Dammit!
I'm going to attempt to combine these three topics into one post, and hope that it doesn't end up a a jumbled hot mess:
Day 9: A family member you dislike
Day 10: Something you miss
Day 11: Your feelings on ageism
Ready, set...here we go.
Until recently, I was taking my grandma to church two Sundays a month. I would pick her up in Vancouver, and we'd take 45 minutes to drive south on 205, to St. Johns in Milwaukie, where she has always gone to Sunday mass. We would spend the 30 minutes before mass started at the front door, greeting all of her friends, and then we'd sit in the same pew each week. After church, we would either have donuts and coffee with her friends, or we'd stop by to visit my parents, and then I would take her back home.
While I do not miss getting up early on Sunday mornings to go to church, I do miss spending those hours with my grandma twice a month. I loved the car rides back and forth from Vancouver to Milwaukie because I could always get her to talk about my grandpa - where and how they met, how she always got out of bed to make him dinner when he worked late, the way their 9 kids drove him crazy and she let him hide outside from them to have a cigarette. She was most alert on our way into Milwaukie - she would comment on my driving, or the landscape, always pointing out how many cars were on the road and how many more houses there were these days.
As I write this, I realize I am speaking in past tense, and the logical reader would have to assume that I quit taking my grandma to church because she passed away. But that isn't the case. Instead, after an argument with my aunt (her daughter), my aunt told me I was no longer allowed to come to the house to pick up my grandma. I was also told that my grandma has never loved me, and that pretending to care about me was exhausting her.
Uh huh. That happened.
I think the entire situation is heartbreaking and sad, but the saddest part may just be the way that these people are holding my grandma hostage, not allowing certain people to visit her, feeding her elderly mind full of horse shit about why we aren't around. My grandma is 89 - her memory and alertness is slipping, and sometimes she doesn't know who we are. But I would hope that in this vulnerable, almost child-like state, that the family - even though we hate each other - would be able to put everything aside to care for her and put her first.
But apparently we cannot do that.
My grandma is an elderly woman who can no longer make decisions for herself, and can no longer make her own choice to get in the car and drive somewhere. And sadly, the people in charge of getting her places, providing her a safe place to live, are three people who hate me and won't allow me anywhere near her. I think that's a sad and disturbing abuse of power, quite frankly. And so yesterday, I took a little bit of that power back. We were all at a funeral, and my grandma was seated at a table with my aunts. They got up to get her a plate of food for lunch, and I seized my moment - mind you, I've gone from seeing my grandma every other Sunday, to having not seen her in six months. I all but leaped from my own seat at a table across the room to sit down in the chair next to her while she was momentarily unsupervised (the previous hour, she'd been flanked on either side by one of these bitches, like she needed a body guard from her own family. I sat down and then so did my mom and dad, and we sat with her for the rest of the afternoon, eating lunch, laughing and talking. No one else approached the table even once. I made my power move, because despite the vile garbage they will sling in an email, these women are actually chicken shit bitches when faced with potential confrontation. They won't dare come near me, even to join their own mother for lunch.
I let go of wanting a relationship with any of these people a long time ago, but I will admit that they got to me when they cut off my tie to my grandma. I love my grandma; I remember countless things about being in her house as a kid, playing with my cousins while she pumped us full of ice cream. I have memories of her clothes, her Christmas aprons (which she gave me recently and I have hanging on a hook in my own kitchen, by the way - a clear sign she doesn't love me), her baking dishes. She used to babysit me every Wednesday evening, and she made potatoes a different way every week (I hate potatoes), and she would say, oh just try them, maybe you'll like them this way. I also remember calling her a few years back to tell her a joke that I finally found a way I did like potatoes - in vodka. I miss getting to see her and hang out with her, enjoying her on holidays, spending three hours with her on Sundays.
And I very much dislike the three women in my family who have taken that away from me. For their own selfish and disgusting reasons, they are holding me from my own grandma in what are likely her final years of life. I dislike them for the things they have said about me, about my mom, for the things they believe in their own minds to be true. I dislike that they will read this post because they stalk me on the internet, and that they will probably twist it in a way that makes me the bad guy - though after you tell your niece her grandma doesn't love her, I don't think you get to come back from that.
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