the matriarchy

She's always been a tiny woman. At 98, she seems even tinier, with her shoulders hunched, and her hands idle in her lap.

Those hands raised eight children, and shepherded seven of them across the Atlantic Ocean when the youngest was a baby and the oldest was eight years old. They milked cows and helped with the haying. Those hands could sew the straightest, most beautiful seams - wedding dresses, prom dresses, alterations for customers, dolls with embroidered faces.

She doesn't forget much. She is as aware as a person with dementia can be - sometimes she forgets names or faces, and she's a great one for making things up. In her reality, there is a polluted underwater river, full of chemicals from my sister-in-law's hair salon, running under the house. Well, go big or go home....but for 98, her powers of recall are still amazing, even when interspersed with the fantastic.

She raised her head and looked at me with her bright blue eyes. We were having tea in a nearby restaurant, having momentarily escaped the nursing home. I had already been thoroughly chastised for having been away for so long...but she wasn't finished.

"I am afraid to ask you this..." she says, but do you still have a husband?"

No, I tell her. But I'm okay.

She shakes her head. "Well, people have to do what's best for them I suppose."

I turned my head and muttered to my mother "It's a good thing she doesn't know the whole story." My grandmother is quite deaf...

"Oh, she knows," my mother said.

My eyes widen. "Really?"

My grandmother had been out visiting one of the aunts - and managed, in spite of her apparent deafness, to overhear a conversation that centered around my facebook status on National Coming Out Day. There were a lot of family members in the house at the time, all talking about me. I love being the center of attention, really I do, but I love it better when people talk to me instead of talking about me.

"Well," Oma says "Everyone has something. It's not what I would like, but people have to live their lives and be happy."

First of all - this is the first time that my mother has mentioned anything about my coming out - ever! And we were in public! And she wasn't even in a hurry to change the subject....

Second of all - if I'm out to my 98 year old grandmother, I really am out.