Becoming Myself: The True Story of Thomas Who Became Sara (13 page)

The two detectives got fed up waiting and so came into the store. And before I got the chance to speak privately with my sisters, the two detectives were there and caused the very situation I’d been trying to avoid. I was left trying to explain the situation to two very upset girls who instantly blamed me for bringing the detectives down at my own instigation. It seemed that I was to be made a scapegoat for the family distress.

However, on the strength of my sister’s brave revelation, a meeting was convened in my younger brother’s house. I was excluded. During the meeting my brothers expressed the feelings I’d been encouraging them to express since the original disclosures had been made. And all, except one, openly admitted to being very badly affected. They revealed how they never saw their own children in the same way afterwards; how they were afraid to bathe them lest they, too, be accused of abusing them. In the meantime, the detectives went to my father with the statements made against him. I understand that he admitted to the allegations, but I believe that it was out of fear for my mother that my sisters relented from pressing charges against my father. That has remained the case until fairly recently when the case was reopened following the death of our mother.

This whole experience and my family’s reaction to my desire to be open about it, served to reinforce the fact that I
was not wanted as a member of this family. I was sickened by the way my mother went to such great lengths to protect my father at the expense of her children. From this point on I was resolved not to refer to her as ‘my mother’ and, indeed, that is how it ended between us.

W
hen I look back on those days and the events that were to unfold, I feel like such a complete idiot. I mean really, how many times does a woman have to tell a man that she doesn’t love him before he gets the message? People who are desperate for love will do desperate things to be loved, even tolerating the most terrible behaviour and cruelty. In this respect I was very much the weak one in the relationship, but given my history and my sense of worthlessness and unworthiness, what else could I do?

I stayed in my hopeless marriage because I was convinced, on the one hand, that I could do enough to get Barbara to want to stay married to me; on the other, it was the absolute fear that if I left this hopeless relationship, I would be held responsible for something that was really not my fault. But there was also the plain and simple truth that I loved Barbara very much and simply could not countenance life without her, despite the overwhelming evidence that she never really loved me. Later on, my loyalty would be complicated by my being a committed evangelical Christian and all that that
entailed in terms of the duty of a husband to his wife. But even that could not resurrect a marriage that had never really been a marriage to begin with.

Nonetheless, in the early 80s, we struggled on. We started to look at a few houses in January through April 1982 and finally settled on a house in Tallaght at 24 Homelawn Gardens. We decided to make an offer for it. It was £19,500 and we could just afford the deposit. Barbara was so intent on getting the house that she promised to start a family once we got out of the mobile home. This, of course, was all the motivation I needed to expedite the sale as soon as possible, which I did and we were ready to move in July of that year. I genuinely thought that our marriage was going to work and that Barbara would keep her promise to start a family. I was totally elated at the prospect of being a dad and would imagine what it would be like giving my love to my little son or daughter. I really didn’t care which I had. What was most important was to be a father (as I thought at the time) and to help my children to become whole, rounded human beings who would make a positive contribution to the lives of those with whom they came into contact. It was important to me that my children’s upbringing would be the total opposite to the way my parents had raised me, or rather, how I would have turned out had I not consciously withstood their years of abuse and bad example.

We moved into the house on a Saturday and our next-door neighbour came out to greet us, giving us some salt to throw over our shoulders on account of the superstition that it was bad luck to move into a house on a Saturday. I don’t know about the superstition, but it is certainly true that the time we spent there was an unmitigated disaster. It was there that Barbara was to leave me for the first time and it was there
that I was to have some of the worst experiences of our time together.

I never needed to be told that it was wrong to hit a woman. Violence of any kind was already abhorrent to me and I felt it should be used only under the most extreme circumstances, to the point that I would allow people to beat me stupid rather than hit them; I would not hesitate to use violence to protect those I loved, just like I did in defence of my younger brothers and sisters, but rarely for myself.

This attitude predisposed me to take a lot of verbal abuse and psychological pressure from Barbara without ever retaliating, except that is, to express my hurt and frustration at the way she would treat me. I succeeded in not retaliating, but this just made her worse. She used the death of her mother and missing Ballyfermot as her excuses.

Eventually, Barbara decided to return to Ballyfermot, to her parents’ house, for a break. It was while Barbara was back in Ballyfermot that I experienced a strong need to dress as a female and of being unable to cope as a man. This had been a long time in coming and when it did, it never left me. On the contrary, it was to become more pronounced as the months and years wore on, despite my very best efforts to suppress it. It was during this period that I found myself unable to deny that there was a different
self
longing for expression; a deeply vulnerable, gentle, tender and sensitive self that needed above all to feel loved and wanted. But there was nothing or no-one to help me feel this way. The loneliness was sweeping over me in waves and my health was suffering because of it. I resented having to be strong all the time.

Barbara came back, telling me that she was only doing so because her father had told her that she had made her bed and had to lie in it.

During our time in Tallaght, I threw myself more fully into my studies with the Jehovah’s Witnesses, in search of spiritual truth. Not the right place to go for it, as it transpired, so it was also in Tallaght that I became a born-again Christian and would remain one in one form or another for the next twenty or more years.

Looking back, I can think of several reasons why I became so intensely involved in religion at this time. One reason was that I could use it as a mask to hide my true
self
. I thought that I could use religion to explain why I felt the way I did. By accepting my gender conflict as part of my ‘sinful’ nature, I could repent of it and, through much prayer and fasting and confessing it to my pastor and some of my brethren, I could finally rid myself of it and get on with living a normal Christian life. Again, I was wrong, and continued to repress my true gender identity from myself and, I thought, from everyone else. It never occurred to me just how many people were already questioning this, but never letting on to me that they were. It was to be many years before I finally realised that my condition had absolutely nothing to do with me being a ‘sinner’, and the mental and emotional burden I had placed on myself became increasingly intolerable and certainly contributed to my later breakdown.

It was in April 1983 that I became a professing Christian, around the same time as Barbara’s mother died. She was just 57 and died from emphysema. Barbara never really got over the grief of her loss and she completely shut me out and would not allow me to provide her with any comfort or support. Her father died three years later and again she was plunged into grief and again she shut me out. There was nothing I could do for her.

In 1987 things looked up briefly when Barbara found out that a local woman, Mrs Daly’s, house on Ballyfermot Road had come up for sale. I never saw her so enthusiastic about my buying a shirt before! I had decided that I needed to dress up to go and see Mrs Daly about accepting our offer to buy her house, and bought the most expensive shirt I could find. Barbara assured me that if I succeeded in getting the Daly house for us, then she would definitely try for children. I was desperate to have children and so agreed to do everything in my power to get the house. I asked Mrs Daly if she would be willing to rent the house to us to give us the chance to save for a deposit. She agreed, and we managed to save for the deposit and buy the house outright less than a year later. I learned some years later that Mrs Daly thought of me very highly and always appreciated the way I continued to visit her long after we had bought the house.

I now turned my attention to starting a family and asked Barbara if she was going to keep her promise. I felt under pressure to buy the house in order to have the possibility of having children, something I had always wanted. But for the third time in six years, I was to be disappointed. The devastation I felt was only matched by the realisation that I was never going to be a parent while I was married to her and the fact that I was not prepared to leave her because of my faith meant that there was virtually no hope of me ever having children. I had to carry this loss in silence and amidst continuous queries about when I was going to start a family. To compound my misery I was frequently jeered in work by some of my workmates because I still had no children after eight years of marriage. They asked if I wanted them to come up and show me how to make Barbara pregnant. Words fail me to express how this made me feel.

It was 1988 when I noticed that Barbara and a neighbour were spending more time together. At first I didn’t think much of it, but then I noticed that when we went round to our neighbours she started to ignore me. On one particular occasion, she started to mess with this neighbour. It was a hot day, and he got hold of the water hose and started to spray her with it and she never batted an eyelid, on the contrary, her enjoyment of it was all too evident. I was seething with jealousy and did nothing to hide it. I told her that it was inappropriate for her to be going around with a wet blouse. She told me to mind my own business.

A few weeks later we had a row over the way she flirted with the neighbour and I told her that I was not prepared to tolerate it. She responded by giving me a slap across my face. To my immense regret, I snapped and thumped her on the shoulder. A couple of days later, she left me and moved in with the neighbour. She stayed there for about three or four weeks. I called to see her one evening to see if I could talk her into coming home, but when I got there I saw her wearing the clothes I’d bought her for Christmas, but which, until now, she’d steadfastly refused to wear. Now she was wearing them while sitting alongside the neighbour, on the floor. Again, I pleaded with her to come back. She made her disdain obvious and told me that she did not love me and wanted me to leave her alone.

I returned home where my brother Graham had been waiting. I told him what had happened and, as I recounted the events, I came to the realisation that I could not allow her to continue treating me like a piece of shit under her shoe. I resolved to get myself together and move on; regrettably, my determination was short-lived. Barbara returned home but made it abundantly clear that she was coming back for the
house as she had no intention of giving it up and that I could leave if I wanted to. That was never going to happen given that I was a very committed Christian, something that was of little help during this whole period. If anything, it made it much worse: if I hadn’t been a Christian, I might have been able to end my unhappy marriage much earlier.

The only time Barbara and I ever really got on was after we attempted to live separately in the same house, which we did from 1984 until our separation in 1995. We came together physically no more than three or four times a year. This, however, did not stop me from initiating counselling in the hope that the marriage would work. I asked several pastors over the years to counsel us with a view to saving our marriage. In every single instance Barbara stated that she had made a mistake marrying me and that she regretted the hurt it had caused me. She told them that she was verbally abusing me because she resented my persistent efforts to make the marriage work when she didn’t want to. The problem for me was that I fully accepted this in my head but not in my heart. I could not cope with being rejected by someone to whom I had given so much of myself. It was wrong for me to keep this up, but keep it up I did, though only intermittently. From around 1990 onwards, Barbara encouraged me to find someone else to love. I knew that my marriage could not be saved, but it would take time and more difficulties before I could finally resign myself to that fact.

It was somewhat ironic that, years later, my mother would confess to me that she felt guilty about the way she had pushed me towards Barbara by being so resistant to us being together. She also confessed that, had she brought me up to think more of myself, to have greater self-worth, that maybe I would not have tolerated Barbara’s conduct for so long. She
stopped short of admitting that her own and my father’s rearing of me contributed to how I allowed myself to be treated by others. It was absolutely true, but neither of them was prepared to admit to this; though that was to change some years later.

Looking back at the numerous times I encouraged Barbara to come shopping with me and the vast amounts I spent on buying clothes for her, I realise that I was really buying the kinds of clothes I would wear had I been able to do so. I loved shopping and especially looking at the latest fashions. I also loved the new choices of ladies’ lingerie and how it was becoming much more feminine. I would use my purchases for Barbara as a cover for buying my own bits and pieces, mainly skirts and blouses, along with some lingerie. The sense of achievement and satisfaction I got from buying my own clothes bordered on the ecstatic. But that was short-lived as I felt increasingly guilty about it and would pray and fast, asking God to remove the urge to dress as a woman. I was convinced that He would, and there were times when it appeared to be working, as I would get these mad bursts of conviction when I would throw my lovely clothes into the rubbish bin. Unfortunately, it didn’t work and the need to be Sara would come back, only more intensely than before. I threw myself deeper into my religious activities, especially praying and fasting and, the more I did this and failed to get the deliverance I so desperately wanted, the more preoccupied I became with it.