transretrogurl

Two blogs in one night? Well, it’s been a long day and coffee has been involved, so I’m buzzing and more importantly I can feel the pink juices flowing through my cranium; *she* is the house and she wants to be creative, so who am I to argue with her (plus she has heels on and knows, intimately, where to kick me.

And after going through the oodles of pictures I got from the session, which was only last Saturday but feels like eons in the past, I have fallen in love with one of the personas I tried on. And she is very much in the forefront of my mind at the moment.

It’s hard to describe what the sensations are when I dress; and by hard I mean impossible. I can’t put in words the way my personality shifts, the way things that ‘he’ doesn’t care about become so wonderful to ‘her’. And this frock, and the look and identity I took on while wearing it, were something else, something different. Well, something really different from the personality I wear most days and this one felt, and it makes me happy and somewhat scared to say it, much more *me*.

This is a frock tale so I’ll hold back from the usual philosophical examination of the core man/woman fighting inside me (she’s hitting him with a heel again), but I need to try to put down in words the way it made me feel because it was so lovely.

So the dress; it was actually oversized, because I tend to buy the next size up in case the sizing is small (and this dress came from the United States so returns would be daftly difficult), but I used a white vintage-style belt, and then an apron (squee!) to pull it in and give it more shape. But again, this one felt different the minute I put it on. I could feel myself melting into the role; looking at the prim and 50s stylish woman in the mirror, shifting my hips left and right to make the skirt sway over the petticoat, I felt as far from my natural gender and mannerisms as I could possible get.

And it felt more normal.

Let me explain as I’m probably coming across like a girl with the fashion-vapours. Every day I wake up, go into the toilet, stare in the mirror and I’m satisfied with what I see. Satisfied. Not happy. Not sad. Just meh. I don’t think I’m that handsome a man, because my brain doesn’t think like that. I think my chin is a bit week, I’m constantly seeing fat (where there really isn’t any anymore but hell, my brain thinks like a girl sometimes and it’s a very female, eating-disorder way to think). I’m constantly scrutinising my face for signs of age, for scars.

And this is a recent thing. Not the age (52 and I spent a lot of my life drinking alcohol; not because it was a manly thing to do, but because I was genuinely uncomfortable with myself when sober and much happier when three pints in; in retrospect and judging from the sheer joy and happiness buttoning myself into a 1950s housewife dress gives me I was trying to ignore the gorgeous petticoat and stocking wearing elephant in the room and not succeeding), but the obsession with looks.

And it’s not an obsession with looks as such; it’s an obsession with seeing things that might interfere with my ability to be Sarah.

So when I stepped into the voluminous dress, which was a thin fabric that felt wonderful against my skin, buttoned it up, carefully spreading the skirt over the petticoat and delighting that wonderful feeling of restriction a dress gives you across the bosom, at the waist and, in the case of this one, around the buttoned up collar, and looked long into the mirror, brushing my hair off of my cheeks and seeing my old fashioned pearl earrings, there was none of self-conscious crap I get when looking at myself in the mirror when wearing the same predictable male clothing I have worn for fifty odd years.

And it’s not a case of being so radically different to the clothes I normally wear either. I’ve worn a lot of dresses (why does that statement not only make me smile but give me that warm rush in the lower abdomen?) so wearing a dress isn’t the oddity and rush it once was. The effect has changed. I feel more comfortable in a flowing skirt, petticoat, tight dress top. And this dress was sleeveless, which felt even nicer; when I looked in the mirror I could see my bare arms and my delicate hands with long red nails.

For some reason the dress exaggerated the thinness and, I hate to say it, the femininity of my arms and hands. I’ve always been lucky (for a crossdresser) in that my hands and arms are naturally willowy. If I didn’t make a concerted effort to not have limp wrists, for example, I would look very fey even in full drab male-mode. Again, I spend a lot of my time in normal days consciously doing the ‘man’ thing; it wasn’t until recently that I realised how much of an effort it is to pretend to be male.

Yeah, I have said on many occasions that I don’t want to be a woman all the time but I’m starting to ask myself some very telling questions. Why do I say that? Why do I make such a big deal of pointing out that I don’t want to be a woman? How am I trying to persuade?

Hint – it isn’t the person I talk to.

I can’t describe how I felt posing in front of the mirror before we started doing the photoshoot but I don’t need to. Just look at my face and eyes. The whole look felt more like me than the me I am every day.

And I realised I wasn’t posing, I wasn’t pretending. The woman in the green and white sleeveless dress, looking for all intents and purposes like a comfortable 195os housewife was me, or rather I wasn’t trying to pretend to be something else. Being that woman was more than easy. It was natural.

And it got much better. We did some shots in the cabin, the usual kind of poses that, and again not trying to be modest, just come naturally to me when dressed. Then we did some at the back door, always fun as it’s, gasp, outside.

And before I get onto the real cream of this blog post, which I will enthuse about in a sec, I need to talk about the outside. People take it for granted but for me, when dressed, being outside is an almost indescribable pleasure. Not only am I feeling more, well, *myself* for the lack of a better phrase, but being outside makes it more real. I’m presenting myself, albeit in a controlled fashion (and I have been out and about further as I’ve described before), as a woman. And the lovely thing is it’s not a disguise. In fact it’s the opposite of a disguise; I’m not dressing as a woman to hide the man. I’m dressing in a way that makes me feel much, much happier than the way I am normally. I’m not hiding him, I’m letting her out.

Cindy knows how I feel about this kind of look. She knows that it appeals to me more than I say, so she was generous, and lovely, to allow me to do some shots in the kitchen.

Now, it’s just a room. But for some reason the idea of being me, the real me, the housewife, in the kitchen, just did something I feel very rarely. I felt natural and I felt, again for lack of better words, at home. I worked the oven. I made tea. I tidied up after myself. I made salad. I washed up. I did all the mundane things that mean nothing to most people. but dressed as I was, and feeling like I did, it was magic.

I seriously cannot explain it. For a natural woman those kind of things are chores at best, demeaning at worst. To me they were joyous, an expression of the person I’d love to be, a chance to experience not only the look and the feel, but the mannerisms, behaviours and stereotypical role.

We only did it for ten minutes but inside I wanted to be there forever. The feel of my dress, the sensation of my hands on the cooker, it was all electric.

I’ve talked about fetishes but this was something else. At one point while posing, a little too realistically if I’m being honest, Cindy joked about how I was cooking my husband’s dinner. And she used a male name to describe him. And for an exquisite second it felt real; it felt like I was cooking food for *my* husband. And that moment of pure role-play was like nothing I’ve experienced; it felt like I’d broken through to some inner truth.

Of course, after the ten minutes of posing and wonderful photos we decided it was time to change outfits but it had had such an effect on me. I felt renewed, I felt energised. I had a wonderful warmth inside at the thought and, dare I say it, realisation of just how natural that role felt.

It wasn’t dressing up. In that moment if a man had walked in and asked me, in all honesty, if I would give up my life and be his wife I would not have hesitated. And that realisation is a little stunning, to say the least.

I’ve always kept a firm barrier between him and her; he earns the money, she gets to play occasionally when the time is right (and Covid allows). But this felt different. There was a savage yearning in my heart. It faded at the end of the day, with the three and a half hour drive home and the gradual shift back into the grey normalcy of drab life.

But it has stuck with me. I guess it’s another of those feminine fantasies, waiting for Mr.Right to come along and sweep you away to a life of romance and love. But there was something delightful, something wonderfully warming about those thoughts right then when I was standing on heels, dressed 100% like an adoring housewife in a kitchen.

I’ve found myself looking at this set of pictures a lot more than I normally look at pictures after a session, and every time I do I smile and think of that wonderful single moment when I imagined myself cooking a meal for my husband.

You can blush behind makeup.

Anyway, I hope you enjoy these images as much as I do. They make me smile in a way that’s hard to get off of my face, and after the year we’ve all had that’s a nice sensation for a change.

Stay beautiful and try new things whenever you can; you never know when you might turn over a rock that has been one way up your life to find the underside is much more lovely….