Just had an evening of three-way melodrama from my children, and I'm in need of calming advice.
Child 1 (11, Asperger's) has been off school with a cold, draped in exhausted attitudes over the armchair declaring that he's Far Too Tired to move, shrieking 'My nose! My nose! Aaargh! It's SORE!' every time he needs to blow it.
Child 2 (5, accident-prone) decides to entertain him by attempting star jumps from the sofa, lands badly, and wails that she's 'brokened all her foot bones'. Just as sobs are reducing, Child 3 (8, boy) arrives downstairs wearing his sister's newish party frock (not for the first time). Outraged sister bursts into fresh tears of fury because he hasn't asked her permission. Child 3 bursts into terrible anguished sobs and says the frock is his, really, because it used to belong to his (female) friend. Child 1 screams that the noise is making his head explode!
Pretty normal for our house, really, but the middle child's behaviour worries me. It's not the cross-dressing itself, exactly; he's always had a penchant for silky material, and I've tended not to make a big thing of it, though some of his friends found out and unsurprisingly teased him rotten about it. It's degree of desperation he seemed to feel about it. He's a darling, but not happy in his own skin at the moment -- very jumpy, tearful, hair-trigger temper. Gay child starting to realise it? Attention-seeking middle child? Obsessive compulsive tendencies (been there, got the t-shirt with DS1)? Or has he just got an over-anxious, over-analysing sort of mother?
I shall go and give him an extra cuddle and come back to this thread later -- congrats to anyone who got this far.