Female Archetypes: the Den Mother. The Core of My Posse.

A glimpse inside the holy circle of women sustaining me.

Trigger warning: there are some graphic discussions of things which happen to a body going through sexual reassignment surgery.

My preparations for sex reassignment surgery have been going on for years and taken many forms, but the most important has been the “selection” of the women who have surrounded me at this final and most critical stage.

When you are thinking about who you might need to ask to cope with faecal incontinence, changing blood-soaked diapers, draining your pee bag, and just being with you 24/7 and waiting on you hand and foot because you are literally helpless, there is a very sober whittling down of loved ones…and some incredible surprises.

Who can you receive from?  Who is it okay to be totally helpless and vulnerable in front of?  Who are you willing to just sob like a baby with?  Who won’t ever hold any of it against you?  Who will love you more for seeing you broken in this way?

My bestie didn’t make the cut.  She said, “I might not be that kind of friend.”  As always, I appreciated her total honesty.  It is what I love about her most.  There are many of the questions above where neither of us would have been able to handle it.

There is a formal “crisis” three-week post op period where my surgeon requires me to have 24/7 cover, and then a longer, slower convalescence which initially continues to keep me confined inside as I heal and develop the strength to walk normally.  I suppose it could have been a series of professional nurses.  Expense aside, this was an opportunity to receive love and be vulnerable with those I love and respect most of all. I saved on the nurses and got a nicer apartment so people could stay with me and be comfortable and socialise in the other room.  Eight women have stepped forward to provide the deep and intense emotional support that this transition requires.  I love them for what they represent and am able to receive from them with unbridled submission and joy. My children are with me too, and that matters more to me than everything else.

Each of these women represents an archetype of the Divine Feminine, though this was unplanned, and this has been and is becoming an immeasurably enriching experience.  I will write and share about each in turn.

The Den Mother

The first and most important player in this mix is a woman I have loved since I met her.  We have been close for decades, and she has been my strongest pillar and most generous and full-on supporter in my transition, advocating for me, but also pushing me, educating me, and taking me at face value as a woman.

I asked her to be the one to take me into the hospital, to deliver me, to be the expectant Father to my own death and birth.  To hold space for my transformation as a Phoenix.  

“I’d be honoured,” she said, “I’d love to be there.”

“There is nobody on earth that I would feel safer with,” I told her.  We both cried.  She became my proxy in case I was unable to make decisions for myself. Signing such a paper, granting someone power of attorney for life and death decisions, is sobering no matter how you conceive it.

And it is true.  There is nobody on this earth who is more put together, totally with it, totally able to navigate stress and crunch decisions with aplomb and poise than the Den Mother.  She is a true tigress.

“I will call you from the OR right when we finish,” the surgeon told her “so you know she came through okay.”

“Oh that’s great,” my friend said.

“That way you don’t have to pace in the waiting room, and can know you will be able to see her about 3 hours after my call, as we keep her under observation as we wake her up from anaesthesia.”

“Great.  I’ll be in the area anyway.”

Educating Baby

I have been learning slowly about my own femininity my whole life, and with increasing pace these past two years that I have been out, been on hormones, and have not wavered from this path.  The eight women that I am referring to are all big sisters to me, even though most of them are younger than me, one even half my age.  My learning of what it means to be a woman is much more real now.  I know that I will still be misgendered, but there is something so deep about the commitment to becoming a woman that a sex change operation represents, that my skin will be thick enough to be impervious to.

I have asked each of these women what it means to be a woman to them.  And to share with me their thoughts on this topic.  That our time together in this deeply intimate space of my totally incapacitation and transformation be filled with lessons on life.  It is like teaching a baby how to walk, how to talk, how to be, how to navigate the world.  Life’s lessons.

The Den Mother’s Teachings

We learn from our closest friends and family always.  Observation and admiration equals osmosis.  We soak them up.  The Den Mother is driven and competent and on top of life in ways that I have never seen before.  She is a force of nature.  When she tells me to do something, even if I disagree, I listen, and almost always come around eventually, even when it’s hard.  She is an inspiration.

She also knows me.  Knows me in all the ways that the readers of this blog know me, but also in the million and one ways that my vanilla intimates know me.

Her gift to me was a book called When Women Lead, by Julia Boorstin [subtitled, What They Achieve, Why they Succeed, How We Can Learn From Them].  It is an incredible book that explores so many of the additional hurdles that women face for professional success.  It focusses on women pursuing start-ups and new business, and how capital is so much less patient with women CEO’s than male ones.  I am lapping it up and look forward to reviewing it in good time.

Her messages and lessons to me have been clear.  “What will you do next?  How will you provide for your children?  How will you provide for yourself?  What steps do you need to take now, next week?  Not what steps do you need to take next year.”  And there is a degree of expectation in these questions.  As if to say, ‘I want to see you keep up, to move ahead, to do something even better and more impressive than you have done so far.’  She is saying, 

“I want to see your achievements as a woman dwarf what you accomplished as a man.”

The Den Mother

That is what I want.

The Physical Reality

She was there when I woke up.  She was with me when I was discharged and guided me up the stairs of my rented apartment and into bed.  The short walk in the hospital out of my ward and into the elevator, through the lobby and out to the taxi, the short ride home and few steps to my bed wiped me out.  I slept for three hours.  She was there when I awoke.  And she changed my pee bag over and over again.  Most of all, I felt the energy of the den mother.

We both wanted to watch Barbie together, but we ran out of time.  On her last night with me, she gave me a gift of two more books she encountered by chance whilst buying coffee.  We are Feminist, An Infographic of the Women’s Rights Movement by Helen Pankhurst.  And an immediately compelling morsel of a book Lady Secrets: Real, Raw, Ridiculous Confessions of Womanhood by Keltie Knight, Becca Tobin & Jac Vanek.  This bright pink tome had me laughing and horrified in equal measure from the random page I opened it to.  I had no idea women were so naughty!

I look forward to relishing the lessons she has left me with over the days and months to come, indeed, she has left me with lessons to last a lifetime.  I am honoured by it.

P.S.

Being confined to bed has a great side benefit which is guilt-free, excessive time spent reading. I feel as if awakening from a fugue: my midlife-crisis is over. I am reborn as I was always meant to be.