There had been fights about that, too. But they had found a way in which they truly shared everything and Tina stopped mothering Bette and finally saw she was her equal, that their age difference wasn’t a problem if she didn’t make a problem out of it. At first, it had felt strange to confide in someone ten years younger with the expectation that they would be able to offer advice, but every time she was reminded of how wise Bette was for a person her age. She was nothing like her peers – well, of course there were more people like her at Yale’s art department, but still. Just like Tina, she had been confronted with difference from a very young age. Bette had been even younger. She grew up as a biracial female and even though it was claimed that racism and gender inequality have been behind us for years, Bette had experienced first hand that that wasn’t necessarily true. Sure enough, it was politcally correct to support the idea of equality, but it didn’t mean that everyone had undergone a change in mentality.

In her teenage years, after having suffered abuse from her father in the form of neglection and seeing how her mother experienced the same but wasn’t unable to do anything about it, her sexual identity had come on top of that. It was horrible for little Bette to see how her mother, who was an adult and thereby supposed to be strong enough to oppose her husband, wasn’t able to stop him. It left her without any hope that this would ever get better. Her mother had known that she would never marry a man, that she didn’t feel attracted to the other sex, but she had never told her father. He had found out on that faitful day when he ‘busted’ his daughter in bed with her girlfriend who had so much patience with her, who had done so much more for his daughter’s entitled self-confidence than him in the past seventeen years. He had kicked his own daughter out, just like he had kicked his own wife out of life, just because they weren’t perfect as he regarded himself to be. He had even blamed his wife for giving him a handicapped daughter. He blamed his wife’s genes for that ‘terrible mistake of nature’.