Re: momness & dadness
21Our daughter has been going through a lot this year. She's always struggled with body image; mom, younger bros and older sister are all lean and fairly naturally athletic, whereas she is built bigger and really has to work at things that take coordination and quick response. She opted not to play hockey this year, maybe in part due to coming to the conclusion that she didn't have to follow in her siblings' footsteps. But she's also really withdrawn from any of the activities she was involved in prior. Her social circle seems to be closing off. She's really struggled with anxiety this year, much more than before. She's been stick-and-poke tatting herself, intermittently cutting, and torpedoing her success opportunities. Top top it off (rather, at the root of it, really), she is struggling with gender identity. At first, she was convinced that she was non hetero. From there, it sort of steamrollered into dressing more "boyish", for lack of a better term. She cut off all her hair, did away with much of her girl clothes, and sort of embraced a butch aesthetic. At this point, her therapist is trying to reinforce the notion that gender identity issues are issues that people struggle with and work through for many years. Her impulsivity right now is really high and largely uncontained, such that we've had to really, REALLY work at suicide-proofing the home. She's resourceful and unrelenting when it really comes to something she's motivated for, which scares the living fuck out of me, because it's every parent's worst nightmare. Like, more than just "Ok, better take all the guns out of the locker and take them to a secure undisclosed location", it's "holy xrist, do we need to hide the knives, and all our belts and shoelaces and nylon ropes and bungee straps and drywall saws and jeezuz what else". Needless to say, we're at a point of constant supervision with middle-of-the-night room checks. It's this current state of impulsivity that makes me question the authenticity of her gender identity issues. Her therapist agrees. Is this truly a matter of being a boy instead of a girl, or is it more rebellion de jour and a teenager being heavily influenced by ever-present inescapable fucking social media? At least she's still susceptible to reverse psychology; she had a notebook with sketches of stick-and-pokes she was planning to do, and one of them was the Black Flag bars, to which I said, "Cool!", and showed her mine on my right shoulder from eons ago. That put the kibosh on that, luckily.
