My then spouse, the person I considered to be my husband, came out as a trans woman during lockdown

Nobody wants to remember what it was like to be locked in, to be thrown completely out of the timeline you were living, only to emerge years later to a completely different life. During Covid, my then spouse, the person I considered to be my husband, came out as a trans woman. I thought it best I start with this, because in many ways it was the start of everything, of living a more authentic and honest life, of feeling free to be myself – and if I was feeling that way, I can only imagine what the process was like for her. But that’s the thing, I can only imagine.

I refer to my former spouse as my co-parent, because we share a wonderful child together, but also because there are no other words or phrases I can think of to describe our new relationship, our unusual family structure. She will always be family, I care about her deeply, but it is also true that she bears little resemblance to the person I married in 2013. I met D when my father was extremely ill and dying. I was close to finishing my PhD in English Literature in UCC and I could feel myself coming unmoored from reality, from my body, from the safety of academia, a bunker I had built around myself that had, regrettably, started to resemble a prison. I tried to continue working in third level, being called for interviews for post-doctorate positions and bursaries on outlandish topics that I would daydream about while walking aimlessly through the streets of Cork eating scones and crying between teaching seminars on American Gothic Literature, invigilating exams and visiting my father’s sickbed. I bombed all the interviews dramatically by being ill-prepared and extremely anxious because I couldn’t forget, not even for a second, that my father was dying.

I was living in the cracks between life and death. And when I met D, well I felt that here was someone who understood my situation in some way as D too was struggling with anxiety and finishing a PhD thesis in another discipline. I thought that maybe we could sit in the cracks together and eventually help each other to climb out. And to a degree this is what happened. D was the first person to tell me that I was not my feelings one night in my tiny apartment overlooking the Lee not long after we started dating and I was crying about something. D’s observation opened something in my brain that allowed for a sudden, irreversible perspective shift. It still gives me shivers to think about how attached I was to every mercurial moment in my cognitive experience prior to that watershed moment. It was one of the best gifts D ever gave me, access to this detachment, an acknowledgment of this space.

I knew there was something awry, something off in how we were together, in how unreachable she was

We welcomed our first and only child in 2017. Then we bought a house, worked at permanent, pensionable, sensible jobs, did all the things we thought we were supposed to do. Yet, apart from being a parent, which I love, there was a hollowness in my life furthered by the painful experience of secondary infertility. It was also becoming clear that I wasn’t exactly cut out for teaching secondary school long-term, a job I had fallen into when I moved to Kerry when D got a third-level position here. I loved my students, I loved teaching English, but the relentless routine became crushing, particularly once I became a mother. I wanted so much for my writing to exist outside of myself. I wanted so badly to publish a book of poetry.

I had started writing poetry when I was a child and had continued to write all through my life with varying degrees of regularity. A poetry collection was always my goal, my ultimate dream. And then it happened. My first poetry manuscript, Eat or We Both Starve, was accepted for publication by my dream publisher, Carcanet Press in 2021 after 10 years of publishing poems in journals and magazines. It was one of the greatest and most brilliant shocks of my life. And something shifted in me again. I found it harder to drive to school, to teach my class, to sit in the staffroom. I felt like I was living the wrong life and was so guilty because it was a lovely life, and I was grateful for it. But a window had been cracked open, and I found I had to clamber through the gap, even with the threat from the remaining jagged, broken glass.

Then Covid, and then the big reveal from my co-parent – that she had been acting strange and aloof and distant and sad because she too was in the wrong life. Or rather, the wrong body in the right life. I felt such enormous relief in one sense because I knew there was something awry, something off in how we were together, in how unreachable she was. We sat with this revelation for months, wondering what she would do. Would she transition, or would small adjustments to her life and appearance suffice? We had ridiculous conversations – in retrospect negotiations about how much of a change I could manage, and she could endure. But it became clear very quickly that there were no half-measures in this scenario, and that her transitioning to the woman she had always been would mean the end of our marriage.

Even so, the process was quite beautiful in its way, if excruciatingly heartbreaking. The saying goodbye, I mean, because the two scared creatures living between the cracks were now ready to emerge, finally, but in so doing they would have to go their separate ways. In the midst of this white-hot hurt, I turned as I always do, to writing. I wrote feverishly and in intense bursts the poems that would become part of my second collection, egg/shell (Carcanet Press, 2024). The poems in this collection feature images of eggs and swans to explore miscarriage and the impact of a spouse’s gender transition. Rather satisfyingly, for a poet, I learned that in trans slang an “egg” was someone who had yet to realise that they were trans, and an “egg cracking” refers to the process of having the beautiful epiphany that one is trans.

I wrote a poem, Lessons in Neuroplasticity when Changing your Name to your Name, about the day, six months or so before D came out to the world and I changed D’s name to her new female one to train my brain. It was one of the biggest moments of the whole process for me, seeing that new name every day and having to instantly recall what was happening, that the husband I knew and loved was gone. I wrote, “It is a shock/every time you call/ Who is she?” I cannot tell you how exhausting it was, relearning this person as the women she is, but it was vital and important to me and to her that I got this right. For many weeks it was the most important thing. I had to let my husband go. I can’t even contemplate how bone tiring it must have been, and remains, for her.

While my life was falling apart, my poems were coming together. I wrote not only for people who might be in a similar position to me – but for all those who experience something in their lives that blindsided them or put their lives in disarray. But I also realised, through my writing and my experience, that in my accepting D as the woman she is, I in turn started to radically accept all the parts of myself I had been hiding and scared to explore – most notably I was screened for ADHD and, unsurprisingly, found out that this is how my brain works. But I also allowed myself to be sad and to be angry. Don’t get me wrong, this is not what I thought would happen when I walked down the aisle with the person I thought would be my husband. I’m sure I’m not the only one who has experienced the unique disappointment of a marriage break-up. But people change, people grow and in that we must let them go – and let ourselves off the hook and look to expanding beyond what we think is safe or acceptable or familiar – and I am so glad that I did because my life is beautiful in ways that I cannot quite account for here. I think there might be a poem in that. A book of poems, in fact. So that’s what I’ll do. I’ll keep writing, and jumping over the cracks as best I can. But if I fall in, it’s okay, I know that I can clamber out eventually. And sometimes it’s important to spend some time alone there, in the dark because when you emerge, there is nothing so safe and life-affirming as the warm feeling of sun on your face, and the green, green grass under your feet. The joy and relief in accepting yourself as you are right now is like being let out of lockdown. Remember that feeling?

Victoria Kennefick’s poetry collection egg/shell is published by Carcanet Press