On Me and my Grandmother
I took my boyfriend to the coal region, the land of my youth, on thursday and we promptly left on friday. During that period we met two of the most important people in my life. First my mother.
My mother is insane. Quite insane; when it comes down to the depth of the irrationality that accompanies my mother is such that one could loose islands roughly the size of say manhattan within it. John Mark said she was sweet and most assuredly she is but sweet in the manner that the crazy old woman that every neighborhood has is sweet; provided you have no real attachment to her she is harmless. Moreover you feel upon passing the crazy woman that you are fortunate for having no attachment to her. Well I have an attachment to the crazy woman; she raised me. My mother is and always has been a control freak absoloutly and without exception. When I was a child my greatest joy was reading the numberles books strewn about my room; her method of punishment was to ground me to my room, which was in a basement without windows, and turn the lights off. So I could sit in the dark alone to think about what I had done to earn her wrath. To this day I am uneasy in tight places and am terrified of absoloute darkness. I remember hiding in my room on saturday morning with the lights out pretending to be asleep just to avoid seeing my mother; sometimes I could manage three or four days without coming in contact with her.
We then met my grandmother; she is dying. During our meeting in which it was obvious that John Mark and I were a couple though I did not vocalize it, she told me that i had forgotten her. I did; I had forced my self to, and this entry is my confession as to why I cut myself off from someone I dearly loved. My homelife as a child in case you hadn't noticed was absoloutly miserable as far back as I could remember. I was a smart ass little prick who knew to much said even more and thought about what I said almost never. The result was a succession of groundings that probably ate up about half of the first decade of my life. Before I was eight I was granted respite from the constant terror that was my house by visits to my grandparents house for weeks at a time. Most of the memories of my early childhood are from these visits. Walks with my grandmother, fishing with my grandfather, playing connect four in their kitchen, saying the prayers thand grandma taught me before crawling into bed with my grandpa; all of these things are as vivid as though they were yesterday; then my grandfather died. My visits to Hazleton stopped and i was consigned to a decade of living on top of a mountain in aristes Pennsylvania with my mother. She hated my relationship with my grandmother, I was her favourite and my grandmother is the sort of woman that rewards favourites; she made it clear that if given the choice between her grandchildren she would always choos e me and this rankled my mother conjuring up memories of her own chilhood where she felt she had been slighted by her mother. In righteous anger my mother demanded my grand mother treat all of her grandchildren, or at least all of my mother's children, equally. Grandma did not approve of being told what to do and the feud began.
It has yet to cease.
As a result we did not visit my grandmother and on a very real level the denial of that glimmer of happiness was more terriblee than I could bear, and so I forgot. I made my self forget that there was someone twenty miles north of me that loved me dearly and clung to the memories of happier times erecting them as a shield against the calamitieds of my high school years. An ambient injustice is acceptable as it occurs outside of ones control but a active injustice is a slap in the face and a knife to the heart. I was tired of being stabbed, I was tired of my mother using my affections against me, and so I buried theem as best I knew how. I robbed my mother of her weapon and in so doing spared my own sanity.
High school came and with it mobility but the idea of going to grandma's was untenable. I could not annoy my mother; she was volatile enough to kick me out of the house and I had nowhere to go. I found refuge in Fred but even he was ravaged by my mother's controling nature; she took to grounding me from visiting him or him coming to see me. Then I escaped through work; I got two jobs, went to school and was home only to sleep and was so ashamed at having abandoned my grandmother that I couldn't bear to go see her.
I had left her alone for so long that it was a point of shame for me to show up on her door step because in so doing would have been admiting that I caused another person pain to spare myself it.
My mother told me last week that my grandmother was in the hospital and would probably die soon and I decided that I should see her. The matriarch of my childhood had been worn by a decade and a half of disease and age but still showed the intelligence that I admired her for. Like always she told me what she felt and I tried to respond; most of all I tried to raise up every memory of my childhood I could to shield myself from the grim reality facing me; my grandmother was dying. She claimed she had led a good life and like everything I have ever heard her say she meant it. She was accepting of my homosexuality and told John Mark to take care of me. We parted each of us crying, each of us knowing what had been denied us by our own pride and my mother's insanity.
Pride is something my grandmother taught me. She told me to be proud of my father who worked himself practically to death every day, and my mother who tried even if she did fail miserably. From my granmother I recieved pride in my self and the concept that no one was better than me and that moreover no one was better than anyone else. It is something of a miracle that I am where I am with my mountain of debt, my education, and my life. If I think about it I owe that to my grandmother first. The words she told me that had the most impact wer, "Life is what you make of it Jason, if you are miserable then life will be miserable." For the joy my grandmother gave me I will be grateful to the end of my days, for the things we never had the chance to share I am sorry beyond my capacity to express. She has perhaps a month or two to live and I only pray that the God she has believed in for her entire life recieves her warmly until we meet again.
My mother is insane. Quite insane; when it comes down to the depth of the irrationality that accompanies my mother is such that one could loose islands roughly the size of say manhattan within it. John Mark said she was sweet and most assuredly she is but sweet in the manner that the crazy old woman that every neighborhood has is sweet; provided you have no real attachment to her she is harmless. Moreover you feel upon passing the crazy woman that you are fortunate for having no attachment to her. Well I have an attachment to the crazy woman; she raised me. My mother is and always has been a control freak absoloutly and without exception. When I was a child my greatest joy was reading the numberles books strewn about my room; her method of punishment was to ground me to my room, which was in a basement without windows, and turn the lights off. So I could sit in the dark alone to think about what I had done to earn her wrath. To this day I am uneasy in tight places and am terrified of absoloute darkness. I remember hiding in my room on saturday morning with the lights out pretending to be asleep just to avoid seeing my mother; sometimes I could manage three or four days without coming in contact with her.
We then met my grandmother; she is dying. During our meeting in which it was obvious that John Mark and I were a couple though I did not vocalize it, she told me that i had forgotten her. I did; I had forced my self to, and this entry is my confession as to why I cut myself off from someone I dearly loved. My homelife as a child in case you hadn't noticed was absoloutly miserable as far back as I could remember. I was a smart ass little prick who knew to much said even more and thought about what I said almost never. The result was a succession of groundings that probably ate up about half of the first decade of my life. Before I was eight I was granted respite from the constant terror that was my house by visits to my grandparents house for weeks at a time. Most of the memories of my early childhood are from these visits. Walks with my grandmother, fishing with my grandfather, playing connect four in their kitchen, saying the prayers thand grandma taught me before crawling into bed with my grandpa; all of these things are as vivid as though they were yesterday; then my grandfather died. My visits to Hazleton stopped and i was consigned to a decade of living on top of a mountain in aristes Pennsylvania with my mother. She hated my relationship with my grandmother, I was her favourite and my grandmother is the sort of woman that rewards favourites; she made it clear that if given the choice between her grandchildren she would always choos e me and this rankled my mother conjuring up memories of her own chilhood where she felt she had been slighted by her mother. In righteous anger my mother demanded my grand mother treat all of her grandchildren, or at least all of my mother's children, equally. Grandma did not approve of being told what to do and the feud began.
It has yet to cease.
As a result we did not visit my grandmother and on a very real level the denial of that glimmer of happiness was more terriblee than I could bear, and so I forgot. I made my self forget that there was someone twenty miles north of me that loved me dearly and clung to the memories of happier times erecting them as a shield against the calamitieds of my high school years. An ambient injustice is acceptable as it occurs outside of ones control but a active injustice is a slap in the face and a knife to the heart. I was tired of being stabbed, I was tired of my mother using my affections against me, and so I buried theem as best I knew how. I robbed my mother of her weapon and in so doing spared my own sanity.
High school came and with it mobility but the idea of going to grandma's was untenable. I could not annoy my mother; she was volatile enough to kick me out of the house and I had nowhere to go. I found refuge in Fred but even he was ravaged by my mother's controling nature; she took to grounding me from visiting him or him coming to see me. Then I escaped through work; I got two jobs, went to school and was home only to sleep and was so ashamed at having abandoned my grandmother that I couldn't bear to go see her.
I had left her alone for so long that it was a point of shame for me to show up on her door step because in so doing would have been admiting that I caused another person pain to spare myself it.
My mother told me last week that my grandmother was in the hospital and would probably die soon and I decided that I should see her. The matriarch of my childhood had been worn by a decade and a half of disease and age but still showed the intelligence that I admired her for. Like always she told me what she felt and I tried to respond; most of all I tried to raise up every memory of my childhood I could to shield myself from the grim reality facing me; my grandmother was dying. She claimed she had led a good life and like everything I have ever heard her say she meant it. She was accepting of my homosexuality and told John Mark to take care of me. We parted each of us crying, each of us knowing what had been denied us by our own pride and my mother's insanity.
Pride is something my grandmother taught me. She told me to be proud of my father who worked himself practically to death every day, and my mother who tried even if she did fail miserably. From my granmother I recieved pride in my self and the concept that no one was better than me and that moreover no one was better than anyone else. It is something of a miracle that I am where I am with my mountain of debt, my education, and my life. If I think about it I owe that to my grandmother first. The words she told me that had the most impact wer, "Life is what you make of it Jason, if you are miserable then life will be miserable." For the joy my grandmother gave me I will be grateful to the end of my days, for the things we never had the chance to share I am sorry beyond my capacity to express. She has perhaps a month or two to live and I only pray that the God she has believed in for her entire life recieves her warmly until we meet again.