Things were a bit grim for me at home in my childhood and teens and I left after a particularly vitriolic afternoon not long after I turned sixteen. Oh it was nothing special, just the usual nonsense that thousands of quiet kids in rowdy families get every day, but I’d had enough. I moved to a town two hundred miles away and have never returned. I got a job in Waterstones, a bookshop, and managed to keep the wolf from the door sufficiently well to educate myself. I’m clever but by no means brilliant, so I was pleased to leave university with a middle of the road degree in librarianship. The publisher that specialised in scientific papers and conference proceedings where I still work was delighted to offer me a job at what I considered to be a generous salary. Looking back, I’d done well for myself. I’d been a working class kid from an inner city estate who’d managed to get a worthwhile degree, a job that paid well enough to fund a decent flat in a decent area, and I was now living the life I wanted to lead having escaped the underclass cesspit with it’s attendant mentality that my family were not only happy with but proud of.

I met Michael when I was a few months shy of thirty and he was just starting divorce proceedings at the age of twenty-nine, he’s a few months younger than I am. He’d married in his early twenties had four children Carys, Jonathan, Peter and Robert, and his wife had just upped and left, leaving him with the children eighteen months before. He’d had no contact since, she hadn’t made any contact even via a solicitor. He was a single dad struggling to raise a daughter and three sons. He was a well paid engineer, so money wasn’t a problem, but time was. His two sisters were willing to help but they had young families too. Their parents had died a few years before so getting the children to school and picked up afterwards were a nightmare.

I met Michael one Saturday when he was clothes shopping in M&S with Carys having managed to leave the boys with one of his sisters. They were looking at vest and knickers sets and Carys clearly wanted her dad’s approval of her choices, and he was completely clueless. I couldn’t help myself when I said, “The pastel blue looks lovely against your fair skin and blonde hair. Within minutes, Carys and I were chatting like we’d known each other for years, but children are like that. Michael happily faded into the background when I asked, “Are you shopping for anything else?”

“I want a pretty dress for weekends, not for school,” I was told.

“Michael said, “Several if we can find them, Carys has been growing a lot recently.”

Two hours later, we’d bought dresses, socks, underwear, a bolero jacket, a pair of sandals, a coat for school and various hair accessories. Michael invited me for coffee, which we had in the M&S restaurante. Carys was hopping with excitement at her purchases and couldn’t wait to get home to try them on. “Next time,” I said, “We’ll use the dressing rooms and you can try them on in the shop.”

Over coffee we exchanged a little personal information and Carys told me about her horrible little brothers who she insisted were always pulling her hair. “Did your brothers pull yours when you were a little girl, Dorothy?”

“No they were much more horrible. They used to hit me when no one was looking.”

Michael asked me, “Would you go out for dinner with me some time, Dorothy, if I can arrange baby sitting. It may take me a few weeks.”

He was disappointed when I said, “No,” but smiled when I said, “I’m not prepared to wait weeks, but I’ll come to your house and cook dinner for six if you like?” We arranged it for the following Saturday. The soup came out of a can, Baxter’s royal game. I bought a rib of beef joint for roasting, and cooked it with boiled and roast potatoes, carrots, green beans, Yorkshire puddings and gravy. The Ginger cake I baked to go with custard. Carys helped in the kitchen and we chased all the males out.

“We eat a lot of stuff out of the freezer,” Carys explained, “because after school everything is a rush for Dad, so mostly he shops in Iceland once a month and fills the freezer up with ready cooked meals that can be put straight in the oven or the microwave. Real cooking is fun. Did your mum teach you?”

“No. I had to learn it all by myself, but there’re loads of meals to learn how to cook on Youtube. We’ll have a look at some after dinner. There’s a really tasty, but not complicated one for Spaghetti Bolognaise that you could do. I’ll find it.”

The boys and Michael were amazed, and Carys was proud to say, “I did the gravy all by myself.” I didn’t call a taxi that night and we were woken up in bed together at eight by the children.

Two months later I moved in and the kids called me mum after that. Some how everything gets easier when there are two of you. We weren’t doing any less, we were both still working, but getting the children to and from school was no longer a nightmare for Michael and shopping for me with Carys became fun rather than the chore it used to be. The boys would put up with almost anything for a good meal and started helping in the kitchen. Michael relieved of clothes shopping for the boys as well as Carys was able to be the dad he should have been, and to be fair wanted to be.

Because his wife had just disappeared, Michael had to wait five years for his divorce to be made absolute, and we married as soon as the law made it possible, but by then we’d been living together for six years. After three months I started wearing a wedding ring. I wasn’t ashamed of not being married even though living together outside marriage was frowned upon in those days. The truth was simply that I got bored providing folk with explanations that they weren’t entitled to just because they noticed I didn’t have a gold band on my finger. Those kind of people with their puerile appetites for salacious tittle tattle had become as tedious as the explanations, so we referred to each other as husband and wife and I wore a wedding ring.

Since I wasn’t local and came from a couple of hundred miles away from where we lived and worked, Michael still in engineering and myself still at the publishers after several increases in my salary, nothing was known about my background. The wedding ring business was bad enough, but if I’d been expected to provide explanations about how me being trans meant we couldn’t marry back then I’d probably have killed someone just out of sheer aggravation.

I’d told the children that I used to be a boy and they just accepted it. It was no big deal, and they understood why we never used the expression trans woman. Peter said, “I know what you mean, Mum. I don’t tell anyone at school we were adopted by you because after you’ve explained it ten times in a day you want to talk about something else, and anyway you’re just our Mum.” Me being trans wasn’t something we talked about every day or even every month in the family. It was known, but just there in the background, a piece of family history.

I’ve always ‘passed’ with no effort and other than hormones and SRS itself needed nothing else to assist my transition. Michael has always said I have a ‘classy chassis’, like I said he's an engineer, but we only met years after my SRS which was even longer after the hormones had worked their magic. I admit I’m widening a bit now but Michael says that’s just like all the other women of my age he knows. Both his sisters are far broader in the beam than I and admit to a bit of envy, but it’s all friendly and we regard each other as sisters and usually go shopping together with our daughters.

We were a very happy family and eventually the children grew up, became educated and found jobs and partners. Carys’ husband said twins ran in his family, and she had twin boys when she was twenty three which makes shopping fun. Jonathan and Peter found good wives and settled down to family life quickly. Robert found Felicity, and I was never sure about her. She was a bit of a new age type and seemed a little unstable to me. Fortunately for Robert when she ran off with a roadie from some band they had no children. Felicity hadn’t seemed bothered about a settlement, she earnt more than Robert had before he lost his job due to losing her. He was hurt badly and couldn’t function, so Michael and I went for him and took him home. I told him he wasn’t to think about leaving till his head was working properly again.

Then someone must have told Felicity I was trans. Felicity was then trying to clean Robert out after ‘discovering he had been keeping it secret his mum was that thing.’ Michael and I talked about it, it had never been a secret, but we concluded it must never have come up when Felicity was about. Anyway, Michael and I went into the divorce court with Robert where Felicity ran off at the mouth with hate speech about me. The divorce judge said it was clear Felicity was motivated by unreasoning hatred and he granted the divorce, but awarded neither Felicity nor Robert anything. What little equity they had in their house after the bank loan was repaid he ordered split fifty fifty.

Michael however is prosecuting Felicity for hate speech and the court records from Robert’s divorce hearing will provide all the evidence required. Michael said, “I’ll have something out of the bitch for what she did to Robert.” My view is there’re precious few positive aspects to being trans, but there is the odd one.