The Truth Comes Out

The more I talked to NeverTooLate, the more information would come out.  Sometimes she’d flat of tell me things, other times she’d be reluctant, and other times I’d have to read between the lines.  Some of her emails were more like confessionals.  It was a bit odd at times to feel like I was her diary in a sense.

I also started to learn a bit more about what happened when I was born. Because NeverTooLate was the one telling me everything, I saw the whole thing from her eyes, and to be honest, I didn’t always like the picture she painted. It seemed to me like NeverTooLate forgot who she was talking to at times. She would tell me with no apologies that she felt like her life was ruined. When I sent her a message on Mother’s Day thanking her for giving birth to me, she wrote back that she had never before felt validated as a mother before she started talking to me. At first I thought it was sweet, but then I reread the message and it came across as her blaming me for having those feelings.

She told me a month later that she felt she would lose her job if her boss found out. She works for the church and didn’t tell them she had a child out of wedlock. She was afraid that they would fire her from the job she needed and was starting to love if people found out that she was talking to me. She used this as an excuse to not tell SinginInTheRain. I didn’t see how the two were linked, but she couldn’t really explain well through email.
I started to feel like she was treating me as her confident because I was the only other person in the world who knew she was talking to me. The lines were a bit blurry for her, probably because she had never really dealt with her feelings. While it explained a lot to me, it was still hurtful to hear in the blunt manner she was telling me. Sometimes I wished she would just keep those details to herself, or reread her emails before she hit send. I know I would read mine through three times to make sure the tone was ok, but clearly she wasn’t doing that for me.

However, I was afraid of saying the wrong thing and that I would scare away NeverTooLate if I brought any of this up with her. I made what I see now as a huge mistake in not being honest with her and telling her how I felt. So by the end of the summer, I was still without a phone call, feeling hurt for all the blame that seemed to be piling up on me, and wondering how this mess was ever going to be resolved.