“I decided I had to tell my family. I was old enough. I was 30 something…I’m not a teenager and I’m supposed to know what I’m doing…but at the time you don’t know what you’re doing. My mum lives in Montreal so I had to write her a letter. I just wrote it, in a blink of an eye…it took half and hour. I was lean with what I said. I felt I’d jumped from a plane with no parachute when I sent it. That’s how I felt…it was too big, too confusing, not knowing what to expect, not knowing how they will take it. Maybe she knew? I’m been struggling with this so long…had made my choice to live my life…and if she accepted it or not it wouldn’t change the way I’d decided to live my life. So she called me immediately and she said, and it’s such a cliche I have read so many times, “You’re my daughter and I love you and that’s never going to change but don’t ask me to accept that from you”. They think they are doing it right but actually they are doing it wrong. Though we have a very ‘polite’ relationship, it’s frustrating at the same time. I don’t want to be accepted. I want to feel normal, natural about this. I don’t want this to be struggle for her…because it makes me too uncomfortable. It’s been like that since then, almost 5 years.
We don’t talk about it. Not at all. I came out the closet then she got into it.”