She worried me.
She worried me and my wife, and from what I remember of her adoptive parents, she worried them, but most people seemed to like her, especially those who went on that school trip I once took with her. to South Dakota, to: The Bad Lands, Black Hills, and Mount Rushmore. Her adoptive mother and her father led some of the children on that trip to this rural district of Minnesota, where my granddaughter, Maria-Lee, lived (I had remarried, so Maria was not related to me). new wife).
She treated her adoptive parents like servants of some old southern town, before the advent of the Civil War, in the 1860s. I didn’t like that and I confronted her about it, but she felt no guilt about that confrontation: ” Why didn’t you tell me you didn’t like the way I act before?” It was all she could say.
I was one of those grandparents who lived quite far from her, in the city of St. Paul. However, it so happened that I didn’t stick around to be scolded by a thirteen-year-old, saying, “If you can’t respect your adoptive parents and it seems like you want to negatively confront me about this, how do you expect this to turn out between us?” I added to That, in a nutshell: I’m not the kind of person who’s going to take all your crap in. And to be honest, I think she was pretty happy that I didn’t get involved with her control issue with her adoptive parents.
I didn’t really have anything more to say about it, but I did have a secret, something that was bothering her, and perhaps to a slight degree, me. Something that really worried her a lot, something that she was afraid to tell anyone, even me, she couldn’t imagine what it was, and she couldn’t imagine what my reaction would be, it was something so strange that she had no one to tell her she didn’t know. worry. If she had asked me, is that what she would have said?
I had never really heard of anyone having a problem like the one that worried Maria at her age. On the one hand, it seemed silly to me when I found out; on the other hand…
I wanted to tell her that her secret was nothing to be mad at me about. Because she had no magical powers to make her any different from what she thought she was, or how she thought she lived, not after she was an adult anyway. He could have been for her, a serious-minded adult, one who could compel her to propose and regain her lost femininity if she really wanted to, but she wouldn’t and couldn’t. In short, she was angry from the age I met her, at thirteen, and when she called me when she was sixteen she was still angry, and when she called my wife when she was an adult and said what was her secret, she was still annoyed. Maybe she had a wish, I had a wish, and who could make wishes come true? Would she accept her as she was her? I was too angry to deal with her.
Not even card tricks could make him any less angry, and then again, there was no magic that I knew of other than time to allow this anger to sink into some deep sink and die, but it was hard to tell when and if it would. would do.
Now, about this desire and secret… of hers, which I’m sure worried her from morning to night: it was nothing she could clarify and ask me, obviously, but she told my wife when she called her. It required the right timing and a carefully prepared moment. She rarely called me and she didn’t want to disrespect me anymore. But when she did, I listened to my wife, what she had to say about what she Maria had to say and how she had said what she said. And it was not a delicate moment; again the thick, ugly anger came out of her, trying to catch my ear.
We never spoke after that last conversation when she was sixteen, at least not verbally. She was too stupid and I was too nervous. Yes, nervous. It was something I felt in me, powerful, just like the stupidity I carried on this subject.
However, she saw something in me, a desire. So she tried to contact me in South America, and she lowered her anger and rolled up her sleeves, eyes and heart elsewhere, and said, “I want to start a new relationship with you (inferring that she was sorry, and that must repair all wounds and wounds and so on).” She didn’t call me Grandpa, but by my first name, which was the first disrespect I noticed. I was to her what I always was to her, a brief visit, curiosity, homeblood.
When I think of her, the moist winds of the old Mississippi River creep deep and seep deep into my bones, they are no longer for an innocent girl.
I love her, and she wanted to love me, but she loved beyond me, so I kept my distance, while she behaved nonchalantly. She felt it, but she never reasoned what caused my coldness; It wasn’t how she thought, and so I told her, the last time we talked on the computer: I never cared one way or the other if she was gay, I did care if you were angry and disrespectful, she wanted respect, she just didn’t I could give it, I didn’t mind walking on eggshells with anyone, including her, life is too short for that. Why be surrounded by people who make you unhappy? It doesn’t make sense, they use you, they drain you, and then they proudly walk away like a bear that just sucked all the honey out of the hive.
‘Really,’ he thought. Perhaps thinking, this is all a bit funny. It seemed to me a very dry subject: her lesbianism.
I told her, “If you’re happy where you are in life (knowing it must have been hard for her), I can’t help in that area, I don’t know how, all I could do is accept. I’m fine, and I’m fine with you. Everything goes smoothly.” But of course I wouldn’t have wanted her to bring her lover, that maybe could have been another problem, but one that could have been resolved later.
I said, “I’m sorry things didn’t work out better for us, but why do you want to be in a relationship with an old man now?” She really didn’t have an answer.
What was there to say? How to explain that during all the years that I waited for her to accept me for me, I had already accepted her and her secret, the one that she never told me until she came of age, apart from the lack of respect towards me and her friends? adoptive parents? . And so we stay silent, and maybe that’s for the best, no one gets hurt that way, especially if it’s a one-way street.
Dedicated to Maria… (Granddaughter) 22-5-2009