A Matter of Unimportance

4. Boy

When my grandfather Benjamin said that to me, I was patient enough to wait until I got home before inquiring.

I asked her, "Why did he say I looked like a girl?"

I wasn't offended. My mother hadn't ever allowed me to believe that being called a girl was an insult. I simply wanted to know.

"Because he... my dads the type of person who believes things ought to look a certain way," she explained to me. "And we just don't live like that."

"Is he the only one that believes that?" I replied.

"No," she said. "No, he isn't the only one."

"Do you think I look like a girl?" I asked.

She'd looked at me the way she always looked at me, with love and adoration for everything that made me hers.

"I think you look like my Darling," she said informed me with all the warmth in the world. "And I don't need you to be anything else."

So from there forward we saw her father periodically and he sometimes made comments about me, the way she let me dress and the way I wore my hair and even the color of my complexion, and she never let him make me feel any sort of way about it. She just said, "I love Darling just the way he is."

It was easy to ignore comments from a bitter old man when she was standing right there giving me a look of absolute non concern about it. My mother was my best friend. I didn't know many people my own age, but I had her. She and I had a language that was completely non verbal between the two of us. We shared knowing looks and had conversations without ever saying a word.

It was as if she were saying, get a load of this old guy. He's totally out of touch.

And I was looking back and saying, he just doesn't get it, does he?

In that way, Grandfather Benjamin wasn't doing any harm. It was clear that he still cared for my mom, even if I was a clear lapse of judgment in his eyes. All you had to do was consider the fact that he stayed there in Portland instead of enacting his plans of moving back to Europe. He had no reason to stay, except for her. He received her letters and stewed in disappointment for 5 years without speaking to her, but he still wouldn't leave.

He spent lots of time trying to convince her that they would move too. As soon as the three of us would gather, he'd talk about going back again. As if no time had passed at all. He was pleased that she'd gone to school too, even though he found her subject innately idiotic (He thought the fact that I was homeschooled was idiotic as well, but that was a whole other discussion). He really believed there was hope for them.

So that was our life. I was a wild and free homeschool student. My father was cordial, but essentially absent. My mom was my best friend and possibly the most beautiful and inspiring person I'd ever know. I was voraciously in love with our tiny little apartment and our gleefully happy life together.

Then one year after she started her job with the environmental agency, she found a lump on her breast.

The both of us had finally gotten health insurance that year. I was 11. Until then I'd been getting my shots at a free pop up clinic and she'd simply gone without care. We'd both had our check ups together earlier that year, so the lump was an obvious surprise. It had come out of nowhere. Considering how her mother had passed, something I was already aware of at that point, the lump was a huge concern.

She scheduled an appointment immediately. I went with her to the woman's clinic and received odd looks from women in the waiting room for being the only male presenting person there. My mom told me that there was nothing to worry about with a look on her face that spoke to me in our unspoken language, calling her a liar.