Some amplification re my nieces

Kea -- Thanks for your kind response and welcome.

The mention of my nieces prompts me to write a little about that situation here since I can talk about it nowhere else really (aside from my own journaling).

At the time of my involuntary "outing" to my wife and some of my family, my oldest niece was 9 (the day it happened was her 9th birthday, a purely coincidental occurrence, but sad to me nonetheless) and the other one was only about 2 or 3, so I never had developed the very close relationship with her as with the older one. During the previous few months prior to my outing, I was living once again near my family because I was separated from my wife (we had lived several hundred miles away), and I was able to develop a wonderfully close emotional bond with my precious niece. We often went on special outings (ah, a pun!) together -- movies, fast-food places with playgrounds, or whatever. It was a chief delight of my life at the time.

Fast-forward to the present: once more, several years later, I am living near my family. My niece is now 13 and still as wonderful as she ever was. We still have that special connection to each other, but I am reticent to be openly engaged with her as I once was for fear of tripping some alarm wire with my sister or her husband and having them assume I'm up to no good (which was never the case anyway, of course).

The ultimate sadness is that my niece has perceived the change in my interactions with her. Several times she has suggested, asked and hinted that she would love to do something special -- just her and me -- like we used to. I am tormented that I can't respond in the way I'd love to, but have to sort of just be evasive about it. My own fear is that she will automatically (as children do) believe that the reason I no longer spend time with her the way I once did is because I don't want to be around her, or that somehow I don't love her, or that there is something wrong with *her*.

I know that when she is older, I can explain things to her that I can't now, but by then the damage is perhaps done, and we can never recapture the lost magic of her childhood and my positive place in it.

That prompts a thought: isn't it sad that, far from being in any real danger from me as a GL, as her parents might fear, the real damage in this situation comes from the unfortunate fact that I am not able to be as involved in her life as I would like to be, and that she would like me to be? Talk about the cure being worse than the ailment! Misguided attempts to protect a child from some perceived danger is actually creating a potential problem that is just as harmful (i.e., my niece perceiving my distance as rejection in some form).

This situation grieves me to no end, but I am thankful for the interactions with my nieces that I do have, and they are probably about as much as most relatives have with their nieces/nephews. I am still able to be around them (that was never even an issue; only being able to go places alone with my niece was curtailed, and that was just something I did after being "outed", never something her parents actually issued a proclamation about), and enjoy those times to the full.

Another lengthy post I hadn't anticipated when coming to the board today. Thanks for letting me get some of these feelings out here.

Outcast1