Domestic Partnership by Jennifer Brock

Two lost souls seeking to improve their lives find a common solution, but a series of mistakes, bizarre coincidences, and confused identities leads them in an unexpected direction.

Honey, I know you’re probably a little confused about what you saw. There’s a secret we’ve been keeping from you until you were ready to handle it, and I guess we’ll have to explain it now whether you’re ready or not. I know you’re going to have some questions, but if you could wait until we’re finished, and then we can fill in any holes that you still don’t understand. Okay?

I suppose for me the story begins in college. Here’s a photo of me and my old housemates sitting on the front stoop of our rental. This skinny guy on the end here with the long hair and the t-shirt covered in paint splatters is me. Yes, really. I was majoring in art. The short guy with the beard and sunglasses is Fletcher, an engineering student. The boy with all the muscles is Chuck, and the blonde hanging on him is his girlfriend Holly; they were both business majors. Our last roommate was Reg. He was the dreamer, the planner, the one who got the idea for us all to rent a house. He studied political science, and wanted to be a lawyer. We all went our separate ways after graduation, and I didn’t hear from any of them much.

Cut to fifteen years after this picture was taken. I’d gotten a job out of school working in the graphic arts department of an advertising agency, and I hated my job. I wasn’t making art; I was generating pictures. It was work that had no soul. As a result, I’d gotten really out of shape. I must have been about fifty pounds overweight, depressed, my hair was thinning, and I didn’t have a social life to speak of. Then I get a call out of the blue from Holly. Reg was dead. He’d become a big time divorce attorney, and the stress was too much for his heart. At the funeral I got caught up with my old friends, but we really had nothing in common. They had all done things with their lives, but I was still idling. Chuck had an MBA from Stamford and was a VP at Mays Bros. He’d married Holly, who was working part-time as a tax accountant when not raising their four kids. Fletch had invented something for the military that he couldn’t talk about and I couldn’t understand anyway.

I soon found myself going alone to a bar. I took out this very photograph and asked the younger me where I’d gone wrong. I was nursing a whiskey when this guy comes in and tries to sit next to me. He was on crutches.

I feel that I need to interrupt here. The “guy” in question was me. No, I wasn’t actually male. I just looked the way I always have: short hair, no makeup, not much of a figure. And what little figure I do have was obscured by a bulky winter coat. I’d slipped on some ice and gotten a hairline fracture in my ankle and I’d just come from my doctor, who said that I wasn’t going to be better in time for the tour season. I was being stupid and attempting to mix alcohol and pain killers. Never do that. I saw someone who seemed to be having as bad a day as me, and thought we might be able to commiserate.

I said my name was Liam, and she (although I actually still thought she was a he) said she was Nat, and we shook hands and shared our stories. I said my life was in the toilet and showed the picture of the younger, happier me. So Nat asked what was stopping me from getting my life back toward what younger me would have wanted it to be? I said I had a job I hated, I was out of shape, I was going bald, and hadn’t had enough free time to make some art for myself in a long time. She said that I could easily solve two of those problems at once: if I quit my job, I’d have plenty of time to paint. But I said if I didn’t have a job I couldn’t afford to feed and clothe myself, or have a place to live, or make the payments on my car. She then made a bizarre proposal: if I moved into her spare room, I wouldn’t need to pay rent, and she’d feed me if I helped out around the house while her foot was a problem. If I didn’t have to drive to work, I should just sell my car.

I thought this was very weird. It’s kind of ironic in hindsight, but I thought she was a gay guy hitting on me. I said I didn’t want to be any kind of live-in slave.

I need to break in here again before we have to explain more things that I think you’re ready for. Let’s just say that I made it clear that I wasn’t looking for a romantic relationship, just a kind of arrangement where we could help solve each other’s problems. I needed some kind of project to keep from going nuts, so I also offered to help him get in shape, and he accepted the deal. I gave him my address and said to rid himself of all unnecessary material possessions, and show up in two weeks ready to get started.

I almost didn’t do it, but lucky for all of us I had a dream where Reg showed up and told me to follow my heart. I hired a guy with a truck to drop me and my six boxes of stuff off, and I started my new life as unencumbered as I could. It wasn’t until she opened the door that I realized her name was Natalie and not Nathan.

She pulled out a paper where she’d written down the things I wanted to change about myself, and said that the one thing she’d couldn’t help me with by herself was “going bald.” As a sign of good faith, she said she’d purchased for me sixty days worth of an herbal baldness remedy that was guaranteed by the manufacturer.

Now I think I need to tell you now not to ever take an herbal supplement without checking with your doctor first. But in general, herbal supplements don’t work. There’s no FDA control over dosage or effectiveness. Actually, it’s more like they don’t work for 98% of people, and as fate would have it my metabolism happens to be in the other 2%. The herbs that are supposed to cure baldness contain plant extracts that mimic hormones in the body.

Do you know what hormones are? They’re substances that are usually made by glands within your body. Some hormones are the kind that turn little girls into grown women by making their breasts grow and their hips get curvy and helping their wombs get ready to make babies. Some others can turn little boys into grown men by making them grow beards and muscles and sometimes making their hair fall out.

So these herbs that I started taking were made to get in the way of the boy hormones, but they worked because they’re the same shape as girl hormones. I didn’t know any of this at the time, though. I just thought they were magic pills that kept my hair from falling out. Also as it turns out, it wasn’t a hormone that was making my hair fall out; it was the stress of working a crummy job combined with my unhealthy eating. So I ended up taking pills that came with some pretty serious side effects, to solve a problem that would have gone away on its own.

Not long after I moved in, I came down with the flu and was bedridden for four days, and it really got me worrying about having lost my health insurance. Nat was very nice and listened patiently to my fears, and said she had an idea. A few days later, we drove to her lawyer’s office, and we signed some papers that formally defined the rights and responsibilities within our relationship. Mr. Barnes said that since we were now living in the same house and bound together under a legal document, we met the state’s definition of a “domestic partnership,” and Nat’s contract allowed her to extend her medical insurance to cover a domestic partner. It seems there were enough domestic partnerships in women’s golf that it was easier for them to make it part of the standard agreement.

Natty had also started me on a weight loss plan from day one. She took pictures to chart my progress, and here’s the first one. As you can see, I looked about as different from my younger picture as possible. The long hair was gone and everything was covered in flab. Not a pretty picture at all. She put me on a diet of fresh vegetables and whole grains with very little meat, and made me exercise. I had to swim fifty laps in the pool a day. At first, this left me way too worn out to do much else. But after a couple weeks, I’d adjusted to my healthier lifestyle, and I started doing household chores.

Meanwhile, my ankle had healed enough that they moved me up to a walking cast, and while I couldn’t go out on tour that season, I was able to go back to my job at the country club giving lessons. It was nice having dinner waiting for me when I got home.

At about four months into my training, we thought I was getting in tone, but couldn’t tell. My body was so hairy that it was hard to tell whether my skin was covering flab or muscle. Nat hit upon the idea that I should wax my hair off like a body builder, so we could see what shape I really was in. I remembered seeing a movie where this guy got waxed and it was really painful, so I wasn’t sure I wanted to do it. So Nat called the place where she gets waxed and asked if they offered anything less painful, and they said they offered laser hair removal, but it was a little more expensive.

The price did fit within my budget, so we went ahead and made the appointment. Now when real professional dermatologists do laser hair removal, they only do a little bit at a time, and it doesn’t really hurt much. But it also takes months to look pretty and smooth. But if you’re a beautician who wants to keep her customers, you have to leave them completely smooth after something you call a “hair removal” treatment, so you use the fancy new laser that you’ve been inadequately trained on to attempt to remove all of the hair on the customer in one session. Not only does it take forever, (imagine pointing at all of the hairs on your body one at a time), but it also builds up so much heat in your skin that it’s like you’ve been out in the sun without any protection. I was pink and sore and naked everywhere, and the girl had even lased the hairs off of my face.

At first I thought that maybe the pinkness had also come with some swelling, but I had no such luck. I was swollen in places, but it was from flab. We couldn’t find any muscle definition anywhere. The experiment was a major disappointment. What I didn’t know at the time was that as fast as I was trying to take the fat off, those fake hormones were working to put fat on my body, in certain areas. But as you see in the “before” picture, I started with a lot of belly, and here’s the first picture after my hair removal, and I lost a lot of that; my shape had gone from like a ball to a cylinder. And you can see how my hair had grown out a couple inches in those four months.

When it got so I was able to swim all my laps without getting winded, Nat made me start exercising with her. Three days a week we followed an aerobics video, and the two days in between we’d go for a run around the block, making the runs longer every day. It was good exercise, but it was also the beginning of my mistaken identity problem.

I complained to her about my lips getting chapped by the wind on our runs, and she showed me a case of lip balm that she’d gotten free with an endorsement deal back in the day. The one downside was that it was tinted, so it was kind of like she was making me wear lipstick. She refused to buy me some plain stuff until her supply ran out. Since slightly redder lips were better than chapped ones, I started using it.

Another thing that was bothering me when we ran was that my hair had grown out long enough that I had to keep stopping to brush it out of my face. It wasn’t quite long enough yet to be gathered at the bottom in a typical male Paul Revere type ponytail, so I didn’t know what to do. But my habit was annoying Nat enough that on one of our runs the first time I stopped she grabbed my hair and then pulled a scrunchie off of her wrist that she’d brought for just that reason. She gathered my hair behind my head in the higher female ponytail position. It took some getting used to, but eventually I actually got to like feeling it bounce and swish back and forth as I ran.

I swear I had no secondary motive; I just wanted to get your hair out of your face.

So that brings us to the day that Nat said that if I could keep up with her long enough to make it to the little café out on Spring Street, she’d buy me a muffin. It had been so long since I’d had a sweet, I took her up on it even though I’d need to push beyond my limits.

When we got to the place, we ran into a couple of ladies that were actually fans of women’s golf and knew who Natalie was. They introduced themselves as Melanie Warner, a tall brunette in a hippie-style peasant blouse and skirt, and Rachel Lake, a short redhead with a severely butch hairstyle dressed in army fatigues. I shook their hands and gave my name. But I was still winded and kind of hoarse, and they saw my hairless legs and red lips and hair scrunchie and my outfit of shorts with a cinched up waistband and a sweat-drenched t-shirt clinging to my flabby man-boobs, and since I was out for a run with a lady golfer, they thought they saw another lesbian. When I gave my name as “Liam Alden,” they heard “Leah Malden.” The worst part is that they were out of muffins, so I just had a bottle of water.

We made the café a weekly thing, and ended up running into the same couple again. This time around Melanie was taking names for a petition protesting the banning of an art exhibit she was trying to bring to town. I mentioned that I was trying to paint, and she said she was friends with a gallery owner, so if I had anything to show she might be able to arrange an introduction. I then felt that I needed to sign her petition, but the pen died in the middle of printing my name and the new pen she handed me wouldn’t write immediately. So my name looked like “LIA (scribble) M ALDEN.” I had to ask Nat for our address, and that’s when they knew we lived together, which in their minds confirmed that we were also a lesbian couple.

Melanie must have reused her petition and turned it into a mailing list. Not long after that a Feminist newsletter started showing up, addressed to “Natalie Phillips & Lia Malden.” It had some really scary poetry in it. Nat just thought it was funny, and liked to read the man-bashing editorials out loud to motivate me.

What’s being left out here is that I had figured out that they thought you were a woman, but you swore it was just a typo on the mailing label. After all, how could anyone not recognize your manliness?

Ok, I admit it. In retrospect I was just being really dense. Of course I should have realized what they were thinking, but I didn’t. Satisfied?

Sure. Play enough women’s professional golf with a short haircut, and you learn how to recognize when people are assuming you’re a lesbian. Not that there’s anything wrong with lesbians; if at some time in the future you introduce us to a girlfriend, we will welcome her into our home.

I’d been working on some watercolors. Nothing too far out there, just landscapes mostly, and a few still lifes, and one portrait of Nat napping in her chair in the solarium with a sunbeam hitting her just right. She didn’t realize I’d made it. I thought some of them might be pretty good, so I called up Melanie and asked to meet her friend, and she gave me the address of the gallery.

I borrowed Natty’s car and went to the place. It turns out the place was called “Sappho’s Art” but the sign was written in Ancient Greek so I couldn’t read it. The double doors had this cool bronze inlay on them of a three-dimensional abstract sculpture. At least that’s what I thought it was. I later learned that it was a giant interpretation of lady parts, and the story I heard was that after your mind was opened inside the gallery, you’d be “reborn” when you left, but I think they just liked naughty sculpture.

I went in and there was Melanie, talking with a woman whose outfit was more masculine than mine. She was in a suit and tie, but I’d gotten rid of all my suits when I quit my soul-sucking job. I was in khakis (with a cinched up waist again) and a polo shirt. I’d left my hair down. I showed my portfolio, and Maia, the gallery owner, dismissed most of my pictures as too mainstream.

She did ask me why I signed my pictures with a single script L in the corner. I said it was an affectation I’d started in school, and I told them how when I showed Holly, the girl I used to live with in college, my paintings, she called me “Laverne” for a month because she said it reminded her of the monogrammed sweaters on the old “Laverne & Shirley” show. It turns out that was the perfect icebreaker, since she’d been a big fan of the show. It convinced her to take a second look at my stuff.

She ended up taking the portrait. I’d mainly done it as a study in light and shadow, but she took it because she said that the painting had perfectly captured the love that I felt for my subject. I wanted to correct her, say that Nat was just a friend, but you’re never supposed to tell someone who wants to buy your art what to see in it. She agreed to hang it for three months and if it didn’t sell she’d charge me the cost of mounting it. I told her the title of the piece was “Sunbeam,” and she thought that was sweet, like I was saying Nat was my sunbeam, but I really just liked the light.

She gave me a receipt and her card, and when I got home and saw the real name of the gallery and that she’d called me “Lia Malden” like Melanie’s newsletter, I realized that maybe someone’s suspicions were right, and our new friends thought we were lesbians. I wasn’t sure what to do about it; was my painting hanging in a lesbian gallery under false pretenses? I was attracted to women, so at least I was halfway there.

When she did eventually sell “Sunbeam,” I stuck the check in my scrapbook. It was my first sale of a piece of art I created from within myself instead of what someone told me to do, and also I couldn’t figure out how to cash it.

I was still losing weight on my waist, but I couldn’t quite shake the pounds up top or down below. It was really frustrating. What’s worse is my clothes were having trouble fitting. I’d had to add holes in all my belts to get my waist tight enough, but my shirts seemed to be getting tighter. And in order to swim my laps, I had to pull the drawstring on my swim trunks painfully tight in order to get them to stay on. I told Nat that I had to go shopping for new clothes, but since parts of me were still fat she said that I had a ways to go yet.

I asked if I could at least go out and get a new bathing suit, but she said she had a solution for my problem that wouldn’t cost anything. She went into her closet and pulled out an old bathing suit she hadn’t worn in years. It was a red bikini that just wasn’t her style anymore, but it was very stretchy and the bottoms should fit me. I brought it into my room and put the pieces I didn’t need (It even came with a matching wraparound skirt cover-up) away in a drawer, and tried the bottom on.

I was hoping that it wouldn’t fit me, but it did. I showed Nat, and she said it was a little too tight in the front.

I believe the words I used were “plum smuggler.”

She said I should try that thing from “The Silence of the Lambs” to make myself look a little more decent. That’s a movie from way before you were born that’s way too scary for you to watch until you’re at least fifteen, but the important thing to know is that there’s a scene where a man is pretending to be a lady, so he tucks his man parts down and under to pretend they’re lady parts. I tried it and it felt pretty weird at first, but I went for a swim like that and it worked.

So one day a couple weeks later I’m lying on my stomach in a lounge chair, enjoying the sun after my swim, and reading a celebrity magazine that Nat got a free subscription to in exchange for an interview they never printed. I’ve got my hair pulled into a ponytail, I’m wearing my “lipstick,” I’ve borrowed a pair of Nat’s sunglasses, and most importantly I’m wearing a bikini bottom designed to make a woman’s rear end look sexy.

So when the pool guy comes up behind me, he thinks he sees some lady sunbathing topless. He excused himself and called me “Ma’am” and said that he wasn’t expecting anyone. For some reason, I thought it would be less embarrassing to let the pool guy think I was a woman than to know I was a man in a woman’s bikini bottom, so I covered my chest with my magazine and scampered into the house so he could start his work.

I went into my room and looked in the mirror, and started to see how convincingly female I looked. I rummaged around to find the rest of the set, and put on the bikini top, too. I thought that my chest flab made a surprisingly believable set of breasts when I arranged them in the bikini’s cups. I put the little skirt on also and thought that I looked convincing enough, but I decided to test it.

I went down to the kitchen and made a couple glasses of lemonade and carried them outside. I asked in a soft half-whispering kind of voice whether he’d like a cool drink, and he said, “Thanks, Ma’am” and kept trying to make eye contact with my chest, so I knew I had passed the test. Unfortunately, I spent so much time out there pretending to flirt with the pool man (I think it was mostly that I’d had so little social contact that I jumped at the chance to talk to someone.) that I ended up with bikini tan lines, which really made my breasts look like breasts.

Nat laughed when I showed her, and said that it served me right. She also thought it would be a good motivator to keep on the program to try and lose that fat. I’m not sure why we were both so blind not to notice what was actually happening to my body.

Well, when I was home you were usually covered up by your old baggy clothes. What’s your excuse?

I guess the next major milestone was when the country club decided to throw a charity ball, and expected all their employees to attend. For some reason, someone on the board had gotten it into their head that they needed to show off their openness to diversity, and I guess the personnel office knew that Nat had a domestic partner, so they decided to show off the lesbian.

I don’t think it was any sleuthing into records on their part. I’m pretty sure it was just, “She’s a golfer; she doesn’t wear makeup or skirts, so therefore she must be a lesbian.”

Whatever the reason, we found ourselves visited by Lars West, a stylist that had been hired to make sure we looked nice for the occasion. He looked us over and then apologized for the attitude of the mainstream, but that people have an easier time accepting homosexual couples if they can pigeonhole each person into the equivalent straight role. So instead of the usual kind of butch tomboy look we were both working, he was going to have to make people see one of us as the “man” in the relationship and one of us as the “woman.”

I’m not sure which one of us was more insulted when he decided that since I had longer hair and a better figure, I was going to have to be the girl. We tried to explain that I was an actual guy, but he thought we were talking metaphorically and said that it didn’t matter what we did at home.

His assistant then took us into separate rooms and took measurements. She wanted me to strip down to bra and panties, but I said I didn’t wear them, and she didn’t want me nude so she measured me with my clothes on. I guess all the gathered material caused by the cinched up waist on my shorts kept her from noticing any bulges.

Lars said that we’d been signed up to take a ballroom dancing class and since Natalie would be taking the lead, he told me to make sure I wore a skirt and heels to the class. I said I didn’t own any, and he said he’d figure something out.

A couple days later before our first class, a package showed up addressed to “Natalie’s lovely companion.” That was when I realized that they never got my name. It contained a complete outfit for me to wear to class: a fluttery knee-length blue silk dress, a pair of silver strappy sandals with three-inch heels, some sheer-to-waist black pantyhose, a lacy black bra and panties set, and even a pair of silver clip-on earrings and a matching pendant.

I went to try everything on, and I got as far as the panties when I needed Nat to show me how to put on my bra and pantyhose. It was strange to learn that a 38B bra fit me; it was one thing to know I had flabby man-boobs, but it was another entirely to find out that I had actual B-cups. The dress fit like a glove. The shoes were a bit daunting, but once they were buckled I stood up in them and Natalie made me look at my profile in the mirror. The position I needed to be in to balance gave me a woman’s shapely legs and rear end, and also made me stick my breasts out more.

It was very scary. With my jewelry on, I didn’t see me in the mirror anymore; I saw a plain-looking woman. Natalie hadn’t worn heels in a while, but she knew enough to teach me how to walk. I was really wobbly at first, but it just took a lot of practice to feel comfortable walking in them. Well, not comfortable really; you can never get comfortable in heels, but comfortable enough. When you’re ready for them, you’ll know what I mean.

You looked better in heels that I did; you even had a sexy little wiggle in your walk. It wasn’t fair!

When we were ready to take a break, it really hit me what we were trying to do. Did we really want to try to pass me off as a woman at the ball? Would Nat get fired if they found out? We were trying to discuss it rationally when the phone rang. It was Lars, asking if I got my package. I told him that I had and thanked him and everything fit perfectly. He said that meant I was ready for Phase 2, and the front door opened; he’d been talking to me on his cellphone.

He hustled Nat and me into his car and we barely had time to lock up the house. He drove us to a salon and waved at the receptionist before dropping us at beauticians’ workstations. He gave orders to the women working on us: for me he wanted a look of “innocent beauty,” for Nat a look of “classic elegance.” We weren’t allowed to make any decisions and just had to let them do their thing.

When we left the place a few hours later, Natalie looked really cute, like a 1930’s glamour girl with a little wave in her short hair, smoky eyelids and bright red lipstick with matching lacquer on her nails, which while manicured were still an athletic length. But what they did to me was nothing less than miraculous. My hair had been cut and permed into a gorgeous mass of curls with auburn highlights.

They whittled my eyebrows down into perfect feminine arches that accented my eyes, which now seemed a rich cornflower blue instead of gray, and were outlined by full lashes and just a hint of eyeliner. My complexion was flawless, and somehow they’d accented cheekbones I didn’t know I had. My lips were full and pink, and my new long fingernails were an iridescent cherry that matched the toes that peeked through my hose. Somewhere in there they’d even swapped out my clip-ons and pierced my ears with little twinkly blue flowers.

And then we were whisked off to the dance studio. There was a big mirror along one wall, and I couldn’t get over how realistic I looked. The dancing, on the other hand, took me a while to get. The instructor started my saying “If you can walk, you can dance,” but since I could barely walk I had a lot of trouble. We were the only lesbian couple in the class, so I thought everyone was watching us.

Everyone was watching us because you were stunning. A long time ago, I’d taken a dance class, and I’ll admit that it’s a whole lot easier leading than following.

It was a two-week crash course that had us in the studio every other night. I had to soak my feet in bath salts and rub liniment on my ankles. But gradually the class did work. I got reasonably light on my feet. Our instructor, “The Maestro,” kept telling us that we looked too tense and needed to smile. He’d say, “You are holding the one you love in your arms, but you don’t look like it. Let your face show what your heart feels.”

Somewhere in there, pretending to look like I was in love helped awaken the feelings that had been growing inside me. When Nat would take my hand to lead me across the floor, a little shiver would run through me at her touch. When she held me close, I just wanted to melt in her arms, which earned me a couple warnings from the Maestro that I was drooping.

I must admit that I wasn’t there yet. I was still pretending somewhat. Dancing was nice, but it wasn’t really doing anything for me.

The day of the big ball, Lars gave me special lingerie to wear. I had a panty girdle that had stiff boning and came all the way up to my ribcage, which took a couple inches off my waist. It had garters to hook into real silk stockings. Old movies had given me enough of a clue that I rolled them on properly, but Nat had to show me how to attach them. I also got to wear a padded push-up bra for the first time. It clasped in front and when I got it closed, I was shocked. I had a serious cleavage going on!

It came with a very plain yellow dress that buttoned up the front, but even with all the buttons done up it still had a low enough neckline that you could see the start of a little shadow between my boobs. I was very embarrassed. I slipped some elegant blue peep toe t-strap shoes onto my feet and I was ready for the next step.

I don’t think Natalie had any fancy new underwear, but she did have some nice new shoes on her feet, simple black patent ankle boots with a medium heel. Other than that she was in her usual casual clothes of a polo shirt and a pair of khakis.

I’m amazed you can remember exactly what we wore. And I think the only intimate apparel Lars ever gave me was hosiery.

We were whisked off to the beauty parlor again, and they worked on us in separate rooms and kept us from seeing each other until we were done. Lars and his assistants showed up with our formal wear, and when it was all done I finally was allowed to look in a mirror.

The person I saw in the reflection (no way was this me!) looked like a princess. She wore a long blue ballgown with little cap sleeves and a sweetheart neckline that showed off an impressive bust. It tapered down to a little waist and then puffed out into a full skirt over a gauzy crinoline, and there were patterns of tiny sparkly beads all the way down. A pendant of twinkling blue stones hung between her breasts and matching earrings dangled from her ears. Her hair was piled in an impressive mass of chestnut curls on her head, and a few stray tendrils escaped to frame her face. Her makeup was perfect, with shining sultry eyes bluer than mine ever were, and full, pouty, kissable ruby lips. I was in shock.

You did look truly beautiful, and when I came out in my tux and saw you, you literally took my breath away. I’ll admit that I was feeling a confused mixture of emotions at that point: impressed by how undeniably feminine you looked, envious of the fact that I could never look like that, proud of my part in the project to reshape you, glad that I was the lucky one who’d be taking you to the ball, and frightened by the realization that I was very attracted to you.

When we got to the ball, I had to show you off to everybody. There was this moment when I was talking to Mrs. Fairweather, a pompous windbag who just wanted a photo-op that showed her chatting nicely with “the lesbians.” I was telling her about how we met and was telling mostly the truth. I said that we’d started as strangers who helped each other through a rough spot, but grew to become friends, and somewhere along the way we realized that we had become something more. I kissed you to punctuate my sentence, and inside I knew it wasn’t a lie.

I remember that. I think that was our first real kiss, and it wasn’t the last one we had that night. I’ll spare you the mushy details, Honey, but I’ll just say that the night of the ball was also the first time we slept in the same bed.

So our relationship was in a new place, but I put all my lingerie away after the ball and went back to my baggy menswear. Despite having seen what my figure would look like with proper support, I was pretty much in denial. No matter that there was a picture on the society page of Nat with her beautiful companion at the ball; in my brain I was still an out of shape guy.

Even though we’d become a couple, our day to day lifestyle really didn’t change all that much. I still was splitting my day between exercising, doing housework and trying to paint. I’d been trying to recapture the image of Natalie I’d made in that first portrait that Maia had seen as an image of love, but I couldn’t get it to happen again now that I knew the love was really there.

I guess the next important moment was when you came into our lives, Sweetie. A couple years before she met me, Nat had filed some forms with an agency in China to adopt a baby.

I was at a point where I was really tired of being alone. My doctor had verified that I was absolutely incapable of having a baby of my own, and a friend directed me to the Chinese company, and I’d filled out a lot of paperwork and paid them a bunch of money, and then they wouldn’t return my calls. I’d pretty much forgotten about them when I got the call that they had a baby for me. I only had three weeks to get ready.

It was frantic for a while around here when she tried to read every baby book on the planet. It was a good thing that the bedroom I was no longer using was available, so we could turn it into a nursery for the baby. I even painted a nice ducky mural on the wall.

Then came the wonderful day we went to the airport and met you, little Chiu Li. You were so tiny and precious; we fell in love at first sight. Natalie signed some more papers and gave the lady who’d brought you from China some more money, and then you were ours. (I suppose technically you were hers.)

You completely turned our worlds upside down, but it was more than worth it. The club was nice and had given Nat four weeks off of parental leave, so we could double-team you and actually found the time to get enough sleep. But then, Natalie got some news that changed everything.

Life can really throw you curveballs sometimes. I’d signed up to get a baby and had pretty much given up getting one, and I’d also applied for this international tour that I’d never expected to get picked for. But they did. They picked me. It was three months of golf back in the lands where golf was invented. It was the chance of a lifetime, and I had to turn it down. You were more important to me.

But it was eating her up inside. I could tell. I dropped everything from my daily routine except taking care of you. I needed to prove to Nat that we’d be okay without her if she wanted to go away. I convinced her to call them back and see if she could still go. There was a little bit of hassle, but they took her.

I really didn’t want to leave you when you’d just come into my life, but the sponsors really wanted me on this tour, and it was going to some private courses that I’d otherwise never get to play, so I went.

We did fine by ourselves, but we knew someone was missing. I just had some trouble figuring out when to get the rest of the chores done and still watch the baby. I came up with a routine that seemed to be working for a while, but it kind of all fell apart spectacularly one day.

It was mid-afternoon, and you were napping in your crib so I thought I could get a quick shower in. I’d just finished washing my hair, and I heard you crying. It wasn’t your usual “I’m lonely and want to play” cry, and it wasn’t your “I’m wet” cry or your “I’m hungry” cry either. This was a wail of sheer terror. You must have had a bad dream. I quickly dried off and grabbed a bathrobe and went to check on you. You looked so scared; I just picked you up and held you.

But my robe wasn’t really closed all that well, and somehow I ended up holding you to my bare chest, stroking your hair and telling you everything would be okay; it was just a bad dream. Your baby instincts kicked in, and it was like you knew you were held to a breast, you just turned your head a little and your mouth just naturally landed on my nipple. You started suckling, and there was still some water dripping off of me from my shower, so I guess you were getting some liquid out of it. But mainly I’d basically become a living pacifier, because it was really calming you down. And somehow my instincts were kicking in, because I changed what I was saying to, “It’s okay, Baby; Mama’s here.” I’m not sure why.

It just felt so right that I wanted to do more for you. I did some internet research and learned that there was a way that adoptive mothers could breastfeed. I made an appointment with a doctor, and I wore one of my dresses from dance class, but when I got there I told her that I was male but I had flabby man-boobs, and asked if there was a way to turn them into real breasts capable of giving milk. I’d brought you with me in your little baby carrier, so she’d know why I wanted to do this.

But it was the blood tests she did after examining me that showed her that I actually had real breasts, and she told me about the herbs and fake hormones and told me to stop taking them. She made sure I was serious, and then put me on real hormones so she could control the dosage, and included the hormones that would turn on my milk production. It only took about a month before my boobs ballooned up, and your suckling started giving you more than just comfort.

I had to get all new bras and nursing tops, and it was at that point that I just admitted it and started dressing female all the time. They really don’t make menswear designed for breastfeeding a baby.

When it was time for Natalie to come home, I called Lars and he helped me put together a look to impress her. Even when she’d been calling to honestly say she missed us, I hadn’t told her about what I’d done.

When my cab from the airport dropped me off, I walked in and saw this beautiful woman feeding her baby, and I wasn’t jealous or angry at being usurped from the role of mother. I saw a scene of such love that my heart weeped. I dropped my bag and rushed over to kiss you each on the cheek. I was home.

I showed her that when the papers came from her lawyer with your name change to “Julie Phillips,” I had him change mine as well to “Lia Phillips,” since we were truly a family. And we have been ever since. So now you know what that lump you saw in my nightgown was. Sometimes I take a pill so Natty and I can have fun with my boy parts, and it can take a while to wear off.

Nothing’s changed. I’m still your Mommy, and I’m always going to be. I’m just not the girl we always let you think I was. We both love you very much.