DAN’S TRANS-FORMATION

Tradwife. Transwife. Whatever.

with Belinda Vandervelvet

Have I lost my mind?

Came home after a double shift in the psych ward yesterday to find my husband Dan in the kitchen, all dolled up in a neatly pressed floral-print dress with a white ruffly apron, both of which he had clearly ordered from Etsy, since I have nothing like this in my closet. Last I checked, which was admittedly over a month ago (since I’ve not had time to do laundry), Dan’s closet was full of camowear and utility boots. “What the actual fuck” was the first thing that popped into my head, but I kept that to myself because the smell of chocolate cake coming out of the oven was overriding my desire to rip his head off. Is anyone really prepared with an appropriate response when they find their husband cheerfully assuming the role (and attire) of a tradwife? Especially when said tradwife has taken on every household task you hate, like washing sports uniforms? Somehow Dan managed to get all the grass stains out of both pairs of our sons’ baseball pants. Truly a miracle; call the pope.

Though I wouldn’t be caught dead in an ensemble like the one he was wearing, which, by the way, was made in the Apostolic United Brethren community in Utah, Dan actually pulled it off. Not going to lie, he looked damn cute, in an unconventional way. His delicately strutting around the kitchen greatly amplified the effect. It seemed he’d been meant to wear heels and lacy undergarments his whole life. It was him. Or should I say “her.”

Apparently, the United Brethren was the only place Dan was able to find custom-made hausfrau clothing in his size. The ladies did a fantastic job of crafting a dress out of vintage potato sacks that could accommodate Dan’s former-football-lineman physique. I imagine his build was similar to that of a typical Utah farm girl.

Dan, so very proud of his outfit, informed me that it had been made by good Christian women, as if that excused the fact that he was a man wearing women’s clothes, which, according to our pastor, was an abomination in the eyes of the lord, though he was at a loss to pull up any biblical passages to back this claim. The seamstresses were a group of fundamentalist Mormons, all of whom are married to Ammon, an Elder who is apparently in his 90s, yet still has his original set of chompers, which look impressively white and intact in his family pictures. Judging from the number of smallish children in his clan, it would seem Ammon’s equipment was also in good working order. Having 12 women at your beck and call is apparently good for one’s health and libido.

OK, great. So these women are literally slaves. According to the AUB brochure, this is a community where having as many wives as possible, regardless of their age, is a divine commandment, and since the men can’t possibly keep up with their wives’ demands for sex (like when all 12 of them are ovulating at the same time), the men make them wear these ridiculous outfits so they aren’t constantly getting a boner.

That apron, by the way, looks like it’s straight out of the wardrobe room from Little House On The Prairie. You remember that scene where Laura is out splitting wood for the stove because her dad is on some trip where he won’t be back for months, and since they don’t have cell phones, they have no idea whether he is even alive? Thank god he left them the rifle, because some weird guy keeps coming by asking for a place to “lay his head” and get a proper meal. We’ve all heard that line.

I was really trying to wrap my head around Dan’s thought process on this whole thing, but nothing was adding up. We were going to need to talk once the kids were in bed. Really confusing to me was the boys’ reaction — which was no reaction at all, as if this whole thing were perfectly normal. There they were — sitting at the dining room table doing their math, not punching each other, or whining as was usual. Also missing from the pastoral setting: empty soda cans and Pirate’s Booty wrappers. In their place: remnants of Granny Smith apple slices with peanut butter and tumblers with milk residue. How weird is that? Add to that the fact that it was only 6:30 p.m., and the boys were nearly done with their homework.

What planet had I landed on?

And there, in the kitchen, was my fetching husband, Dan, pulling a chocolate cake out of the oven with polka-dotted oven mitts, a tuna casserole nearby on the counter ready to take its place on the center rack. In the middle of the kitchen table was a big green salad smothered in Wish-Bone Western dressing, with homemade croutons. A loaf of French bread, generously buttered and sprinkled with garlic and herbs, sat next to the convection oven, waiting to get toasted. Damn.

With a dinner like this, I could almost forgive this shocking new look of Dan’s. And frankly, I was way too exhausted to have a confrontation with a bearded woman in a white pinafore. So, I gave Dan a kiss, dumped my backpack on the rug, kicked off my shoes, then collapsed in my Lazy-Boy recliner. “Give me a shout when dinner is ready,” I yelled from the living room. Then off I drifted to sleep, with visions of sugar plums, neatly folded laundry, deadheaded rose bushes, and a fridge full of groceries dancing in my head.

Talk about idle hands (and feet) doing the devil’s food work… Dan, who was newly unemployed, had spent the entire afternoon clearing out our checking account and getting a mani-pedi at the Cuticle Crimes Unit at Asphalt Acres. This was not your typical men’s mani-pedi, mind you. Oh, no. Dan, who’d just been sacked from his football coaching job last week, had gone the whole nine yards at the nail salon. Touchdown! Exfoliation, hydrating mask, hot rock massage, organic botanical infusion, paraffin wax immersion, and bling-and-shine acrylics in Fuchsia Fever. That’s right: bright pink nails on both his hands and toes, which here, in MY kitchen, were demurely poking out of a pair of size 14 kitten heel flip-flops, which I can assure you did not come from Tractor Supply Hardware, Dan’s normal go-to for clothing and footwear.

But let me back up here.

After the cruise debacle — which I’ve already documented in excruciating detail — Dan came home and basically had the equivalent of a smallish nervous breakdown, or what is more appropriately called a “wobble” in the UK. Dan stopped eating solid food. He spent hours dancing to the Bee Gees in his jock strap in front of our mirrored closet doors. He drank Aperol spritzers for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. In the evenings, he watched Jesse Watters Primetime in a black negligee, looking the part of a white supremacist Victoria’s Secret model, what with his Nazi tattoos and all. I prayed the local Amazon guy, who delivered packages until midnight, would not see him in the background when I signed for the Chewy order. That kid could have made our social life a dumpster fire just by mentioning this situation to one of the neighbors in our cul-de-sac or catching a video of Dan sprawled out coquettishly on the couch with his body-worn camera.

So what would any good, God-fearing couple do in these trying times? That’s right: we cashed in our remaining 401(k), took out a second mortgage on the house, canceled the kids’ extracurriculars, and sent Dan to the Between-a-Rock-and-a-Hard Place Christian Recovery Spa in Sedona, Arizona.

Pastor Marcus Wellby runs the place. You’ve probably seen him on YouTube — he’s got some 400,000 subscribers and does these testimonial videos where he talks about how he used to be “trapped in the homosexual lifestyle” until Jesus saved him. Now he’s married to a woman named Bethany, and they’ve got four kids and a chihuahua named Deuteronomy. Pastor Wellby has a smile (and body) that could convince even your grandma to buy a timeshare in hell, and you’d thank him for it. That bulge in his pants is not a hard-on, by the way. It’s his wallet.

The spa looked AMAZING in the brochures. Gorgeous red rock views, meditation gardens, a prayer labyrinth, hydrotherapy pools, and something called “Masculine Reclamation Workshops” where men practiced chopping wood, doing oil changes, and rebuilding carburetors. There were lots of pics of men doing manly work in manly clothes — all of it a bit reminiscent of the Village People, and come to think of it, there was that catchy background melody on their website that sounded a lot like “YMCA.” Those who weren’t around in 1978 may have forgotten that the lead singer, Victor Willis, was insistent that “YMCA” was just a wholesome song about youth camaraderie, something Trump has obviously bought into, as he struts the runway to a Village People medley at all of his now poorly attended rallies.

So, to be clear, the gist of these workshops is that in doing all this manly shit, you will rewire your brain so you no longer feel the urge to suck dick. But from what I would learn post-treatment, these workshops were doing just the opposite. Imagine a sweaty, shirtless all-male chain gang in the Arizona sun. I’m guessing that Pastor Wellby thought about that very image many a night.

So it cost us $47,000 for this six-week intensive program. FORTY-SEVEN THOUSAND DOLLARS. That’s more than Dan would have made in two years as an assistant football coach, had he not lost his job. Pastor Marcus assured us this was a small price to pay for Dan’s eternal soul, and for our marriage. He claimed the success rate to be 87%, which seemed pretty damn good to me, and he had numerous testimonials from former clients who were now living heterosexual lives. They were back to ogling women, coaching Little League, and going to barbecues. You know, normal American things.

So off Dan went, and for six weeks, I heard nothing. No phone calls, no text messages, no emails. The laundry was piling up, the refrigerator filled with carry-out leftovers and zero fruit. Pastor Marcus said this was part of the process — complete isolation from “triggering influences” so the men could focus on their spiritual transformation. At the time, I was busy working double shifts at Bayview anyway, emptying bedpans in the psych ward and trying not to murder Carmelita every time she gave me one of her sanctimonious lectures about “professional conduct” and “treating all patients with dignity.” What about my dignity? I was emptying shit buckets for eight hours a day. What more do you want, bitch? Oh, got it. You’d like me to change incontinence briefs for an extra $0.20 per hour. Now there’s a job from hell.

So Dan came home three weeks ago, and at first, everything seemed FINE. Better than fine, in fact. He was oddly calm. Unsettlingly centered. He’d stopped drinking. And he was reading the Bible every morning, though most of the passages seemed to be from Song of Solomon and Ezekiel 23. He started going to Grace Victory Evangelical Fellowship with me on Sundays and even volunteered to cook in the church’s soup kitchen. Pastor Jim was thrilled — he said Dan had “the glow of the redeemed” and asked if he’d be willing to give his testimony at the next week’s service.

I truly thought we’d dodged a bullet. I thought Pastor Marcus had actually FIXED Dan, though I couldn’t shake the thought that we might have wasted $47,000 and would never know what retirement felt like. I was just relieved Dan was back in the fold.

Boy was I wrong. Dan was not in the fold.

So yesterday, when I came home from that double shift — after sixteen hours of emptying bedpans and mopping up “accidents” and listening to a paranoid schizophrenic named Eugene tell me that Elon Musk had put a microchip in his 12-year molar and was broadcasting his thoughts via satellite in geosynchronous orbit, I was bushed. My feet were killing me. My back was screaming. I smelled like industrial disinfectant and human feces. All I wanted was to collapse in my Lazy Boy recliner with a glass of Barefoot Moscato and watch the Hallmark “Chasing Leprechauns” movie, a setting where everyone is white and heterosexual, and no one has any real problems — at least not the kind that require a psychiatrist.

Then, I walk in the door, and there is that smell of chocolate cake. WTF.

Chocolate cake. Warm, rich, decadent, gooey. A smell that makes your mouth water and your stomach growl even if you just ate. I follow my nose to the kitchen, and there he is: Dan, the bearded woman.

He turns around and sees me standing there, and he SMILES. No… he GLOWS. A huge, genuine, supremely happy smile, his lips slathered with fuchsia lip gloss that perfectly matches his acrylic nails. He’s been waiting all day to present me with this cake. He’s been waiting his whole life to be the hausfrau. Finally, all of the stars had aligned; his dream had come true.

I just stared at him. My brain was short-circuiting. I could not formulate a sentence.

Dan calmly set the cake down on the cooling rack and wiped his hands on his apron. That’s when I noticed the rest of it. His eyebrows: plucked and shaped. The mascara. The lipstick — and not drag queen lipstick — no, a subtle gloss that made his lips look full and shiny, like January Jones in Mad Men. Dan still had his thick beard, which made the whole thing even more surreal, though unexpectedly reassuring. He was like a lumberjack in a sundress. A knight in gold lamé. A plumber in a pinafore.

“What,” I finally managed to say, “the FUCK.”

“I know!” Dan said, completely misinterpreting my tone. “I wasn’t sure about the color at first, but Destiny at Cuticle Crimes said Fuschia Fever would really pop with my skin tone, and I think she was right. Don’t you? I mean, I was thinking about going with something more neutral, like Ballet Slipper or Mademoiselle, but then I thought, you know what, life’s too short. Go bold or go home, right?”

“Destiny,” I repeated.

Dan held out his hands and wiggled his fingers. The rhinestones in his nail polish caught the light and sparkled. He seemed so happy. The cost of that happiness: the equivalent of my emptying bedpans for 3 days.

I wanted to scream. I wanted to grab him by the shoulders and shake him and demand to know what the hell Pastor Marcus had done with him at Rock-and-a-Hard Place. I wanted to call the Pastor and demand a refund. I wanted to drive to Sedona and burn the whole fucking spa to the ground.

But then I looked around the kitchen.

It was SPOTLESS. The counters were wiped down. The dishes were done and put away. The floor was mopped. The trash was taken out. There were fresh flowers in a vase on the table —sunflowers and daisies, my favorites. The fridge was humming quietly, and when I opened it, it was FULL. Not just full — ORGANIZED. Fruits and vegetables in the crisper drawers. Deli meats and cheeses in the deli drawer. Leftovers in matching Tupperware containers with labels and dates written in neat handwriting. Milk, OJ, almond milk (since when do we drink almond milk?), a bottle of Chardonnay, a six-pack of La Croix.

I walked into the living room. The boys were doing their homework. Without being asked. Without screaming at each other. Without it getting interrupted by a game of Fortnite or them scrolling TikTok or doing any of the other shit they usually do. They were doing MATH and reading books. You know, the kind with PAGES.

“Hey, Mom, Dad made snickerdoodles. They’re on the counter if you want one.”

I walked upstairs. The beds were neatly done up. With fresh sheets — the kind with hospital corners you could bounce a quarter off. The laundry was done — folded and stacked in tidy piles on everyone’s dressers. And the whole upstairs wreaked of Bounce. Even the bathrooms were clean. The toilets scrubbed. Mirrors Windexed. Clean, fluffy hand towels were hanging on the racks, and they MATCHED the bath sheets and washcloths.

I went back downstairs. Dan was now frosting the cake, spreading buttercream in smooth, even layers with an offset spatula. What the hell is an offset spatula? And where did Dan learn to frost a cake? Ah yes. At the spa.

“The dog’s at the groomer,” he said without looking up. “I’m picking him up in the morning. He’s getting the full package — bath, nail trim, ear cleaning, and anal gland expression. I know Tender Buttons hates the groomer, but he was starting to smell like old tube socks, so I figured it was time. Oh, and I deadheaded all the roses in the front garden. They were looking pretty scraggly. Also pulled the weeds in the flower beds and mulched the hydrangeas. I’m thinking we fill in a few spots with impatiens. What do you think? Red and purple?”

I sat down at the kitchen table. My legs felt weak.

“Dan,” I said slowly. “What the fuck is happening?” He just smiled.

That’s when I retired to my recliner — to tune everything out and process what was going on. It would take nothing short of a hyperscale data center to process what I’d gone through today.

I drifted into a deep sleep until Dan's voice floated in from what seemed a faraway place, calling me to the dinner table. The Emerald City, perhaps. There's no place like home. There's no place like home.

And what an incredible dinner he’d laid out. All of my favorites. The best part: I didn’t have to do the dishes.

Things would never be the same in our house. That was clear.

Also clear: I was going to be good with that. Really good.

And my MAGA neighbors could go fuck themselves.