here he is looking anxious about the process,

He is “prepping” for surgery

That was it for the second day. Tomorrow he goes into surgery, and things will progress. I am both excited and terrified for him. I also love him more than anything in this universe.