For The Day When Grass Widows Are Asked To Tell Their Tales
Reading Ute Heggen's memoir of a trans widow
“I foresee a day when grass widows will be asked to tell their tales, and here I offer mine,” Ute Heggen writes. She is hopeful that others can learn from her experiences.
“Perhaps one person will try to do the thing I’ve proven can be done. Perhaps just one person, who made the mistake of marrying the kind of man I did, will read my words and find strength and comfort, and leave when she knows she must. Perhaps someone can be stronger than I am, and be all well where I have been half-fallen.”
In The Curated Woods: True Tales From A Grass Widow, the retired educator prefers to use the 14th century term for a woman whose husband was alive but unseen, leaving her “the grass, but no grave” to mourn him.
Heggen accepts the label ‘transwidow’ too, but ‘grass widow’ fits her naturalistic writing ethos. Her memoir unfolds over the year of Covid as a diary of land management, a record of the plants and animals on her rural acreage, pausing to write down the memories of her marriage as they occur to her, telling her story along the way.
“This is the tale of the last time,” reads the first of her passages memorializing an experience as a grass widow.
Uninvited memories arrive, like the last time my then-husband and I had sex before I discovered he had been taking estrogen. His motions were different, had a vacancy in them; there was a neglect of my breasts, a stiffness in his reaction to my embraces. His errant hand thrust intrusively between us, to explore my orgasm, felt cool and clinical. It was a sudden and voyeuristic gesture. Intuitively I knew it was the last time and that I’d always remember. I felt dissociated, emotionally confused. I was so disconnected—unusual for me, the former dancer. I assume it was the last time he ever had intercourse using his male parts.
A few weeks later, Heggen saw his new breasts for the first time and understood the half-forgotten experience in a disturbing new light. Years later, she realized that the strange exploration of his hand was his effort to imitate her orgasm, later, as a pseudo-woman.
The man she calls “Neddy” was replacing her, becoming her. It was a shocking moment of “female erasure,” not the first, she soon realized, and not to be the last.
Neddy was a narcissistic abuser who had found the ultimate cheat code. Once he became transsexual, “it was as if Neddy could say just about anything, making the excuse of being a man who imagines he is female. Any self-absorbed statement is an inconsequential part of the picture, any and all expressions of this mindset are appropriate, because we have new understandings of words.”
For example, the word gender was at first a synonym for sex, but now gender has replaced sex, undermining the biological reality of sex difference in our conversations. Heggen objects to the neologisms of gender identity gibberish that erase femaleness. She is sensitized by her experience at the hands of a man who systematically erased her.
“In my effort to hold on to my identity as the mother of my children, I am accused of discriminating against someone who tried to omit my name as mother from records, then impersonated me,” she explains.
Neddy used his court-mandated time with their two sons teaching them to call her by her first name. He let the boys think his move out of their shared home into an apartment was temporary, and the divorce was her fault.
He volunteered to be the “class parent” in order to control the school forms, listed himself as “the mother” and Uta as “other parent” on those forms, and then shuffled the boring record-keeping duties off on single moms.
Neddy took an asthmatic son to a new doctor, destroying the established relationship with the family doctor, so that he could have the satisfaction of being listed on some office paperwork as “mother.”
“He needed to use the children as props in the charade, where the children play supporting roles,” Heggen writes. Understanding brought anxiety. “Did he wear my clothes when I wasn’t around?” she wondered upon learning of his paraphilia. She has been slow-breathing her way through the panic attacks ever since.
Controversially, there are transwidows who stay, and those who do not. Neddy tried hard to make Ute into “the wife who stayed.” It was through this process that she met “Ruth the Charlatain,” mentioned at the opening of the book, whom we encounter at last two-thirds of the way through the book.
It is a brief interview with the villain of the piece. “Ruth with no PhD, no counseling degree, no qualifications, had no right to do any kind of diagnoses,” Heggen explains. “She was a doctor’s wife, Neddy told me, and men who had these ideations found her through word of mouth.” She had connections to Stanford University Medical Center. In short, Ruth was a guru of the gender cult.
When she finally got to discuss Neddy’s new life with his own father, a stern and formerly abusive man, his attitude towards the son had changed completely. “I had never heard him talk so glowingly about his firstborn, with whom he’d previously had a contentious and often negative relationship,” she writes.
Rather than support her, Neddy’s parents complained about court-ordered child support. He would never pay it. They used lingo borrowed from Ruth, for they were already cult converts.
“I had expected some contrition, perhaps a recognition of the fact that I had risked alienation from my own parents by converting to Judaism, their religion, before having the children.” The new cult conversion cancelled out the old one.
Absurdly, during the divorce litigation, Neddy tried to accuse Ute’s boyfriend of being an Orthodox Jew bent on drawing their sons into “hardcore traditionalist Judaism.” Even more absurdly, their Jewish divorce (“ghet”) was a necessary step before Neddy could have vaginoplasty.
“The term gender critical refers to those of us who are atheists when it comes to the religious line of thinking that it is possible to change sex,” Heggen writes in 2022. She will not use cult language anymore, least of all preferred pronouns, but the adjustment took years.
Uncovering evidence of his long-suspected lies about his finances was the final straw. “I hit the wall of mangling my own history when Naddy’s wealth and the hiding of it were the last artifacts to come out of the closet,” she says.
“I used to carefully toggle back and forth between male and female pronouns in my own chronicling until my words didn’t sound like my own,” she writes. “It takes too much time, and most importantly, it makes my reality a falsehood.”
Other people are still navigating the same problem, though. Compromises abound. “An old friend, who saw me through those early years, tells me she suddenly has to refer to her neice as her nephew all the time, even with me, to ‘keep in practice’ for the linguistic hurdles of family gatherings or even phone calls,” Heggen notes.
Her adult sons seemed to sympathize with her until 2015, the year when woke took over. One of them expressed a desire to kill himself in second grade when he could no longer say “my dad” anymore. As an adult, he has forgotten about his pain so long ago, and ascribes her views to generational difference: “It isn’t a thing for us the way it was for you.”
“I sense [my sons] rewriting their childhood memories, omitting their periods of grief and resentment. My sons’ lived experiences are no longer appropriate in the new context,” Heggen writes.
The world around them demands they believe their father is a mother, that they disconnect with their actual mother for not believing their father is a mother. “The identity of one person shifts the entire family, if not the entire community.”
Heggen takes solace in her natural community. She knows every plant and animal in her Hudson Valley woods, describes their interrelationships and rejects the invasive species. A grass widow among the grass, she plants food for butterflies, and then counts the butterflies.
Humans enter the landscape. “Mr. Mower,” the groundskeeper of the cemetery adjacent to her property, becomes her new antagonist over boundaries, this time literal ones: his shoddy rail fence versus her “slag fence” of fallen tree limbs, until they reach an unspoken détente.
She has a silver-age romance with Claes, who plays classical piano music, and takes long walks with him through her woods, avoiding strangers: love in the time of Covid.
Ute Heggen (pseudonym) is a talented writer discovering a late-life love of nature while in a state of estrangement from the very people who were once most bonded to her. By turns aching with sad memory and bursting with life, this book is a primary source for future historians seeking to understand the experiences of the women who were erased to make way for the cult of gender identity.