I guess it’s time to talk about Linda
Linda is my grandmother. My mom’s mom. She’s the eldest of five children; her mother had her when she was twenty, and she had my mom when she was twenty, which is far too young to have a kid, if you ask me. I know she had a hard life-- a hard childhood before a hard adulthood. I know that she never wanted this. She’d wanted to join the navy instead of doing the husband and kid runaround, but she couldn’t bear disappointing and disobeying her parents, so she stayed. Married right out of high school. Had my mom. Had another one.
My aunt died before she was even a full year old, and if you ask anyone in my family, that’s when things truly went to shit. She never recovered. Her and my grandpa divorced not long after, and my grandpa moved on.
I wasn’t around for any of that, but my heart does break for the young woman my grandmother once was. She lived through hell. Followed the divorce and child loss with abusive boyfriends and heavy drug use and periods of homelessness and what I have to imagine was suitcases full of unhealed trauma. I wish that things had been easier for her. I wish that understanding her past was enough to get me over Our past, but I can’t sculpt my feelings entirely out of empathy.
I don’t remember ever feeling safe around her, but I remember plenty of times feeling afraid of her.
I was one of those kids who was nervous about everything, and when I was three became extremely nervous about goodbyes. Separation anxiety is totally developmentally appropriate at this age, but I remember what it felt like. I was certain for a while that any time I said goodbye to my parents might be the last time I ever saw them, and that sent me into a panic. Then, to try and cope with this, I came up with little rituals, and decided that Even If this goodbye was the last time I ever saw them, at least I could say goodbye and hug them and tell them I loved them before it happened. I wanted them to be certain of my love for them if they happened to die.
This went on for a while. Any time I didn’t get a chance to do my ritual, I’d fall entirely to pieces. I get how this was a hard thing to deal with. You need a lot of patience around small children, and the crying can get annoying. I remember Linda having very little patience for it, or for me in general.
Once my mom was going out with her brother-- something she hardly ever did when I was young-- and she was leaving me with Linda. Going out at night was New, and as all kids know, the dark is more dangerous than the not-dark. I had a lot of trouble coping with this change in routine, with my mom going out somewhere dangerous with this strange tall man I didn’t know, leaving me alone with Linda. So I lost it.
You know those grabber things old people use to reach things that are far away? I remember Linda standing over me, screaming, shaking one at me and threatening to beat me with it if I didn’t get a grip.
I don’t remember if she did or not. Probably not. I can’t imagine my mom would have kept her cool if something like that happened.
But there was a lot of that. A lot of explosive episodes in response to me crying, or laughing at the wrong time, or walking too loud, or playing in the wrong place, or being out of sight, or being in sight. It was hard to exist around Linda.
Once when I was about four and too small to swim by myself, I was having one of my episodes because my father left for work and I hadn’t gotten to say goodbye. I was out in the yard wandering around, contemplating what I was sure would be my dad’s death that afternoon, when Linda called me over. She was on the deck at the pool-- a simple above ground thing, four feet deep and taller than I was. She called me over, and I went, and she shoved me in.
Took me a while to stop being afraid of swimming after that.
It was hard to tell what would set Linda off, when I was a kid. “Tone” was always a big thing, and being gross or noisy or touching her things or not laughing at her jokes. She has real trouble when people don’t laugh at her jokes. I didn’t like being alone with her because I knew I would do something that made her mad. At the same time, she would play this game sometime where she would be extremely friendly, trying to play and be silly and shower me with affection.
So smart. So clever. So pretty, so special. This child is a genius.
That had always made my skin crawl, as young as I can remember. I never knew why. Always felt bad that I wasn’t appreciative.
Sometimes she would pretend she was going to stab me. She’d be in the kitchen or on the porch chopping vegetables, and she’d turn to me with the knife, and I don’t remember what she would say but I remember being certain that she might actually do it.
She would also hide in closets and jump out to scare me. I would scream and, when I was really young, cry. When I was older and had been taking martial arts classes, once I hit her on reflex when she did it. She was so mad. I thought she might never forgive me.
Forgiveness was a big thing.
Anytime an offense was made, I was forced to beg for forgiveness. An apology was never enough, and she would say she didn’t want to hear it. Would say all types of nasty things. Would sometimes go into the silent treatment.
I didn’t mind the silent treatment, except it made my mom sad. I always ended up doing something to appease her. Writing lines, groveling, breaking down in tears to prove how truly sorry I was. It was a whole charade. I hated it. My parents never insisted on those things for themselves-- if we had any trouble, we would talk it out, and we would find a fix. I remember maybe five spankings at most in my childhood; my parents only had one of me, and were both near thirty when they did it, and they had more of a mind to have Conversations than just start swinging.
Linda didn’t like conversations. She never liked anything I had to say, but boy would she get mad if I refused to talk. She would go through these phases with things, where she’d want to go to a certain place and spend hours there days and days in a row for a couple months. The VFW bar, the department store at the mall, a flower shop, a thrift store. My mom would get into it, liked bonding with her mom, and I would get taken along.
Kids have a hard time being bored in places anyways, but I remember times when we would go after school and stay till late evening, and I’d be so hungry I was nauseous from it. Then, because of that, I would start getting nervous anytime we were out, because I MIGHT get nauseous, and that itself would make me nauseous anyways. It wouldn’t be too terrible if I was with my mom, because at least then I’d have someone to talk and play with, and she would take us home at a reasonable enough time. I hated being out with Linda all by ourselves. It’s hard being a kid and not having any control.
When I was 10 or 11 there was an event, where I’d volunteered to go out with my mom and Linda. By this age I was being left home alone by myself not infrequently, which suited me just fine, but I missed my mom that evening. When my mom said she was actually going to go do something else and I would just go alone with Linda, I changed my mind, said I would rather stay home.
Linda lost her entire mind. Screaming. Crying. I remember these terrible arguments when I was a child where she would demand “Why do you hate me!? What did I ever do to you!? Why does your daughter hate me? Why am I so terrible that my own granddaughter hates me??”
I never answered her, though I wish I had. I wish I’d unleashed all of my prepubescent rage and told her the truth. I wish I’d bitten her.
They left me at home, and I’d been so distraught that I’d made a banner out of that old printer paper that said “I’m sorry, I DO like you” and hung it on the wall. She accepted the apology. My mom was happy. My mom always just wanted to calm Linda down so we could all get along.
Sometimes I was awful, of course. Everyone can be, and kids are learning to be people, so they definitely have their moments. The older I got, the more bitter I got, and the more resentful and disrespectful. Besides my own issues with Linda, there was a lot going on between her and my mom.
They would get into these fights when I was a kid-- screaming, crying, suicide-threatening, throwing thing cage matches in the living room. Sometimes about something I’d done-- I’d committed some childish crime, and Linda had gone off, and my mom had stepped in. Anytime Linda tried to hit me, my mom would step in, and then they’d be off, and I knew in my childish mind that it was all my fault.
They would get into screaming arguments, and sometimes my mom would storm off, and Linda would approach me almost too calmly and say “She shouldn’t get worked up like that. She has a bad heart. She’s going to have a heartattack and die.” And I knew that would be my fault, too.
I stopped believing I deserved the blame as much sometime in middle school, but I remember an instance when I was eight. I don’t remember what happened the night before, but I was in the car with my dad on our way to church, and I told him I hated her. He said hate was a big feeling, and I agreed, but I knew it was true. He didn’t even try to talk me out of it. I think he hates her too, honestly. I would hate someone that tortured my wife like that.
It was worse when she drank, which happened the most when work was stressful. Drunk Linda was meaner than sober Linda, and for a majority of my childhood Drunk Linda was the only Linda I knew.
Once I accidentally flushed the toilet when she was in the shower, and when she came out of the bathroom wrapped in a towel, stringy dripping hair hanging over her face, she’d screamed and screamed that I was a demon, sent straight from hell, and the devil had me, and he’d sent me to torture her, and she hated me and I was a terrible, evil child. That one sits heavy with me, unlocks a tense, hot, flighty feeling every time I think about it.
There were times she was happy though, too. Once when I was six she’d come home with a dozen pairs of children’s shoes that she’d impulsively bought that afternoon. My mom was upset, because she said my grandmother couldn’t afford it, and that Linda had some packrat tendencies and this was just more clutter. And I knew that I was supposed to be grateful. I kept a pair of the shoes; my mom returned all the others. I also knew that this weird shoe incident made my mom upset, and since the shoes were for Me, I knew this was kind of my fault.
When I was in middle school something happened that I don’t remember, but I remember Linda gave me the silent treatment, and I decided to give it right back. Whatever had happened had been bad enough that my mom didn’t even try to stop me. It was one of the few moments of righteous indignation I got in my childhood; Linda actually apologizing to me. She tried to act like we were friends right after. It had made me want to scream.
Linda also had some digestive issues that could get pretty bad, but the doctors said they were made worse with alcohol. She went on a pretty bad bender once when I was in middle school, and I remember the night she almost died. She collapsed in the bathroom and bled out and had to be carried out of the house by paramedics. She was in the hospital for weeks. I remember kind of hoping that this would be the end of it; it wasn’t. Sometimes on particularly strange nights she would go on and on that I was the one who saved her life, because I was the one who heard her fall and got my mom.
She broke my door in elementary school. It had a lock on it, and she’d busted the door down. I didn’t put a new lock on it myself until the year I lived at home after college. She threw a fit about that too.
I wanted to kill myself in high school. I didn’t ever want to go through with it, because I knew it would break my mom’s heart, and I also knew that Linda was always threatening suicide, and I didn’t want to be anything like her. Still, my mental health hit the absolute gutter my sophomore year of college, when my mom was similarly falling off the deep end, and Linda was getting meaner and meaner by the day. I ended up getting expelled from school, and Linda used to corner me in my bedroom at night and hiss that my parents no longer liked me, how could they? I was terrible. And that I was lucky they didn’t take a belt to me for all of this. That I would have deserved it. That I was lucky I was still alive.
Even when she was being neutral instead of nasty, she wasn’t particularly pleasant. She didn’t like that I did martial arts, wanted me to do dance, was worried it would turn me into a dyke. Was always worried anything I did was too dangerous. Would take it personally any time I got hurt and go off on a guilt trip about how I was Trying to worry her to death, but not in a normal parent way. It was next level. Sometimes she threatened to kill herself. Sometimes she got black out drunk and said she had to, to deal with me.
She did Karen shit at stores and restaurants that always drove me crazy, and she drove drunk a lot, and she was always so mean to my mom. I was in second or third grade when my mom started confiding in me, because my mom and I were very close, and I was a good listener who asked a lot of questions, and I was there to see all of there terrible fights while my dad was at work. She told me about her childhood abuse, about the homelessness, about the drugs, about how her mom would hurt her. Which made me hate Linda even more, and also instilled a good dose of fear of the woman. I knew what she was capable of, and I was always small and weak and sickly. I didn’t want to push my luck and have Linda really turn on me.
So I was my mom’s confidant, and sometimes I tried to be her protector, but I was also something that set Linda off constantly, which meant I was often the source of the terrible feelings my mom needed to vent about. It was a gross cycle, and wasn’t good for either of us. I wish my mom had had someone else to talk about. I wish she’d been mad enough to not let Linda live with us. I wish she’d been more hateful, like I am. Worse at forgiveness.
Ever since a young age she would force me into showing Linda affection, to keep from hurting her feelings, because hurt feelings always meant either screaming or drinking or both. I hated it. I hate it now. I think I might stop getting bossed around like that. A 26 year old person shouldn’t have to hug anyone they don’t want to, but especially not their childhood abuser.
In high school I started fighting back for a while. Screaming arguments. I’ve never screamed at anyone in my life except Linda, and I hate that I ever felt that desperate, cornered, and angry. I’m not a shouty type of person. I didn’t like myself during all of that.
She would come into my room in the middle of the night to scream at me. She would go in during the evening and lay on the bed and refuse to move. She would get drunk and stumble into my room and collapse on the floor.
Any efforts to get her to leave, pleads that I was tired, it was time for bed. Teen snappishness to “Get out of my room!” every so often. All of it was met with this demeanor shift that still haunts me. Like the life being drained from her face as her eyes hardened and her jaw clenched, the spat “Who the FUCK do you think you’re talking to!? I am your grandmother.” The way it truly looked like she might be ready to kill me.
Sometimes I would slip out of the room and slam the door and let her scream through the whole house, locked out of my own bedroom at 2 in the morning. Sometimes I would crawl out the window.
We got a dog when I was 11, right after I got a pretty serious head injury from playground nonsense, just some shit timing. He was a lovely dog, but an energetic puppy, and my family isn’t the best at training dogs. He did what puppies do-- chewed shit up, had accidents-- and it often sent Linda flying off the handle. Sometimes, calm and pleasant, she would tell me “You know, we only got this dog for you. It’s stressing everyone out. Maybe we should just return it.”
She would say this was a joke. She thought it was just so funny and precious when I would volunteer that myself, when people were upset. Tearily say “We can take the dog back. We don’t have to keep him.” My parents never knew why on earth I would say that, worried I didn’t like the dog, and that would only make me feel even worse, because I worried they thought I was ungrateful.
She would drive drunk with me in the car. As a high schooler I would have to pick her up drunk from the bar instead. She would pinch nasty bruises into my arm as a kid. She criticized everything, or poured on lavish praise, and got upset when I didn’t accept it.
When I was about twelve we were at the mall, and I was at the age that I was starting to worry about the other girls in my class liking boys, and trying to figure out what I was supposed to do about that. A chatted a bit with a boy, just some kid who was there with his mom. And when Linda came and took me away, she was spitting mad and told me to never do that again. That child was black. What the fuck was wrong with me.
She was so mad when I would swear as an adult visiting home from college. She was even madder when I pointed out she was the one who taught me how to swear.
It broke my mom’s heart when I came out as gay, and Linda didn’t let me forget it. She would remind me anytime we were alone. She would make comments openly about “faggots” and “the gays” and what God had to say about it and plenty of things about the AIDS crisis. But then, sometimes, when she was the right kind of drunk, she would tell me how she loved the gays, she had gay friends, it was disgusting but she thought they were so fun, those men.
It’s therapeutic to write this, right now. She’s changed a bit as I’ve grown, got a bit less angry when she retired, which I get. Job stress can make a person miserable. She still has her moments, but she’s not as mean. She still drinks a lot, but it’s not as violent. Sometimes I’ll visit home and think she’s really changed, but before long there’s an explosion that has me feeling all of eight years old again, and rehardens my heart. I don’t know how to forgive her, and I don’t think I ever want to.
She’s still terrible to my mom. She and my mom are tied together. My mom’s relationship to her isn’t something I’ll ever be able to understand, I don’t think, but that’s alright. It’s her mom. Moms are complicated.
My mom tells me Linda is coming to my graduation for my master’s degree in a few weeks, and I’ve been tied in knots since she mentioned it. Seeing her at home is enough; I don’t want to see her here. She still introduces me to people as her granddaughter. Thinks this “whole thing I’m doing” is ridiculous.
In February I casually mentioned my wife and she bit my head off, telling me not to talk about that shit in front of her. Later, in what wasn’t quite an apology, she told me “you know how I feel about those things. I just never want to think about any of that. Just don’t talk about it with me.”
In a perfect world I would never talk to her about anything, but I’m not quite ready to break my mother’s heart like that. My mom said not too long ago that as long as she was still alive, Linda and I would just have to get along with each other.
I wish she wouldn’t do that. I wish me hating my grandmother wasn’t my mother’s problem. I wish I didn’t, but I gave up imagining liking her nearly a decade and a half ago. Sometimes I worry I’m bad for feeling badly about this woman, but looking back and writing this has soothed that over. This rage is more than justifiable. I don’t think I’ll ever outgrow it, not while she’s still alive, at least.
Whenever death comes for her, they’d better not ask me to write the fucking eulogy.
