Becoming Nicole: The Transformation of an American Family (7 page)

H
alfway through Jonas and Wyatt’s first-grade year at Asa C. Adams Elementary School, the family was throttled by bad news. A lingering cold in January 2004 had finally pushed Kelly to make an appointment with her primary care doctor. During the physical examination the doctor felt a small lump or nodule on Kelly’s thyroid. Typically these are tumor-shaped collections of benign cells, the doctor told her, but Kelly, who was forty-three, knew enough to be deeply frightened. At the time, she was helping a friend deal with a second bout of thyroid cancer. The woman had only just recovered from her first go-round the year before; now she faced deeply invasive surgery that would gouge out part of her neck.

The thyroid is a butterfly-shaped gland located in the lower front portion of the neck. Its job is to secrete hormones into the blood to help the body’s brain, heart, muscles, and other organs stay warm and functioning. Between 85 and 90 percent of people who are found to have thyroid nodules do not have cancer, which is why Kelly’s doctor had tried to reassure her. Tests needed to be done before there was any cause for worry. A chest X-ray, neck ultrasound, and thyroid function and blood tests followed. At last, a fine needle aspiration biopsy was performed. Then came the confirmation Kelly had feared all along: She had papillary thyroid cancer. Two surgeries in Boston followed, including a thyroidectomy, where doctors cut a three-inch-long incision in the front of Kelly’s neck and pulled out the diseased gland. The cancer appeared to be contained, but just to be sure, doctors suggested radioactive iodine therapy, or radioiodine treatment, which they hoped would kill any remaining metastatic cells. The thyroid is the only tissue in the body that takes up and holds on to iodine. But radioactive iodine therapy is a punishing treatment, requiring patients to be isolated in a single room for several days, because after they ingest the iodine they remain slightly radioactive, evidenced in their sweat and urine. Patients undergoing the treatment are asked to flush the toilet twice after relieving themselves to rinse away as much of the leftover radioactive fluid as possible, and nursing staff change the sheets on patients’ beds every day. A kind of medical Geiger counter is used to keep track of a person’s radioactivity, and when it is finally low enough the patient is discharged.

After the iodine treatment, there were checkups and follow-up scans at the Dana Farber/Brigham and Women’s Cancer Center in Boston. Sometimes Kelly’s friend, the one fighting her own second battle with thyroid cancer, would drive her to the hospital—a 240-mile trek straight down I-95 from Orono to Boston. But often Kelly drove herself, once or twice in the middle of a snowstorm. When she did, her mantra was always the same: “I need to live ten more years, just ten more years. If I can make it to ten years, Wyatt and Jonas will have a chance.” It wasn’t that she didn’t think Wayne loved both boys, but if she died and he had to raise the kids alone, he would likely continue to struggle to understand Wyatt and not know what to do for him, and she dreaded the thought of Wyatt being alone, without his mother to tell him that everything would be okay.

Occasionally the whole family packed into the car for the trip to Boston. Kelly had told the boys matter-of-factly that she was sick, but that she was getting medicine in Boston to make it all better. She was petrified, of course, but there was no way she was going to frighten Wyatt and Jonas. She had to stay calm for both boys.

When the family made the trip with her they stayed at a Holiday Inn, where the kids could swim. Kelly and Wayne would sit and watch them, all the while talking about how the twins were doing in school, or Wayne’s job—anything but cancer. They were having a hard time not feeling sorry for themselves, when one day a young boy, not more than thirteen, shuffled by them wearing a kind of housecoat. He had no hair, his face was thin, and his eyes seemed lost. His parents walked alongside him, and they were just as pale and worried looking as their son. Kelly and Wayne watched the small family walk from the pool, down the hall, and back into their room. Then they looked at each other and without saying a word gave thanks for their own good fortune. No matter how much they were being tested, they knew their children were safe and well. When the months of treatment were finally over, doctors gave Kelly a clean bill of health. Her cancer scare was over, and Kelly was more determined than ever to be there for her family.

O
NE OF
W
YATT AND
Jonas’s favorite times of the day was when Kelly read them a story before going to sleep. Between the boys’ twin beds was a wooden chair whose seat Kelly had painted yellow on the right side (Wyatt’s choice) and purple on the left (Jonas’s). A red stripe down the middle indicated where mom sat. Here she’d read to the boys, one son squeezed in on each side. Wyatt’s favorite story was Garrison Keillor’s “Cat, You Better Come Home,” about a certain feline who felt underappreciated. The cat wanted to be special, to stand out, and so one day she ran away from home in order to become rich and famous. Soon there were parties and yachts and unending food, but it turned out to be an empty life. After a while, all she wanted was to be normal again, to be one of the crowd, and so the prodigal cat finally returned home, welcomed back by her owners without a question.

If other cats could only know

To hang their hats on the status quo,

And make the best of what they’ve got,

And be who you are and not what you’re not.

Both boys were just beginning to figure out who and what they were. They each gravitated to the fictional characters they imagined they’d most like to be. For Wyatt, if it wasn’t a princess, it was the Wicked Witch from
The Wizard of Oz
with long green hair and fingernails—and attitude—or Dorothy with braids and shiny ruby slippers. For Jonas it was the Tin Man—with an ax—or a pirate, like in the movie
Pirates of the Caribbean.
But for now, Wyatt was happy that his parents allowed him to skip off to the first grade dressed in pants and a shirt, but with pink sneakers, a pink backpack, and a pink
Kim Possible
lunchbox.

After school, the first thing Wyatt did when he got home was to throw off his pants and shirt and put on a skirt or dress—more hand-me-downs from Leah. The halfway dressing for school had been Kelly and Wayne’s decision, a compromise that they weren’t at all sure about. Somehow, they believed it was better to take a middle road for now, to set limits. Wyatt clearly wasn’t happy with the decision, which made Kelly realize maybe it was finally time for him to see a therapist on a regular basis. She knew it wasn’t going to be easy trying to hold Wyatt back, or even that she should hold him back, and knowing he was seeing a professional would make her feel more comfortable about whatever might come next.

Kelly combed through lists looking for doctors who treated kids for sexual issues. The first psychologist they visited in Bangor told them she worked with children who had been sexually abused, not children with sexual identity issues. Wyatt needed a gender specialist, she told them.

The next therapist asked Kelly and Wayne, “What kind of underwear does Wyatt use? Does he urinate standing up or sitting down?”

“Well, he pees standing up,” Wayne answered.

“Well, then, he’s not transgender,” the shrink said.

Wayne and Kelly looked at each other and were glad Wyatt wasn’t there. Wayne was nowhere near ready to accept that his son was really his daughter, but he thought the psychiatrist’s questions and reasoning were simpleminded and ludicrous. He and Kelly stood up and thanked the therapist. On his way out the door, Wayne couldn’t help himself.

“By the way, I pee sitting down, you know.”

What Wyatt understood about himself, whether he felt different or odd or broken, neither Kelly nor Wayne really knew, until one day Wyatt looked up at his parents and said, “You know, I can have an operation that will fix me.”

Wyatt didn’t know the word “transgender” and he certainly didn’t know anything about sex reassignment surgery. But somehow he did understand the concept of plastic surgery and that women were able to have their breasts enlarged and their faces made to look younger. If a doctor could give a woman bigger breasts than why couldn’t a doctor give Wyatt little ones? Wyatt was an optimist, mainly because Kelly made a point to never instill doubt in him. She might have been holding him back, but she never discouraged or tried to dissuade him from becoming a girl if that’s what he really wanted. From Wyatt’s perspective, he just somehow knew it would all eventually work out. But an operation?

“Where did he learn that?” asked an incredulous Wayne.

Kelly said, “I have no idea.”

UnnHappy, sad, mad, Unnspeakable blue red Unnsunshining and hot and cool and red hot and ice cold.

—Wyatt Maines, diary, May 4, 2005

B
eginning around age seven, Wyatt’s moods seemed to fluctuate daily. On the cover of his second-grade “Secret Notebook,” he drew three suns, three clouds, and three smiling girls, all with long red hair, standing on a green hill that sprouted pink and yellow flowers. On the second page he drew a picture of himself with long hair standing beside his brother. Neither was smiling:

Dear Notebook,

Sometimes when my brother does something bad to me, I punch him right in the guts!

Under a picture of Wyatt hitting Jonas, Wyatt wrote:

Sometimes I punch my brother right in the center of his face with my fist.

The notebooks and diaries Wyatt and Jonas created at Asa C. Adams Elementary School usually included only sporadic entries, but in this one there were also drawings—of Wyatt throwing off his covers in the middle of the night, getting up, and going “wild in the dark,” doing noisy gymnastics and pretending to be a vampire lady “and I bite my brother and scare his underpants right off!”

On page seven:

I mean this. I hit things. I kick things. I trip on things. And I throw things. This is how I practice my karate.

The final drawing in the notebook was actually a series of faces:

Sometimes I like to dress up as Daphany and Velma. My brother likes to dress up as Shaggy and his friends like to dress up as Scooby-Doo and Fred! I’d like to tell you more, but if I do, my brother might get mad and punch me!

The notebook was a second-grade assignment that Wyatt had to show not only his teacher but his parents. All of them then wrote comments on the back page:

In truth, Kelly and Wayne were both concerned. Because Jonas was the more passive of the twins, he was used to absorbing the blows, both physical and verbal. Fighting was to be expected between siblings, especially at that age, and identical twins were no different in that regard. But when they were physical, Wyatt sometimes seemed like he wanted to pummel his brother. Both parents gave them time-outs, tried to teach them they needed to talk instead of yelling and fighting, and told them that if they couldn’t agree about something, they needed to come to them. Around this time Wyatt’s anger also turned inward. The first sign of worry for Kelly were little tics she saw him develop. She noticed that when Wyatt was lying on the couch watching TV or doing his homework, he would absentmindedly pull at his eyelashes and eyebrows, trying to pluck them out.

“Wyatt, why are you doing that?” Kelly said one day.

“I have to.”

“What do you mean you have to?”

“I mean I can’t stop.”

On April 13, 2006, nine-year-old Wyatt had his first appointment with child psychologist Virginia Holmes. Her office was in Ellsworth, about thirty-five miles southeast of Orono. Holmes had come highly recommended by the twins’ pediatrician when Kelly told the doctor she thought Wyatt needed counseling. The weekly sessions were structured so that Kelly would talk to Holmes first and update the therapist about what was going on at home and at school. At first, Kelly and Wayne thought maybe Wyatt had attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, because he never seemed able to keep still. But his fidgeting, his constant restlessness, also seemed to point to a deeper anxiety, something perhaps even Wyatt couldn’t explain.

Virginia Holmes wrote in her clinician’s journal:

Met Wyatt for the first time. He is very feminine. He is wearing his hair long, and had a blue flowery barrette in it….Wyatt displayed no anxiety or worries about wanting to be a girl. His eyes sparked with interest when I said my usual about knowing lots of boys who feel this way, but his main anxiety is not about that.

Wyatt’s main concern is his overwhelming automatic desire to choke himself….He does not feel able to stop himself from doing so, most of the time. He wanted to know did I know other kids who felt THIS? I talked a little about OCD, and he understood that: “Oh!” he said. “Like Tourette’s Syndrome!” Right.

V
irginia Holmes counseled Kelly to go slow with Wyatt, to not necessarily give in every time Wyatt pushed her to allow him to be more like a girl. Holmes still thought Wyatt might be gay, not transgender, so until that could be determined, she thought it best to keep his feminine behaviors a bit more in check, at least in public, so Kelly insisted Wyatt continue to wear “boy” clothes to school.

When Wayne came home from work one night, Wyatt and Jonas were playing in the backyard with friends. They were sword fighting, and Wyatt was wearing a pink blouse and pants.

Wayne confronted Kelly, something he rarely did.

“Dr. Holmes said to go slow.”

“She said to go slow with him in school,” Kelly answered.

She was peeved. She knew Wayne was just using Dr. Holmes as an excuse for his own discomfort. Wayne was trying to adjust to the changes, but he was afraid the more feminine Wyatt was allowed to act, the harder it would be for him to go back to being a boy.

Wyatt compensated for the split life he was leading by escaping through a show called
Winx Club,
an Italian animated television series on Fox that highlighted a fantasy world of girls with magical powers. Their love interests are called “the Specialists” and their enemies are three witches who call themselves “the Trix”: Icy, Darcy, and Stormy. The witches, like most evil characters, get the lion’s share of the drama, and they look the part with long hair, tall boots, and hourglass figures. The witches are powerful: capable of manipulating matter, specifically ice, darkness, and wind.

In his pink marble notebook for 2004 and 2005, Wyatt drew page after page of the Trix, the witches. The notebook begins with drawings of valentines, sunshine, and stars, and ends with sketches of a woman frowning and crying and a boy sticking his tongue out. Wyatt was first attracted to the characters because they were both feminine and powerful. Stormy, also known as the Storm Queen, has a cinched-in waist, purple eye makeup, and dramatic hair—a storm cloud of frizz and curls with long white bangs shaped like lightning bolts that frame her face. She is wild, even uncontrollable, and is capable of creating tornadoes, unleashing wind blasts, and stunning her enemies with shocks of electricity. As the youngest of the Trix sisters, however, Stormy is weaker than the other witches, but what she lacks in strength she makes up for in confidence and aggression. She’s proud and quick to anger, and if someone crosses her, she will get her revenge, no matter how long it takes. Proud, outspoken, aggressive, and immature: That was Wyatt all over. Increasingly he was pushing limits, and sometimes even seemed to test his father. If they were in a department store, Wyatt would go straight to the girls’ dresses, the ones he called “sassy” with their bold colors and glitter.

“Daddy, can I have this one?”

Wayne tried not to overreact. He didn’t want to hurt Wyatt, but his job was to keep things neutral, which was what Kelly had suggested he do if he couldn’t be more supportive.

“Maybe for Christmas, Wy-Pie, maybe for Christmas.”

Usually Wayne didn’t talk to Kelly about these incidents. But once, when they were discussing the possibility of Wyatt someday wearing a dress to school, he said they shouldn’t do it, that once that happens, that’s it, that’s what he’ll be forever known for—the boy who came to school dressed like a girl.

“Well, that’s what he wants,” Kelly answered.

W
ITH THE START OF
the fourth grade, Wyatt’s anxieties seemed to ratchet up. He pulled at his mouth, repeatedly touched his gums, pinched the skin under his tongue, and plucked out the hairs on his head one at a time. In his physical education progress report, his teacher noted: “Wyatt is very emotional and gets down or angry quickly. This behavior has emerged most dramatically in the past few months. Wyatt’s self-confidence seems to have slipped.”

These new stresses seemed to be more about how others saw Wyatt, and him wanting to fit in with the girls. He was desperate to wear a two-piece bathing suit, but Kelly had figured out a compromise several years earlier when the twins were first learning to swim at the YMCA. She’d convinced both boys to wear wet suits in order to avoid the whole issue of trunks versus bathing suit with Wyatt, although his wet suit was orange and pink.

Now Wyatt was pushing again, and it was getting harder to refuse him with his longer hair and his sense of himself as female growing stronger. Finally, Kelly gave in. Wyatt could wear a two-piece suit but with two conditions: no spaghetti-string top, and the bottom had to include a swim skirt. Agreed. At his swimming and diving lessons Kelly now sneaked Wyatt into the girls’ dressing room. She hadn’t told Wayne she was doing this, and when she told Virginia Holmes, the psychologist asked whether it was sensible to allow Wyatt to identify as a girl in such a public place. Kelly didn’t often cry, but this time, in front of Holmes, she burst into tears. It was hard enough without Wayne’s support, but now Holmes seemed to be questioning her parenting.

Wyatt had his own questions. He told Dr. Holmes that kids on the bus, especially one girl, often called him names that he didn’t understand. Once, someone called him a “fruit basket,” but he didn’t know what that meant. Holmes mentioned the words “gay men.”

“What are gay men?” Wyatt asked.

“Men who love other men instead of women.”

“Oh! That’s not me!”

Wyatt seemed perfectly confident of that, but Holmes said, well, they didn’t know yet who he was going to love. But Wyatt did. Without question he did. He wasn’t gay, he wasn’t a boy attracted to other boys—that was as foreign to him as calling himself a boy. He was a girl. He was a girl who wanted to be pretty and feel loved and one day marry a boy—just like other girls did.