rubyluby
You can't blame your relatives for trying to hide things from you when you were little. I learned this after I had a child of my own. There are just some things that a child shouldn't hear; shouldn't know about, shouldn't be told. What you forget is that they find out so many things all on their own; you forget how important you are to them and how curious they can be. They want to know everything; they take your emotional temperature too, all the time. A certain frown, or if you're staring out the window because you're trying to figure something out. Or if you lower your voice when you're on the phone because something terrible has happened and you don't want them to here. When I was little, there were extension phones in the house (if you had a little money) and if you were really tricky, you could pick up the phone extension to listen in to what was happening. Cell phones have made spying on your parents harder in that respect, though there are new ways, as I learned not long ago, for kids to find out things about their parents that they shouldn't know. When they become adults, they believe they were misled or lied to. But it's protection, that's really what it is. That impossible thing that you can never really offer your children but spend your entire life trying to do for them.
From our house, you can't see the rooftops of other houses because ours is pretty low to the ground. But one time, a friend of mine told me that when you're really rich, you can see the tops of everyone's houses almost in the whole world. She showed me a picture of a place that's in New York City, a place where someone really rich lives. This person has a balcony, and if you stand there, you can look over all of New York and see everything there is to see. You see the tops of the trees and the sky, and the other buildings where people who don't have as much money as you do live. The ones who are rich, but not as rich as you, have places near to the height of you, but not really. I was thinking how much it must bother them to be so rich, they can see all the things they do. But not rich enough to be higher up than everyone else. You think about these people and wonder what would ever make them happy. And you hope that you never become like them. If you're lucky, you don't. That's what I think. But some people think that if if you're lucky, you do. They have a lot to learn, don't you think?