Trying To Be Understanding

I am off work today but decided to stay home and tend to myself and my house. This evening I called eldest daughter who just today, returned to work for the first time since that evening on July 30th when she went out searching the fields for her father, and discovered him dead under his tipped farm tractor in a remote field out of sight of the main road.

She answered but immediately handed the phone to her boyfriend and told him to tell me what was going on. He was reluctant but relayed what had transpired in regard to his son, who on the second day of school, refused to go because he had stayed up all last night playing video games.

His father apparently told him to go on to school and sleep when he got hom. So the boy called his mother, who does not have custody of him, and begged her to come and get him, and she did ….

This is not what I called to hear but I listened. Then he told me that Janelle had a fairly good day at work and was now eatting a yogurt, that it probably wasn’t a very good time for her to talk.

I told him to let her know I hadn’t called for any detailed information, just to tell her I loved her and was thinking of her.

He relayed that to her and she asked him to pass her the phone.

She said, “I love you too but I don’t want to talk about whatever it is you want to talk about”.

I told her that was okay, I had only wanted to tell her I loved her.

She was very close to her Daddy. Lived in the homestead farmhouse while her father lived 1/2 mile away in a new home he had built on a 12 acre parcel seperate from the farm proper with his 91 year old mother for whom both he and my daughter were caring.

They’ve seen each other daily for the past 7 years since she moved her horses to the farm. They work together just about daily side by side around the farm. Taken their evening meals together most evenings. He was her favortie parent, .. they understood one another almost without a need for words, and my heart simply breaks for her.

But it also hurts my feelings when she so often speaks to me as if I’m a fool who understands nothing at all, as if she views me with a form of … (dare I say it?) … almost contempt.

It’s so reminiscent of her father’s treatment of me during our marriage, I suppoe it should come as no shock to me that holds a similar view of me.

The truth is, there is very little I can do to change anyone else’s opinon of me.