I have just had a wonderful Christmas week with both of my children, yesterday I had to take them down the road so they could go or a week with my ex and have a 2nd Christmas, our agreement was to alternate the holidays and she had Christmas last year.

I am awake again after less than 4 hrs sleep due to a nightmare in which male me was out walking with my mum and we discouraged two kids out playing on their own from going into an abandoned property with broken windows, in my dream the owner appeared in a car just as we were walking away and I was informed by a colleague that he was looking for me and was extremely upset. In my dream I had to track this person down, interrupt a family bbq and explain that while I didn't know the kids I could assure him that my mum who walks with 2 sticks and myself had no intention of doing any B&E on his empty property and were merely trying to stop the youngsters from getting into trouble because at that age all empty buildings either contain treasure or are used by smugglers and pirates.  I have no idea how it went but the guy was livid or I would not have gone looking for him and  I hate confrontation.

Either the dream is due to too much caffeine consumed yesterday and interrupting my sleep cycles or it could be due to not having the kids. I was going to try and fit some Dee time in but my mum who was here for Christmas IRL decided to stay an extra day or two and now it is just us I am considering trying to broach the subject about seeing a therapist to help me unravel my gender issue, you know the fact that while I walk and talk like a man I feel and respond like a woman. I put it off last year and still kind of want to avoid it, my mum has a thing about tidying up whenever she visits one of us children's houses and I was paranoid for the time I was away that she would attempt to help me out by doing my laundry and discovering my Dee wardrobe. (she hadn't, instead she had gone through my hallway cupboard to create bedding sets of duvet covers and pillows)

To top it all off my niece and my two older sisters have told me how worried they are about my daughter, she chose to live with her mum but according to her she is miserable and feeling isolated and often left alone for hrs at a time. I leave my son for a could of hrs for meetings but apparently at least one night a week she is on her own from when she gets in from school until 11 or so at night while her mum is out, I have told my daughter many times that I would love to have her live with me and that I would collect her anytime if she wanted to come back. The children chose who they wanted to stay with when my ex-wife left and neither hesitated. Of the two of us I am the more maternal and have done more of the actual child raising, my daughter tells me she is happy where she is, she loves her mum and misses her when she is not there, the divorce has us both providing full time childcare for each of our children and unlimited access to the other. I can only go by what my daughter tells me but it breaks my heart to think that she might be staying with her mum out of duty - she has already taken to calling the new man step dad and his teenage daughters her stepsisters while my son insists that they are all just his mums friends and raises a fuss when he is with her because in his mind she is trying to replace him with her new mans girls the same way she replaced me with the new man. Autism logic in my son is simple to understand and really hard to deal with - I have to constantly tell him to be nice, kind and respectful to both my ex and her new partner and his kids simply because he can be so nasty about them.

I know that overall my kids are loved by both parents - I struggle with the idea that there is a chance that my daughter and I will end up going through puberty together, I do not want to be an embarrassment to my children.

I don't know; I have been floundering around for a year now and do not seem to be much further forward, accepting myself is still an almost daily battle. Then when my family respond to something I say with, "that is such a bloke thing to say", or when I was talking about how my ex only gets on with one of her parents at a time my sister said, "that's just like (our B.P.D) mum, they do say that sons look to marry their mothers", they were quips and not meant to be hurtful but they make me feel like I am just a man (which I physically am) pretending at being a woman by simply dressing up (which I do).

Why is all of this such a minefield? Maybe now I've emptied my brain I can get a couple of hrs rest!