Good News, Bad News

First, the good news:  I feel like writing again, a return to the deep-seated need that used to rip at me till I could sit down at the keyboard, and sometimes made me pull out a legal pad to tide me over until I could get home.

The bad news: I am feeling that old dysphoria as I haven't in several years.

I haven't felt "right" for several months, and I chalked it up to a lack of opportunities to be Leslie (the beginning of August through the beginning of November, to be precise).  That would be enough, really, but the struggles of my daughter have been tearing at the missus and me as well.  All that stress requires an outlet, and I had none, at least not the kind I desired. 

We were in couples counseling this week, for the first time since June (money, you know), and my daughter was the primary subject.  My wife and I disagree about the way to handle her issues, she tending toward hovering and intervention and raised voice, me preferring the occasional nudge or suggestion, but trying to treat her as the proto-adult that she is at 18.  Let her fail and feel the consequences.

The therapist noted that each time my wife described a confrontation with our girl, I was making pained faces (quite unconsciously).  She wondered if it was related to my reasons for defending my daughter.  I said that I feel a deep sympathy for her struggles with anxiety and the paralysis caused by it.  That I want to help her, but I feel completely unconnected to her.  I said that I want to talk to her about my own history of anxiety, as well the underlying reason for it, which I have been forbidden to discuss with her.  My wife then said that she has been reconsidering that rule recently, wondering if it the potential positives might now outweigh her fears. Didn't see that coming.

I also realized that my own discomfort with my wife's methods with my daughter are close to home. Her tone, her language, take me back to the awful conflicts we had when my gender issues started spinning out of control.  She would talk at me, and made me feel the size of a garden gnome, and just as communicative.  I would get lost in my own head, considering a hundred things to say and rejecting all of them, settling for a pained silence in a sad attempt at damage control.  Don't say anything that might make it worse.

My wife's heart is in the right place, honestly, with my daughter.  She is worried that flunking out of college now will stop her education for good, and doom her to lesser jobs forever.  Could be right, but she is truly not ready for the rigors of higher education at the moment.  The transition has been too much for her.  I think we need to back off and let the chips fall.  She will learn much more through failing than she will by our not allowing her to fail. 

The main point of all this, though, is that I am contemplating a long, odd talk with my daughter.