A LETTER FROM MY 18-YEAR-OLD SELF TO MY GRANDFATHER.

Dear Grandad,

I remember sitting in your lounge room telling the story of how my cousin rang Nana up to ask her with help to cook something. My Aunty then rang you and asked you not to help him, with her logic being that he was a boy and boys shouldn’t cook.

Here’s something that you didn’t know. When I was 10, I went on a tour of the high school that let me down, and my mother said, “Don’t you dare talk about wanting to do Home Economics unless you want to have an operation to be a girl.” I know that you used to cook bacon and eggs.

The illusion that my mother attempted to create around my brother and I was that we were similar, when nothing could be further from the truth. I wish that you had spoken up for me when I was 12–13, and my brother wanted to play cricket when we came to visit in the summer and football in the winter and I was always SENT off by her to be with him and was forced to mask. I wish that on December 20, 1987, when my brother had hassled for cricket and then, no sooner had he finished his lunch when my brother asked my mother if he could go for a ride on one of the bikes in the shed and she said he could and sent me out there with him that you had stood up and said to her, “Look, you don’t come here that often, but every time you do, Peter’s brother wants to play sport and play around and you send Peter off with him. Peter hates sport, he told me so; he wants to sit in here and talk with us. It’s not fair that you keep sending him off with his brother. We’re not the “children should be seen and not heard type. And also, Peter is an adolescent now and wants us to see that. Forcing Peter to go down to a younger level is not fair.”

Better still, it would have been good if you had said to my father when I was that age, “Look, why don’t just you and Peter come out to visit us and leave Peter’s brother and mother at home?” That might sound harsh, but my visits to you always entailed having to do what my brother wanted, not what I wanted. Also, it would have been good if you had allowed some of my father’s siblings to come out, as then you could have said to Peter’s brother, “Okay, you want to play cricket? You can go and play with those cousins who want to play. Peter and his kindred spirit cousin can sit and talk instead.”

Love Always,

Peter.