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Welcome back, my friends, to the show that never ends...

As always, I am composing this in a corner of the basement, home to our Dell.  The Closer is playing on the TV, the missus is snoring intermittently in the recliner facing the TV.  I find the noise distracting, but turning off the television frequently wakes her, and I want to get this done without interruption.

Since I am silently communicating near a full chair, why not steal a cinematic trope from the Eastwood files?

The Good:  Earlier this week, we finally tied up a bunch of legal stuff.  We now have wills, advanced medical directives, and a special needs trust for my eldest.  This has been nagging at us for the twenty years that we have had heirs, and it is truly a relief to have this off the table.  All grown up, right?  Yeah, sure.

The Bad:  The basement is no longer my refuge.  Our only cable connection is down here, and the missus falls asleep here every night.  The long implied, and more recently explicit, ceding of this space to me as a private haven is gone.  My resentment is growing daily.  Last week, I snapped at her about turning the TV back on while I was attempting to listen to a podcast.  Why do you get to decide that your slumber entertainment trumps my waking pastimes?  I was chapped, for sure, but the reason was a canard. 

I was actually upset about two things.  One, my sanctuary has been taken from me.  Two, next month it will one year since we shared any real intimacy.  We haven't spoken about either issue, at all.  I don't know if she is bothered about the latter.  I think she is oblivious about the former.  I almost~~almost~~broached the subject before she left for therapy last week.  I wanted to apologize for my outburst, and calmly share the real issues that were lurking beneath it.  And I couldn't do it.  Close only counts in dancing and hand grenades, and we are doing neither.

The Ugly:  My funk, my pink fog, is deepening.  I desperately want to change into a skirt and heels as I write, and that's with her in the room.  I am reaching the point where I don't care whether she sees something that she can't unsee.  This nasty bit of passive aggression would be much easier than actually having a frank talk with her, and far more destructive.  What makes me see this as a solution?  What prompts me to lash out like this, when constructive solutions are at hand?  I think I know what I need to discuss in therapy next Tuesday.

After a couple of pretty sane years, I can feel the walls closing in on me again.  I am thinking about my gender much more in the last month than I have for a great while.  It feels like I'm going back to that awful place I was in fall 2007.  I can't imagine that it could be that bad again, but it worries me anyway.  After such a long time of not pushing the envelope with my wife, over two years, I fear that I am going to feel the need to stretch Leslie out again.  My marriage won't withstand that, I believe.  I feel powerless to do anything about it.

Memory Lane Is a Slum

Earlier, I took a trip down memory lane unexpectedly.

I got a call from the missus in the afternoon.  It seems that my boy, just turned 14, had an incident at school that could be classified as bullying.  He was being actively shunned during assigned group work in science.  Maybe that doesn't sound awful, but he was distressed, and he spoke to his teacher about it after class.  Without giving her the details, he asked her if she ever felt that it wouldn't make any difference if she wasn't there.  She didn't give an enlightened response. 

When he came out to the car minutes later, he prefaced his tale by telling his mother that "I'm not suicidal, but...".

After hearing this story, my own mind spun back to dark corridors of my time in middle and high school.  I've touched on this in my earliest posts, but this was more visceral.  I just don't want to think that my boy is going to go through the same wringer that I did.  Normally, I remember only the incidents at school, the situations.  This time, I was reintroduced to the pangs of dread, the aching loneliness, the vulnerability and isolation.  Popular kids would have nothing to do with me, literally looking down their noses at me (and that's difficult when I am 6'2").  I was a homely, mumbling, slouching shell of a person.

I knew that I was different, and I was convinced that I was transparent in my differentness.  Surely, my inner weirdness must be visible to all.  How else to explain the treatment?  I have often wondered if the gender issues made me hide from the world even as I walked through it, or if my outsider status made me long to be different.  And what could be more different than being a girl?

My boy is sweet-natured, kind to people and animals, and he has the looks that I never had.  He will be a heartbreaker.  Yet, his peers insist on othering him.  He is socially awkward, though less than I was.  In short, he is vulnerable.  He wants to belong.  He wants to be appreciated for his brains and wit.  He is, largely, like his father.  He has shown no signs of having the gender issues that I have, and I truly believe that I would recognize them.  He has less guile than I did, tending toward truth-telling even to his detriment.

So, I need to talk to him about being on the outside.  Without going into the "whys", I will tell him about my own experience.  And I will let him know that he can ask me anything, tell me anything, and be confident that I will still love him.  He needs someone that understands his situation, and I have to be that someone.