In October of last year, I planned on making the trip to see her in December, for Xmas and New Years (yeah I know, different dates there). I had done real well by her so far, especially for her 34th birthday sending flowers, cake, kids toys, etc... I wasn't ridiculous, just relatively conservative and reasonable in sending what I did then. Because of the english problem, I also paid for her first english lessons, which she would attend every Saturday and Sunday through December. I think the first part cost me $100.
Well, as it turned out, a real screw-ball situation happened here in the beginning of December, and I had to cancel the trip for the time being. Man.... you have no idea how I felt about this. Like the biggest horses asz on the planet. It took me three days just to figure out how to tell her after leading her up to this for the last 2 months. Dam. Fortunately for me she read through the lines and could read me like a book the previous week... and knew that something was up. When I finally said the heck with it and told her in email, she wrote back that she already knew. My heart sank.
This wasn't the only time she had read me. Maybe I sub-consciously knew that she could, and I allowed enough attitude to leak through in email that she could do this on her own... Lena carried on with New Years and Christmas and went on a skiing vacation with one of her old school friends. I was quite disappointed with myself, and extremely lonely during the holidays, but I also discovered that she was too.... which was comforting that we shared the same sentiments.
I sent her an extra 150.00 for Christmas. Which was like her getting an entire extra paycheck for the month... Ok, so what. I spent $150 last month on two tires for my car. If I had an AW, knowing what I know now, I would have gotten a very disappointing look for such a cheap Christmas gift. I had no one else to give anything to anyway. It helped to ease the guilt of not being able to go, and also allowed her to go off and have some fun, buy some presents for her family and her son Mark, (even though giving presents for Xmas isn't really a thing to do there like it is here). Stranger still, Lena asked me what I thought of her use of "my" money, for buying Mark a new winter coat and shoes (??). All I could say was that I was happy she did this and that I gave it to her, and it wasn't mine... but maybe if she could consider this money "ours", then it would be easier to understand.
During this time, I had also become great friends with my interpreter too. I needed someone to talk to during the rough (and really screwed up) times of this long distance relationship, so she became my shoulder to lean on. Heh heh... My anger, and real frustration though, is splattered all around this board somewhere in the archives. Hopefully most of those posts have rolled off of the press by now. Funny. I appreciated my interpreter so much that I sent her a 150.00 gift for christmas too. Just for the hell of it. She was shocked, and I laughed. No big deal. You can't buy friends, and she had already become a very close one and had kept me a couple of times from emotional self-destruction simply because I was overly concerned about problems that never existed.... but were created because of the language differences and interpretation. (I discovered the hard way, even up to the week we were first together, that language differences can create phantom "monsters").
Continued...
