Tuesday, December 23 2003

I took couple of days off from work over Christmas and New Year. I have time now for myself but mostly I don't feel like doing much at all. It's fairly cold outside although dry but they are predicting rain all the way from Christmas to New Year so I don't think we will go anywhere outside if it's going to rain. Nikki is ice skating with her friends all day and she comes here in the afternoon to spend few hours with me before going back home. She sometimes brings her friends with her so we often don't have time to ourselves but it's fun looking after the girls. I usually make some snacks for them and they play on the computer and listen to their music.

There are actually two books I bought for Nikki but one of them she asked me for so it's not a secret present for her. That one is a lesbian book called The Adventures of a Lesbian College School Girl by Petra Waldron. It also has drawings so I think she'll enjoy reading it. We might even read it together on New Year's eve. I was considering buying her a different book called School Life in Paris which is about a schoolgirl who is taught how to be a lesbian in all girls school. I like that one very much but I chose the other one because it has illustrations in it so she might find it more interesting. They are both erotic books. I could still buy her the School Life in Paris some other time. The other book, her Christmas present, is a fantasy book called Lyra's Oxford by Philip Pullman. She read his other books in this series so I thought she would enjoy this new one as well. The girly hair things I bought her are just pearls and beads for her hair so she can look like a little hippie girl. That's what she likes to wear and I like braiding her hair with it.

Someone told me it might be good for Nikki to know she could be bisexual but I don't see how it would be helpful for her to call herself that. I'm sure she knows about bisexuality but I don't think it's good to attach labels to people because everyone is different and in the end the label will not help her find herself. She knows that girls can love other girls or boys or both. We talked about it many times before and I don't think she's confused about who she can fall in love with but rather who she actually finds attractive right now. I think identifying oneself with common labels can become even more confusing for a young person than it already is because then they are expected to live up to that label. If she's free of all that, she could one day love a girl and feel like a lesbian and another day fall for a boy and feel completely different. A lot of people are expecting her to be either gay or straight and that's very wrong so why should she then go along with what everyone expects her to be and continue this stereotype.

I'm not pushing Nikki away from me. It's not my intention and I'm sure it's not what she would want right now. We are still very close but I'm afraid that she will not discover other things outside our relationship. It's true her friends are having crushes on her because she's became very pretty. She was always cute but she changed a lot too and boys in her school are even asking her out. She takes time now to look after herself and her clothes and is not so tomboyish as she used to be. She's never been out on a date yet and is not very much interested in boys that I know of, but when I talk with her about it, she sometimes says some of them are cute. I don't know if her girlfriends have crushes on her too. She only giggles when I ask her about it. But what I meant is, she is now at that age when she should be learning how to make new friendships with her peers and have first crushes on them and first dates. I'm afraid that if she never experiences this part of growing up, she might be affected somehow or miss on things that are important part of her childhood. It's very confusing sometimes.

I should go now because Nikki came home and she is looking over my shoulder and asking me to let her play on the computer.