Story:

I was 16 years old when I was having a relaxed conversation and a glass of wine (maybe two, three, let’s not count) with my now sadly deceased mother. All the girls from my circle used to come to my house frequently, and they would all talk about boys. Who liked whom and other classic teenage dramas. My mother had a pretty open, supportive communication with me and with everyone in my circle, so the girls I hung out with often gathered at my place. My mother had a tactic of giving each of us a little wine and getting us to talk about what was happening and share our ‘big’ problems, and she helped us with advice that we definitely needed. It was quite a good tactic to always know everything and have nothing hidden from her. I was the only one avoiding that topic, but that evening my mother caught me with her well-known tactic, and after a few sips of wine, I relaxed and told her why I was the only one not talking about it. After a lot of evasion, I admitted to her that I was in love with a girl. Bjelovar is a small community, and at that not-so-distant time, it wasn’t really desirable to be gay. She was the first person I told, and honestly, I was scared because not even anyone from my circle knew back then. I didn’t know what to expect, but my mother raised her eyebrows, looked at me with an ‘I have an AHA moment’ style and said: ‘Well, why didn’t you say so?’

We spent the rest of the evening laughing while looking at pictures from my childhood, both of us having countless ‘AHA moments’ seeing pictures of me in soccer jerseys, hammering old boards, pretending to shoot from a wooden tomato stake, and so on. From that day on, my mother was always proud of me and supported me, often asking when she would finally ‘have a daughter-in-law.